The greatest-ever gathering of human beings got off to a smooth start in northern India yesterday as more than 2.5 million Hindu pilgrims plunged joyously into the chilly waters of the holy river Ganges.
Scantily clad holy men, their faces daubed with sandalwood paste and ash, mingled with a mass of old, young, rich and poor at the confluence of the blue-green Ganges and the dirty-brown Yamuna river before dawn, in a festival expected to draw about 70 million people over the next six weeks.
Organisers of the Maha Kumbh Mela, or Great Pitcher Festival, which is held once every 12 years in the city of Allahabad, said their painstaking military-style planning for the onslaught of worshippers had paid off.
There were no uncontrollable crowd surges as in the past - around 500 people died in a stampede at a Kumbh Mela festival in the 1950s - and apart from a Mexican woman being bundled away by police after she stripped naked on the bank of the river, everything went without a hitch.
However, two people died of natural causes during the day, and six people were killed in a road accident as they were bringing the ashes of a relative to sprinkle into the Ganges.
Mela officer, Mr Jeevesh Nandan, who said he had suffered sleepless nights since he was entrusted with the job of running the festival four months ago, sauntered along the sand dunes beside the river with the tide of pilgrims.
He said at least one million people had taken a dip in the Ganges by 10 a.m. (4.30 a.m. Irish time). Thanks to a watery winter sun chasing off the morning fog, a further 1.5 million had followed as night closed in.
"We are really satisfied with the flow of pilgrims and we can say that the mela has taken off smoothly," the festival commissioner, Sadakant, told a news conference.
Allahabad in the Hindu heartland state of Uttar Pradesh is one of four spots where Garuda, the winged steed of the god Vishnu, is said to have rested during a titanic battle with demons over a pitcher of divine nectar of immortality. Two of the other towns are on the Ganges, which stretches from a glacial cave in the Himalayan mountains to the Bay of Bengal.
Garuda's flight lasted 12 divine days, or 12 years of mortal time, so the Kumbh Mela is celebrated at each city, alternating between each every three years.
Hindus consider the festival at Allahabad the holiest of the four, and the last one, in 1989, attracted 15 million pilgrims. Mr Nandan said the first day, although auspicious because it falls on the last full moon of winter, was merely a dressrehearsal for the four other big bathing days of the mela, particularly January 14th, 24th and 29th, when up to 30 million people might attend.
"For those days we have calculated that for each person to get undressed, have a bath and get dressed again it takes 10 minutes," he said. "So we have organised it to make sure there is no clog of people, with only one road in and three roads out."
Shiv Charan Ram Das Baba, whose dreadlocked hair spilled out of his loosely-tied saffron turban, said he had come by foot from the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. His journey took him more than a month, and he had begged for a living along the way.
Down at the river, hundreds of rowing boats milled around the sangam, the confluence of the two rivers with a third underground mythical river, named Saraswati after the Hindu goddess of learning.
"It's chilly when you get in first, but you forget that quickly in the excitement," said a man who was towelling down a toddler shivering with cold.