You
receive your water, you make your deposit, and now what more would you
have? Gold, diamonds, power, fame? All in a single moment these things
have withered to dirt, dust, ashes. The world has nothing to give you
now. For you it is bankrupt.
I do not claim that the pilgrims do their acts of worship in the order
and sequence above charted out in this Itinerary of mine, but I think
logic suggests that they ought to do so. Instead of a helter-skelter
worship, we then have a definite starting-place, and a march which
carries the pilgrim steadily forward by reasoned and logical progression
to a definite goal. Thus, his Ganges bath in the early morning gives him
an appetite; he kisses the cow-tails, and that removes it. It is now
business hours, and longings for material prosperity rise in his mind,
and be goes and pours water over Shiva's symbol; this insures the
prosperity, but also brings on a rain, which gives him a fever. Then he
drinks the sewage at the Kedar Ghat to cure the fever; it cures the fever
but gives him the smallpox. He wishes to know how it is going to turn
out; he goes to the Dandpan Temple and looks down the well.
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