NOTEBOOK

Slept all the way back to Bombay—10 P.M. till 7 A.M.
Our own bedding and towels.

Seme unthinking people criticise Adam—find fault with
h:ir* because he was weak, and yielded. Oh, that is not
fair, that is not right. He hadn't had any experience. We
have had ages and ages of experience and tuition—we
who criticise him and yet see what we are—just see what
>:ze are when there is any forbidden fruit around. I have
been around a good deal, but I have never been in any
place where that apple would be safe—except Allahabad.
Why, it is the prohibition that makes anything precious.
There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it un-
speakably desirable. It was not that Adam ate the apple
for the apple's sake, but because it was forbidden. It
would have been better for us—oh infinitely better for us
—if the serpent had been forbidden.

Consider the patience of these poor people. At seven
this morning I went around the long veranda of this
hotel to see Smythe, and by a door I saw a Hindu man-
servant squatting, waiting to be on call. He had polished
his master's yellow shoes and now had nothing to put in
the time with. He was barefooted, the morning cold, the
tiles frozen. There he sits now, just as before, waiting—
9 A.M.

Not more than a tenth of the Ganges's bed has water
in it. Great crowd of natives and huts and flags on that
sandspit. It is the fag end and finish of the great January
meet, when two million natives swarm to Allahabad to
bathe in the sacred waters.

A sick man was carried by in a palanquin—the dirty
Ganges bath has healing powers.

All the way yesterday was through parched land, sown

275