Banaras (Varanasi)

Photographer: Eric Newby

Country: India

‘Now the sun rose above the mist and from out on the water the city was revealed as a great golden crescent of temples, spires, mosques, minarets, ashrams and secular buildings, suspended rather than built high above the river and fading away in either direction into the misty distance. A light breeze started to blow and brilliant paper kites began to edge up the sky. Clouds of pigeons wheeled over the temples and the palaces of the princes whose splendours had departed. There were so many temples that they were like some monstrous growth of fungi. They grew all the way down the bank, in some places to the water’s edge; one even stood in the river into which it had sunk, still held up by its own weight’ - Slowly Down the Ganges.

Ref.: S0027618