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Updated: May 26, 2025
Instead of heading straight for home, in which case although he did not know it he would have been surely overhauled and brought to bay, he led at a stiff hand gallop to the Jew's, changed horses, crossed the ford by the burning ghats, and swooped in a wide half-circle for the sandy trail that would take him homeward.
Mahabaleshwar, in the Western Ghats, is therefore largely visited by Europeans from Bombay. We left Bombay by the 1.15 express train, reaching Poonah in seven hours. The air was like blasts out of a heated furnace. We dined at Poonah at a very comfortable inn.
Behind us lies the Tihamat-Balawiyyah, the equivalent of the Ghats of North Midian, from the Zahd to the Sharr. The items are the little Jebel 'Antar, which, peeping over the Fiumara's high left bank, is continued south by the lower Libn.
The word Ghát indeed means the steps leading up from pools or rivers, whose frequent occurrence in India attests the need of easy access to water, arising from the important part which it plays both in the civil and religious economies of the Hindu. The Gháts are so called from their terraced ledges, rising one above another from the shores of the ocean like the stairs leading up from a pool.
For miles along the shore the ghats are thronged at the first appearance of the orb of day, and there is a continuous murmur of voices. No matter how cold the water is, they dive in and swim like fishes. You can see a thousand heads in the water along the shore at any moment. Then they support themselves on the surface, and gaze motionless at the sun as it mounts in the sky."
I think the Ghats are the most nauseating place in the world; there, is Idolatry, in capital letters the most terrible vision that a mind diseased could picture in horrible nightmare! for you see thousands of inferior specimens of men and women dabbling in the water's edge, doing all and every particular of the toilet in the same place almost touching each other, and right amongst them are dead people in pink or white winding sheets being burned, and the ashes and half-burned limbs being shoved into the water and I forgot there's a main sewer comes into the middle of this.
The scenery was full of charm for Desmond: the rich vegetation; antelopes darting among the trees; flamingoes and pelicans standing motionless at the edge of the slow-gliding river; white-clad figures coming down the broad steps of the riverside ghats to bathe; occasionally the dusky corpse of some devotee consigned by his relations to the bosom of the holy river.
Many were near, but they were few compared with the crowds pressing towards the chief bathing places. When I arrived at Raj Ghat the confused sound of a great multitude fell on my ear, but no sooner did the eclipse begin than the thousands on the river's brink and crowded on the ghats, as with one voice raised a shout so loud and prolonged, that I should think it must have been heard for miles.
When we rose early in the morning and repaired to the river-bank, hundreds of the faithful were ascending and descending the numerous ghats leading down the high bank to the water, while a still more animated crowd of both sexes were standing up to their middle in the stream, throwing the water in this direction and that, and mingling their personal ablutions with the rites of worship in such a way as might at once clean both souls and bodies.
To reach him, he had to wade the Howrah River, less than a mile from where the burning ghats glowed dull crimson against the sky; the crowd around the ghats was the first intimation he received that the streets might prove less densely thronged than usual.
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