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TO AMARNATH AND GANGABAL.-AMARNATH.

BY EDMUND CANDLER.

1. THE QUEST.

Hindustan, whether in some vague general hope of merit, or drawn by some particular need

the craving for offspring perhaps, for the long-denied son who will lay them on the ground when they come to die.

The road is rough for the Sadhu, a true path to merit. His impulse is not ours. It was the fashion among them to grumble at the clear springwater and the sweet scent of the flowers, to which they attributed many unfamiliar ills, pain and giddiness and short

AMARNATH and Gangabal lie in the mountains at the back of Kashmir. Amarnath, the sacred cave, is twenty-three marches from Rawalpindi in the plains, and Gangabal, the sacred lake, eighteen. They are six days distant from each other, and more when the snow bridges are broken. Gangabal is a domestic pilgrimage. The Hindus of Kashmir carry the knuckle-bones of the dead there and throw them in the lake. Amarnath has a wider call. The cave is Siva's mansion, a Titan's dwelling - place. roof is a seventeen-thousand- ness of breath and mountain foot peak, which thrusts jagged flank into Ladakh. The god and his spouse Parbati dwell within, congealed in two frozen green springs which spurt from the rock. These are the First Cause, the genesis of Energy, the primal lingams in which the Essence of Shiv resides, the natural altar of his priests, though Amarnath, save at the time of the great pilgrimage, is & priestless shrine.

His

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The Hindus believe that the ice - lingams increase and decrease with the moon. So when the orb is full in Sawan, in middle August, the springtide, as it were, of the plastic spirit which informs all life, they swarm to the cave in hordes from every corner of

sickness. Their gaze was
mostly on the ground or fixed
on the sky-line. It did not
wander. They had no eyes
for the changing colours of the
hills. They were aware, I
think, of a
certain savage

grandeur all round, in which
it was proper that the god
should dwell, and into which
if man intruded it must be
with submissive awe and in
a spirit of appeasement and
propitiation.

The Hindu has none of our waste energies, and no real interests, as we understand them, save what he acquires by contact with us. Work, family, and devotions fill his life. The aesthetic impulse is. dead in him, but he still has a hankering for the marvellous.

The West sees God's hand most clearly in what is beautiful; the East, in what is, or seems to be, be, supernormal. The two quests often lead along the same road. So it is on a pilgrimage that East and West are nearest meeting. Even so they do not meet, but move in close parallel lines.

If they follow the same star there is the difference of a hemisphere in the parallax.

I caught up the main camp at Pahlgam in the Lidar valley, nineteen marches into the hills from Rawalpindi and four from the cave. Here the pilgrims were herded by the Kashmir State officials. The Maharajah had spent a lakh of rupees on the pilgrimage. Everyone was given firewood and grass-shoes. Grain transport was organised. The sick were given palanquins or carried in baskets on coolies' backs. A hospital tent and a doctor went with them, camping at every stage. Yunnani hakims, physicians of the old style, attended those who refused European drugs. And there was need of precaution, for there is no shelter by the road and in the last stages no fuel. Torrents of rain sometimes fall for a week at a time. In bad years hundreds die of cholera and

pneumonia and dysentery and fever.

There was no transport for sahibs. Five thousand coolies had been called in for the pilgrims alone. Phillips, a cheery young subaltern who had been hung up ten days in Pahlgam, joined camps with me here. I understood that there was a 54-inch markhor waiting for him somewhere in Ladakh. In the meanwhile he had his banjo and his sketch - book, and his spirits did not suffer. We would have got up somehow if we had been set on it, but the pilgrims were not savoury neighbours, and I confess I had no stomach for the twice-contaminated road. We would miss the impressive arrival at Amarnath, but we would meet the Sadhus coming and going, and we would camp by the cave in its solitary grandeur, alone with the god.

Also I had a feeling that the transport crux was deliberate. It would have been easy enough to find us coolies. The truth is, they did not want us. And no wonder ! The chill of a sceptical, inquisitive eye is colder than ice. And we, the uninitiated, could not have been happy peeping at their mysteries, prying into their intimate rites.

II. THE PILGRIMS.

On the morning they left Pahlgam there was a battle among the Sannyasis, which almost came to a bout with staves. One flag only is carried

on the pilgrimage to

Amarnath, and it entitles the standard-bearer to a third of the pilgrims' offerings. For years the privilege has fallen to the Shivaites of Bhairon Asthan in Srinagar, but the

Mahunt of a rival temple, the shrine of Mahadeva on the Takht-i-Suleiman, claimed that his followers were more numerous. He had carried his banner far through sun and rain, and he swore by all the attributes of Siva he would not leave it behind. When he drove his little standard in the ground, the others protested with loud cries, and the two parties met in the streamlet which separated their camps, shouting and waving their staffs. The magistrate of the pilgrims rode up on his ambling tat, and in the middle of hearing both sides declared in favour of the Bhairon Asthan party. It was the order of the Maharajah of Kashmir that they should carry the standard as before, and that there should be no other flag.

The Takht Sannyasis boded foul weather and disease if the Bhairon flag advanced. The Bhairon party threatened some special visitation if the unorthodox standard was raised, whereat the Takht priest cried out angrily

"Under what provocation, then, has the cholera goddess Scourged the camp in past years?"

One of the others struck at him with his staff, but a bearded khaki-clad Mussulman of the Maharajah's police intercepted the blow and pushed the scowling Sannyasi aside. He threatened to go back. Thus a scourge would fall upon the pilgrims.

