And then, the Moony-crested stopped. And after a while, the Daughter of the Snow said softly: Alas! for these unhappy mortal women, who suffer at the hands of evil-minded lovers, such intolerable wrong, and woe. And yet, as I think, poor Babhru deserved rather to be forgiven altogether, or even to be actually rewarded, rather than punished by the body of a camel, for treating those two ill-doers even better than they merited, for such outrageous crime.
Then said Maheshwara, looking at her with affection: O Daughter of the Snow, thou resemblest every other woman, judging by thy own pity and compassion, and the emotion aroused in thy soul by the particular misfortune of a solitary case, not taking into any consideration the constitution of the world. And this is a merit and a beauty in thee, and yet it is altogether wrong. For Babhru suffered as a consequence of acts committed in a former birth, the circumstances of which thou dost not know. And moreover, even so, he was culpable and presumptuous, in taking on himself a vengeance to which even Aranyání did not urge him, not knowing that punishment far more terrible than his was waiting for those criminals, without his interference. And he should have left Aranyání's vindication to the deity, who knew what was necessary far better than himself, and had his eye upon it all. For there is no retribution so just, or so sure, or so adequate, or awful, as that which evil-doers lay upon themselves, in the form of their own ill-deeds, which dog them like a shadow clinging to their heels, from body to body, through birth after birth, till the very last atom of guilt has passed through the furnace of expiation, and the very last item of their debt to everlasting Yama has been weighed in his scales, and struck from the account, and utterly redeemed.
And then, that Lord of the Moony Tire took his darling in his arms, and set her on his lap: and they rose up and floated away together like a cloud to their home on the snowy peak. But the bones of that camel remained alone, lying still in the sand, till the moon got up and gazed at them with wonder, looking down from the sky, as if mistaking them for a reflection of himself, looking back at him with white and silent laughter from the blackness of the earth, and saying as it were: By the help of thy beams, I am whiter than thyself. And the night-wind rushed over them, scattering over them oblivion, in the form of a cloud of its plaything, the ocean of the sand, and danced round and fled away with a wail into the desert, with a music that resembled the moan of the world for the victims of the waste.
FOOTNOTES
[1] I am told, by a pundit in these matters, that the term is found at least as early as Patanjali (the Mahábháshya;) that is probably, the latter half of the second century B.C.: and hence, it must have originated long before.
[2] In his Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce.
[3] I was sorely tempted to give it the title of Mere Foam: which, if the reader would kindly understand mere in its German, its Russian, its Latin, and its ordinary English sense, would be an exact translation. But it has an unfortunate suggestion (meerschaum) which made it impossible.
[4] Sat. The thesis of Socrates, that virtue is knowledge: probably borrowed, by steps that we cannot trace, through Pythagoras or "Orpheus" from the East.