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Updated: May 26, 2025
"He lives in great state and calls himself king, but is in obedience to the king, his uncle." Leaving the sea-coast and going inland, Barbosa passed upwards through the ghats. "Forty-five leagues from these mountains there is a very large city which is called BIJANAGUER, very populous, and surrounded on one side by a very good wall, and on another by a river, and on the other by a mountain.
Thousands of people, including a few who are still living, have seen Trailanga floating on the Ganges. For days together he would sit on top of the water, or remain hidden for very long periods under the waves. A common sight at the Benares bathing GHATS was the swami's motionless body on the blistering stone slabs, wholly exposed to the merciless Indian sun.
Stretching out from these ghats, in order to accommodate a larger number of people, are wooden platforms, piers of slender bamboo, floats and all kinds of contrivances, secure and insecure, temporary and permanent, which every morning are thronged with pilgrims from every part of India in every variety of costumes, crowding in and out of the water, carrying down the sick and dying, all to seek salvation for the soul, relief for the mind and healing for the body which the Holy Mother Ganges is supposed to give.
The Gaboon proper is included between the Camarones Mountains to the north, and the "Mayumba,"properly the "Yumba" country southwards, in south latitude 3deg. 22', a shore upwards of 400 miles long. The inland depth is undetermined; geographically we should limit it to the Western Ghats, which rarely recede more than 60 miles from the sea, and ethnologically no line can yet be drawn.
So we went the regulation round of Delhi and Agra, the Taj Mahal, and the Ghats at Benares, at railroad speed, fulfilling the whole duty of the modern globe-trotter. Lady Meadowcroft looked at everything for ten minutes at a stretch; then she wanted to be off, to visit the next thing set down for her in her guide-book.
The great Highway spanned the river on a broad low stone bridge and turned just south of the burning ghats with a majestic sweep northward, between its four lines of sacred, flowering, perfumed and shade trees.
It is a high object of ambition in India, among the wealthier classes of natives, to construct these ghats, and this species of useful ostentation has produced some magnificent structures of the kind on the rivers Ganges, and Jumna, which are of great public utility.
Arab belumchis, Jews, Persians, Armenians, Sikhs, Gurkhas, Pathans, and Ghats crowded the bank, voluble and picturesque. Dhobies thrashed clothes at the river edge. Bhisties drew water in kerosene tins. Convalescent Tommies in blue dungaree, fished stolidly wishing they were bound for India. The roofs of the square white buildings were filled with nurses taking tea.
In addition to the pecuniary loss which directly and indirectly would fall on all classes, the whole community would feel the glory of Kasee, the Splendid City, had departed, when, stripped of its sacredness, crowds of pilgrims no longer filled its streets, frequented its temples, or bathed at its ghats.
We got on to a boat with a cabin on it, and sat on its roof on decrepit cane chairs, and the rowers below with makeshift oars gradually pulled us up and down the face of the Ghats what oars, and what a ramshackle tub of a boat too old and tumble-down for a fisherman's hen run at home. Holy Gunga!
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