I stepped out of the solemn shade of the boh and peepul trees, and took my seat on a broken stone pillar, still under shelter, and commanding a view of the grand hall. The roof, which was fast crumbling away, was an inferior imitation of that of the wondrous temple of Maha Nagkhon Watt, and had scarcely been touched for centuries, for there still figured the inevitable Siva and Kalee, and all the rest of the Hindoo gods and goddesses, dismantled and broken, but still in sufficient preservation to show the wild grotesqueness of the Hindoo imagination, which seems to have grown riotous in the effort to embody all its imperfect conceptions of the Divinity.
When this strange and solemn procession entered the portal of Brahmanee Wade they suddenly halted, threw up their arms and folded their hands above their heads, and repeated one of the most magnificent utterances of Krishna: "O thou who art the life in all things, the eternal seed of nature, the understanding of the wise and the weakness of the foolish, the glory of the proud and the strength of the strong, the sacrifice and the worship, the incense and the fire, the victim and the slayer, the father and the mother of the world, gird thy servants with power and wisdom to-day to slay the slayer and to vanquish the deceiver,"[37] etc. After which they marched to the sound of music into the temple, and offered sacrifices of wine and oil, and wheaten cakes and fresh flowers, and with their eyes lifted to the dark vaulted roof they again prayed, calling upon Brahma the father, the comforter, the creator, the tender mother, the holy way, the witness, the asylum, the friend of man, to illumine with the light of his understanding their feeble intellects to discern the devil and to vanquish him.
At length the astrologers, wizards, and witches took their places in the hall, with eager crowds all round them, standing in rows on all the steps of the building. Then came two officers from the king with a royal letter,—one was the chief judge of the Supreme Court, and the other his secretary to report the trial. After this lordly personage had taken his seat, the prisoners—the two handmaids of the princess and my friend May-Peâh, who, as I feared, was the deaf and dumb "changeling"—were brought in. She was deadly pale, and there was a wild light as of madness or intense suffering in her eyes. They were placed at the end of the hall, strongly guarded by as many as fifty Amazons, while the soldiers scattered themselves all round about the building. Not a word was spoken, and the strange assembly looked into one another's faces, as if each knew his neighbor's thoughts. I trembled for the unhappy prisoners; and the crowd, who seemed to look upon poor May-Peâh as a veritable witch, were silent in breathless expectation.
It was a frightful spot, and a still more indescribably terrifying scene, where one might indeed say with Hassan of Balsora, "Lo! this is the abode of genii and of ghouls and of devils." I had half a mind to slip down from my rocky perch and run away. But very soon my anxiety for poor May-Peâh absorbed every other feeling.
The three prisoners sat profoundly silent, waiting in sadness to hear their doom.
But why did they not begin the trial? There were the boxes and the planks with little niches cut into them, deep enough to enable any nimble person to climb with the tips of their toes, and scale any wall against which they might be placed. I turned to a soldier who was standing close by, and asked him why they still delayed the trial.
"They are waiting," said he, as if he knew all about it, and had witnessed many such scenes before, "for the 'sage,' or holy man of the woods; it is for him that they have blown the conch-shells these three times." There was, to me, nothing improbable in the soldier's story. He told me that this holy man, or yogi,[38] lived in a cave, in the rocks adjoining, all alone, and that he rarely issued from his unknown retreat during the day, but that pious Hindoos, while performing their ablutions in the stream after the close of their labors, could see him moving in the moonlight, and hear him calling upon God. Feeding on tamarinds and other wild fruits, he slept during the day like a wild animal, and prayed aloud all night, oppressed by his longing and yearning after the Invisible, as by some secret grief that knew no balm. Even the cool evening air brought him no peace; for,
"At night the passion came,
Like the fierce fiend of a distempered dream;
And shook him from his rest, and led him forth
Into the darkness, to pray and pray forevermore."
By and by a man appeared on the opposite banks of the stream, plunged into it, and emerged on the hither side; shook the wet from his hair like a veritable beast, and made his way towards the hall, where he sat himself shyly down near the prisoners. This strange mortal, who lived the life of an "orang-outang," had a remarkably fine, sensitive face, and a noble head, around which his long, matted, unkempt hair fell like dark clouds. He was meagrely clad, and his wiry frame gave evidence of great muscular power. There was, to my thinking, a gleam of a better and higher humanity in his fine, dark face, that shot out in irrepressible flashes, and convinced me, in spite of his filth and nudity, of a noble and impressive nature.
The soldier assured me, in a tone of the utmost reverence, "that this man's eyes were opened, that he could see things which the paid mercenaries of the court could not begin even to comprehend; and that therefore they always made it a point to invite him to aid them in their spiritual examinations."