a reluctance to take stock of things, and an instinctive treading in the
old paths. "Via trita, via tuta." In the path from one Indian village to
another may often be observed an inexplicable deviation from the
beeline, and then a return to the line again. It is where in some past
year some dead animal or some offensive thing has fallen in the path and
lain there. Year after year, long after the cause has disappeared, the
feet of the villagers continue in that same deviating track. That is in
perfect keeping with India. Or--to permit ourselves to follow up another
natural sequence--things may quickly begin to fit in with the deviation.
Perhaps the first rainy season after the feet of the villagers had been
made to step aside, some plant was found in possession of the avoided
spot. India-like, its right of possession was unconsciously deferred to.
And then the year following, may be, one or other of the sacred fig
trees appeared behind the plant, and in a few years starved it out. Ten
years will make a banyan sapling, or a pipal, into a sturdy trunk, and
lo, by that time, in some visitation of drought or cholera or smallpox,
or because some housewife was childless, coloured threads are being tied
upon the tree or some rude symbolic painting put upon it. Then an
ascetic comes along and seats himself in its shade, and now, already, a
sacred institution has been established that it would raise a riot to
try to remove.

Visitors to Allahabad go to see the great fort erected upon the bank of
the River Jumna by the Mahomedan emperor, Akbar. One of the sights of
the fort, strange to tell, is the underground Hindu temple of "The
Undying Banyan Tree," to which we descend by a long flight of steps.
Such a sacred banyan tree as we have imagined, Akbar found growing there
upon the slope of the river bank when he was requiring the ground for
his fort. The undying banyan tree is now a stump or log, but it or a
predecessor was visited by a Chinese pilgrim to Allahabad in the seventh