Told by the death's head

by Mór Jókai

"Oho!" sneered the chair, "you would like to postpone this trial for a year or more, while a searching commission travelled to the end of the world and back—wouldn't you? We prefer to believe that living creatures also hang on trees like fruits."

"And so they do!" responded the prisoner. "There is a sort of large squirrel, or small dog, that has wings and flies, and at night hangs by its hind legs to the limbs of trees, and looks like a gourd."

"Didn't I say so?" again interrupted the chair with a choleric laugh. "Flying dogs that sleep hanging by their feet! Go on with your fables, you reprobate!—this honorable court is sitting for the sole purpose of believing every lie you choose to tell. I am curious to hear how your bread growing on trees, and your flying dogs are going to clear you of the crimes of bigamy and regicide."

I am coming to that, your honor. The entire world which environs the human being in that distant land, works an irresistible influence on his nature, and the native inhabitant compels, with his peculiar religion, customs, his deeply-rooted prejudices, the foreigner resident to adopt a mode of life antipodal to that he led at home.

The majority of the natives wear no clothing at all; while the rest bend under a costly burden of greatest splendor.

The Indian is a mixture of the ideally perfect, and the grotesquely hideous, heroic at one moment, cowardly the next, free as a bird, and restricted as an anchorite. He is to be envied for his paradisal simplicity, and admired for his gigantic creations. His cities surpass in magnificence and grandeur those of Europe. His churches are mountains, enormous edifices hewn by artist hands from a single rock; with thousands of majestic columns, and armies of idols; while his huts are more abjectly wretched than the dwellings of our beavers. The Indian, with his thousand gods, to all of whom he renders service and sacrifices—and of whom not one possesses the power to help him—is so gentle-hearted, that he will not take the life of an animal; allows himself to be devoured by lions and tigers; crushed under foot by the rhinoceros; bitten by serpents; and stung by venomous insects—and yet, he considers it no sin to exterminate an entire neighboring folk.

Oh, that is a strange country: where the aristocrat, if touched by a member of another caste, considers himself defiled, and possesses the right to cut off the hand, or arm that touched him, and the mutilated pariah accepts the punishment as his due. Where the wife is burned alive on the funeral pyre of her husband; where the invalid is placed on the banks of a river, and declared to be already dead, so that, should he recover, he may not return to the living, but seek the "community of the dead," which is made up of one-time invalids, recovered like himself.

Dwelling amid such a people, every idea the European entertains when he lands on that shore very soon fades away; for, there, they have different virtues and different sins.

"This lengthy dissertation I take it," interrupted the chair, "is for the purpose of acquainting the court that bigamy and regicide are permissable crimes among that wonderful people?"

Bigamy is permissable, your honor, on conditions: if the first wife consents, her husband may marry a second. But, before the consent of the first wife is secured, he may not kiss and embrace his second.