Thus, until his sixteenth year, Oman spent his days. Then a change came upon him, and he felt this life unendurable. Insensibly, a scene from one of the old, heroic epics that he had read in his student days, came to him, fastened itself in his mind, and would not be dislodged. It was the picture of the “Sinner’s Road”, described with ghastly vividness by a long-dead writer:
“A burning forest shut the roadside in
On either hand; and mid its crackling boughs
Perched ghastly birds—or flapped among the flames—
Vultures and kites and crows, with brazen plumes
And beaks of iron; and these grisly fowl
Screamed to the shrieks of Prets, lean, famished ghosts,
Featureless, eyeless, having pin-point mouths
That hungered, but were never full.”
Here, in the land where these dim spirits dwelt, Oman, in perilous despair, beheld himself. He must die as he had lived, and live in death as he had lived in life—miserable, desolate, desperate, without hope of betterment. And then, as the days scourged him, he was finally driven to take a stand, for sanity’s sake. Thus, one noontide, he girded himself up and returned to Bul-Ruknu, and there, within his father’s house, sought an interview with Gokarna.