Let us now see what is going
on on the left. In the early hours of the morning, when the red
fires, the black clouds of miasmas, and the thin figures of the
fakirs grow dim and vanish little by little, when the smell of
burned flesh is blown away by the fresh wind which rises at the
approach of the dawn, when, in a word, the right side of the river
with its ghotas plunges into stillness and silence, to be reawakened
when the evening comes, processions of a different kind appear on
the left bank. We see groups of Hindu men and women in sad, silent
trains. They approach the river quietly. They do not cry, and
have no rituals to perform. We see two men carrying something
long and thin, wrapped in an old red rug. Holding it by the head
and feet they swing it into the dirty, yellowish waves of the river.
The shock is so violent that the red rug flies open and we behold
the face of a young woman tinged with dark green, who quickly
disappears in the river. Further on another group; an old man
and two young women. One of them, a little girl of ten, small,
thin, hardly fully developed, sobs bitterly. She is the mother
of a stillborn child, whose body is to be thrown in the river.
Her weak voice monotonously resounds over the shore, and her
trembling hands are not strong enough to lift the poor little
corpse that is more like a tiny brown kitten than a human being.
The old man tries to console her, and, taking the body in his own
hands, enters the water and throws it right in the middle.
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