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202,
Story of an Emigrant.
descendants still inhabit the same city, and have retained
the samecivilization and thesameinstitutions through all the
intervening centuries.
The sun cast its last rays over the memorable city when I
had the pleasure of seeing it for the first time. At a distance
of two miles I could sec the palaces and temples with their
domes, cupolas, and minarets merged into a confused mass,
and on the summit of the hill towered the renowned mosque
of Emperor Arungzebes with two minarets, the spires of
which rise two hundred and fifty feet above the level of the
Ganges. It was a beautiful oriental picture, the most
beau-tiful I had yet seen.
The next morning at sunrise a Mohammedan dragoman
or interpreter took me down the river in a boat, and in the
course of an hour we passed, according to the estimate
of the interpreter, over twenty thousand bathing Hindoos.
Kverv two miles are built ghats, or broad flights of steps
down to river, some of these being eightv feet high. Along
o o . o o
the edge of the water Brahmins are squattingabout twentv
feet apart under large sun shades made of palm leaves in the
form of an umbrella. These Brahmins have a certain
inherited right to these little spots where they have thus
raised their sun shades for the purpose of collecting an
offering from every bather. Men and women bathe side by «;’de.
They all go into the water in their thin cotton suits, and
everything is conducted with order and decorum.
After the bath flowers arc offered to the river, and oils and
fruits to the Brahmin.
A ^liort distance above the edge of the water is an open
place for the cremation of the bodies of the dead, and 011 the
river close bv are scores of boats nud barges loaded with
o
wood which is cut into ?mall sticks an 1 is used for the
funeral-pyres. We stopped a lew minutes here while three
corpses were brought on biers. They were covered by a
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