"It will be ill for those who disobey the orders of the Maharaj Adhiraj," the magis

trate said as he rode away. And the defeated Shivaites retired to their camp with sullen murmurs. The sun stood high over the valley between the cliffs, and the last of the Maharajah's campfollowers had filed by when they rose sulkily and followed in the track towards the snows.

We waited for the pilgrimage a little way up the road the morning they left Pahlgam, and found ourselves jammed in a crowd of holy men,-all the twelve sects of Siva, and Sitasamis, and Bairagis, and other orders of Vishnu, more than the god has incarnations.

The back view of a Sannyasi in the early morning is a pair of ashy, naked legs, a little cloth an inch wide passing between them as a protest against decency, and perhaps a small blanket thrown over the shoulders to the middle of this cloth, and a light peroxide wig of ropey texture crowning all, which, if it were a shade finer, might belong to an impoverished lodginghouse lady in Vauxhall.

And the step of the man is often light and airy, and his carriage proud, and he walks with more than the assurance of the clothed and cane - twirling materialist of Piccadilly, so that the happy subaltern who has got his full second leave and meets him one morning on the pine-scented road to Ladakh, cannot resist the greeting-especially if the Yogi is "sky-clad”—of "Hullo,

which the irreverent wayfarers, pious and otherwise, smile.

Sadhu-ji, are you cold?" At some inward longing. Such a pilgrim the Sahib greets respectfully, seeing the quest in his eyes or the peace it has brought.

But the Yogi is sky-communing, or perhaps uplifted with bhang, and he passes by unfalteringly, without a turn of the head.

The soldier boy, happy and unsnubbable, calls after him cheerily in English"Well, good-bye. I hope you will have a good time.' But the holy man passes on to his spiritual week-end, purchased with what travail he alone knows,-perhaps with months of wandering from Ramesvaram or Jogannath, his nose tilted to the sky-line, and his wits guarded by piety or drugs from every distracttion of the roadside.

Phillips, as they would say in his regiment, is by way of being a Sahib, and he would not chaff a man for his religious convictions. But the pilgrim was a palpable automaton. The subaltern would have described him unthinkingly at a glance as a "pro." There were hundreds like him on the road, who make the propitiation of the unseen kind of trade, and who play upon the Hindu's attraction for the grotesque as a means of livelihood. You would not find a trace of anything spiritual, or unselfish, or spontaneous in the face of any one of them.

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But now and then you saw an expression in a face, perhaps in one of five hundred, which told you clearly that the man had come in response to

Roughly speaking, the pilgrims were of three kindsprofessionals who make a living by it, mummers and charlatans and mendicants and clowns, with a sprinkling of genuine searchers after truth; family pilgrims, fathers and mothers and childless ones, men and women in some need or seeking to wipe out some stain; men who had renounced the world wholly or temporarily, like the old subadar who told us that he had lived all his years for his belly, and now as the end drew near had come to think of his soul, for the health of which he was going to every holy place, as an ailing man to his baths and physicians.

The pick of them all, or, perhaps I ought to say, those that were most drawn to us, feeling easy and homelike and sure of sympathy, and so more friendly and communicative, were the old soldiers. There was a Sikh of the Nirmali sect, with the eyes of a medieval saint or Templar, whom I saw gazing at the jagged limestone rocks rocks above Pahlgam with their criss-cross veins of snow, as if the lights that played over them beckoned him to some goal. He had been in a Pioneer regiment and fought in Waziristan and Chitral and Tibet. He loved wandering for its own sake, like an Englishman. After the pilgrimage he was going to the Delhi Durbar,

and afterwards perhaps to Pasupatinath in Nepal or Jogannath Puri. He wore a long bright-embroidered saffron robe which was always clean. Packed in among that ashcoloured crew between the cliff and the stream, he looked like a lily in a muddy pool.

There were many women on the road, veiled and unveiled, according to their birth or to their birth or years or—as it often seems to cynical European eyes-their fascinations. The rich had palanquins. The poorer ones, plain and weatherbeaten, rode astride on baggage ponies or walked. There was a stalwart Punjabi woman wearing the blue accordion - pleated skirt with the red hem of the north. She carried one little girl on her shoulder, and another larger little girl half ran beside her and held an umbrella over both. The infants on the road were nearly all little girls. The male child, perhaps, would be the fruit of the pilgrimage.

Now and then a family passed who had the air of taking an outing. In one narrow bend of the road a burgher of Delhi with his wife and his old aunt and his sons and daughters blocked the way. The family had three light palanquins, red campanulashaped awnings laid across two poles. The youngest little

girl lay asleep in a basket on a coolie's back. A cow had fallen down the bank to the edge of the torrent, and this pleasant, pursy, consequential - looking man explained that he had offered a reward to have it hauled up. Phillips was just in time to lend a hand to the rope.

I talked with the merchant, who told me that his aunt, the stern old lady in the palanquin, the only one unveiled, was the widow of "a colonel," a great bahadur who had fought for us in the Mutiny and acquired much land and consideration. In the meanwhile the cow's dejected head appeared over the bank. The citizen had no change. He held out his rupee a little ostentatiously. All the world saw the largess and understood that he was a pious man. But assessment was complicated; there had been many hands and no particular initiative. Phillips solemnly received the coin and put it in his pocket with the absentminded air of the independent cabman who takes his due without comment. I was watching the old aunt, and enjoyed her look of horror and bewilderment. Soon a slow smile crept over her wrinkled old face, like a light shadow on a rock. She was slow at the uptak."

moon

III. THE CAMP.

In four days, when the swollen proportionately, and had waxed full and the ceremony was the god in the cave had the pilgrims returning, the

VOL CXCI.—NO. MCLVI.

over and

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