“Avaunt! deceiver,” she cried. “You have marked me for your victim. I am betrayed. Why should the divinity of Somnat assume the form of an aged and deformed Brahmin, when he might clothe himself in the fairest garb of mortal flesh? My dream is past. I am your dupe. Away, and leave me. Never will I submit to pollution by one who makes religion a pander to his odious passions. A light has broken upon me. The deity has indeed heard my supplication, and saved me from the machinations of one who will swell the ranks of the Asuras, amid the darkness of Lóhángáráká.”[4]
The Brahmin, finding himself foiled, quitted his expected victim in a fury of disappointment.
She stood alone, leaning on the image, rapt in a trance of painful abstraction. Suddenly she felt the idol totter; a noise was heard from within, like the hissing of ten thousand serpents, immediately after which fire issued from the nose and mouth of the image, and fell in thick showers around. The whole temple was illuminated, and the door instantly became visible to the worshipper. She darted forward in spite of every impediment, and at length succeeded in gaining the entrance. She felt the pure breath of heaven upon her burning brow, and rejoiced in her escape. Reaching her home at length, in a tumult of hope and anxiety, she found that her husband had gone to that land where “there is time no longer.”
FOOTNOTES:
[2] This is stated in the Zein-ool-Maasir.
[3] The Maha Yug, or great Divine Age, is the longest of the Hindoo astronomical periods, containing a cycle of four million three hundred and twenty thousand years.
[4] The last of the thrice seven hells of the Hindoos. Lóhángáráká signifies hot iron coals.
CHAPTER IV.
Immediate communication was made to the relations of the defunct, that the deity of Somnat had heard the prayers of his relict, and he that was transported to a higher region, to be subjected to a change in the course of his transmigration that would bring him nearer to the final bliss of absorption into the universal Bhrim. The various connexions of the deceased were all summoned, and the neighbourhood immediately resounded with cries of lamentation, and those frantic ululations invariably heard at Hindoo funerals. The women stood screaming over the body with dishevelled hair, beating their breasts and rolling themselves upon the floor like so many wild beasts, whilst the disconsolate widow sat apart, abstracted by the thoughts of her own approaching sacrifice. She moved not; her eye was fixed on the ground, but the fountains of her grief were dry. Not a tear came to her relief—not a sigh escaped her bosom. The one awful image of death, in its most appalling form, absorbed her whole mind.
The Brahmin, before spoken of, appeared to officiate upon this melancholy occasion. He whispered in the widow’s ear words of consolation and hope, but she heard him not. He talked of her rescue from the fiery death about to be prepared for her; she disregarded him, and turned from the aged sensualist with an expression of disgust. His eyes gleamed in their hollow sockets with a deep leaden glare, and the blood rushed a moment to his flaccid cheek. He turned from his anticipated victim to proceed with the obsequies. When everything had been provided, the spiritual functionary, having previously bathed, took a narrow slip of a certain herb, and binding it round one of the fingers of the deceased, sprinkled upon the floor a quantity of lustral water, obtained from the sacred river,[5] a libation to the gods, whom he invoked with numerous prostrations, and a variety of wild gestures. The people assembled joined in a prayer for the future repose of their relative’s soul.