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Updated: June 3, 2025
The plan which they have laid for their own proceedings is perfectly prudent and unexceptionable, and there is as little fear of their provoking martyrdom as there would be of their shrinking from it, if the cause of God and man require the sacrifice. But the converts ought to be protected from violence, and all cramming with cow-dung prohibited on pain of retaliation with beef-tea.
In this second hut also is stored as much fuel, consisting of dried cow-dung, straw, maize-stalks, leaves, etc., as can be collected; and a ragged fence of bamboo or rahur stalks encloses the two unprotected sides, thus forming inside a small court, quadrangle, or square. This court is the native's sanctum sanctorum. It is kept scrupulously clean, being swept and garnished religiously every day.
They also bought as much as they could conveniently carry of plate and expensive jewellery, and sent it secretly away to England or to Holland. Vermalet, a jobber, who sniffed the coming storm, procured gold and silver coin to the amount of nearly a million of livres, which he packed in a farmer's cart, and covered over with hay and cow-dung.
But, as a rule, everybody sits and sleeps on the ground. The floors of the houses are invariably made of earth, beaten down hard, and smeared periodically with a decoction of cow-dung. Even a well-to-do Indian takes his food sitting on the ground in the place where the food was cooked, which is often a dark lean-to building, attached to the main dwelling.
The Persian, it is said, will endure suffocation before he will blow the fire with his breath; the Indian places supreme perfection in besmearing himself with cow-dung; the Mussulman believes himself purified from all his sins by the ablution of his head and arms: the only question with him is, "whether the ceremony ought to begin at the elbow or at the points of his fingers;" but so great is the difference of opinion on this head, that if two Mahometans meet on a journey, and accost each other with brotherly affection, by the one beginning his ablution at his fingers' ends, and the other at his elbow, they instantly separate and become mortal enemies.
There were fakeers in plenty, with their bodies dusted over with ashes and their long hair caked together with cow-dung; for the cow is holy and so is the rest of it; so holy that the good Hindoo peasant frescoes the walls of his hut with this refuse, and also constructs ornamental figures out of it for the gracing of his dirt floor.
Mendicants were in abundance prowling in their ugliness like spirits in a nightmare; some naked, absolute, others with but a loin-cloth, their lean shrivelled bodies smeared with ashes sometimes the ashes of the dead and cow-dung, carrying on their arms and foreheads the red and white horizontal bars of Shiva who was Omkar at Mandhatta.
Both women and men were extremely eager for beads of all kinds, the most valuable being the red and blue porcelain for helmets, and the large opalescent bead, the size of a child's marble. The day after my arrival in Latooka I was accommodated by the chief with a hut in a neat courtyard, beautifully clean and cemented with clay, ashes, and cow-dung.
On the eve of the sacrificial day, a kid is brought into the house, and all the family sleep round him. Next morning, the reception hall in the lower story is made ready for the ceremony. The floor is thickly covered with cow-dung, and, right in the middle of the room a square is traced with white chalk, in which is placed a high pedestal, with the statue of the goddess.
This was the herdsman's room. Most of the space was occupied by a wide legless bedstead made of rough boards knocked together, with nothing but the stone floor to rest on. Upon a deep layer of rye straw the bed-clothes lay in a disordered heap, and the thick striped blankets were stiff with dried cow-dung, to which feathers and bits of straw had adhered.
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