He smiled broadly. "It is about Mai Âtma, sure enough. The Huzoor will see that if he lets me tell the tale."
I clinked a rupee down among the jasmine flowers and bid him fire away, and be quick about it.
He began instantly, plunging without any preface into a curiously rhythmed chant, the very first line of which gave pathetic answer to my irrelevant question, and at the same time showed the cause of the old man's ignorance. It ran thus:--
"O world which she has left, forget not she was fair."
Vain appeal when made in the oldest known form of Arya-Pali--the dialect in which the edicts of Asoka are carved--and of which not one man in ten million, even in India, knows the very existence. I happened to be one of the few, and though at the time I could naturally only gather the general outline of the chant, I subsequently took it down word for word from the old man's lips. Some passages still remain obscure; there are yawning gaps in the narrative, but taking it all in all, it is a singularly clear bit of tradition, preserved, as it were, by the complete ignorance of those who passed the words from lip to lip. Roughly translated, it runs thus:--
"O world she left, forget not she was fair; so very fair. Her small kind face so kind. Straight to the eyes it looked, then smiled or frowned. About her slender throat were gold-blue stones. Gold at her wrists; the gold hem of her gown slid like a snake along the marble floor, coiled like a snake upon the water's edge.
"By night she asked the stars, by day the sun, what they would have her do.
"I was her servant sitting at her door,
Watching her small feet kiss the marble floor;
Reading the water mirror's heaven-learnt lore.
"O world she left, remember she was Queen!
"For Âtma ruled a queen ere she was born, her widowed mother wasting nine long months to give her life ere following the King.