Compared with it the Hindu pagodas look like
brightly painted Easter eggs. Generally they are consecrated to
Hanuman, the monkey-god and the faithful ally of Rama, or to the
elephant headed Ganesha, the god of the occult wisdom, or to one
of the Devis. You meet with these temples in every street. Before
each there is a row of pipals (Ficus religiosa) centuries old,
which no temple can dispense with, because these trees are the
abode of the elementals and the sinful souls.
All this is entangled, mixed, and scattered, appearing to one's
eyes like a picture in a dream. Thirty centuries have left their
traces here. The innate laziness and the strong conservative
tendencies of the Hindus, even before the European invasion,
preserved all kinds of monuments from the ruinous vengeance of the
fanatics, whether those memorials were Buddhist, or belonged to
some other unpopular sect. The Hindus are not naturally given
to senseless vandalism, and a phrenologist would vainly look for
a bump of destructiveness on their skulls. If you meet with
antiquities that, having been spared by time, are, nowadays, either
destroyed or disfigured, it is not they who are to blame, but
either Mussulmans, or the Portuguese under the guidance of the Jesuits.
At last we were anchored and, in a moment, were besieged, ourselves
as well as our luggage, by numbers of naked skeleton-like Hindus,
Parsees, Moguls, and various other tribes. All this crowd emerged,
as if from the bottom of the sea, and began to shout, to chatter,
and to yell, as only the tribes of Asia can.
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