By PETER POPHAM Herald correspondent
It may become the biggest gathering of human beings assembled for a single purpose in history.
On a deserted waste of white sand at Allahabad in India, where the rivers Yamuna and Ganges merge and small boys usually play cricket, a phenomenon of breathtaking scale is taking shape.
It is the Kumbh Mela, the first religious festival of the millennium, and organisers believe that 70 million pilgrims - 10 times the size of London - will arrive over the next 40 days, with many millions bathing together at one time.
Already, tens of thousands of Hindu pilgrims and ascetics are camped on the banks and yesterday most of them immersed themselves in the cold, swirling, slug-brown water.
The believers will be joined by some of the world's most famous faces: former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney slipped through New Delhi incognito yesterday on his way to the rivers; the Dalai Lama is coming; singers Madonna and Courtney Love, actors Demi Moore, Richard Gere, Sharon Stone, Pierce Brosnan and sundry other hangers-on are reputed to be hoping to hire highly controversial five-star tents on site.
A leading tour operator providing luxury tents at a huge Hindu festival in India has been charged by authorities with violating the event's sacred status and asked to withdraw
But the stars will be swallowed up in the traditional proceedings.
Yesterday was just the beginning. Before each dawn, up to a million of the faithful are expected to brave the near-freezing water.
According to myth, this is one of four places along the Ganges where the god Vishnu spilled drops of heavenly nectar. At astrological moments when Jupiter is in Aries, the faithful believe that the waters are transformed into nectar, and that to bathe in them is to attain "Moksha," liberation from the cycle of birth and death.
That core belief is the reason millions will make the journey to Allahabad, in the process creating a spectacle that once seen is never forgotten.
Police have laid 75km of steel plate roadway and thrown 15 pontoon bridges across the rivers and laid tonnes of sandbags to stop the banks eroding.
The city is materialising before one's eyes. Out on the river boatmen punt simple craft groaning with pilgrims to the confluence, where the faithful climb over the side and immerse in the shallow channel.
Immersion and consequent liberation are the raison d'etre of the festival, but like all great pilgrimages it attracts a host of others, including Hindu ascetics, many stark naked, their uncut hair matted, their bodies smeared with ash, some dashing perilously along on frisky Arab horses.
Others brandish cutlasses and tridents to menace those who might prevent them being first into the water. Between ritual bathings, the holy men debate issues of moment to their respective sects, sign up recruits, expel those who have done wrong - and openly smoke large chillums of hashish or opium.
When the sun has set, the medieval city disappears and a quite different place springs into life. It is like a huge fairground or a religious Las Vegas.
All over the immense site, neon archways light up, some of great kinetic sophistication, spraying colours and patterns round and round, luring the devout and curious into the presence of the sages.
The Kumbh has always been a gigantic event but the alignment of the planets will not be as auspicious again for 144 years.
Millions of Hindus drawn to nectar of god
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