One touch of the long Maharatta spur, and the pony again bounds, plunging through the crowd, towards the place whence he came. Another moment and they will be saved!
Just as the fugitives are disappearing behind the thicket, an arrow shot from the bow of a Rankari,[24] missing its mark, pierces deep into the widow’s side.
The soldier buried his paramour under the tree where we were sitting. Life had no longer any charms for him. He never returned to his corps, and resolved to devote himself to futurity.
It was wonderful, considering the pain he must have been enduring, to hear him relate his tale so calmly and circumstantially.
The next morning, when we passed by the spot, three or four half-naked figures, in the holy garb, were sitting like mourners round the body of the old Jogee.
Strange the contempt for life shown by all these metempsychosists. Had we saved that man by main force—an impossibility, by the by, under the circumstances of the case—he would have cursed us, during the remnant of his days, for committing an act of bitter and unprovoked enmity. With the Hindoo generally, death is a mere darkening of the stage in the mighty theatre of mundane life. To him the Destroyer appears unaccompanied by the dread ideas of the Moslem tomb-torments, or the horror with which the Christian[25] looks towards the Great Day; and if Judgment, and its consecutive state of reward or punishment, be not utterly unknown to him, his mind is untrained to dwell upon such events. Consequently, with him Death has lost half his sting, and the Pyre can claim no victory over him.
Old Goa has few charms when seen by the light of day. The places usually visited are the Se Primaçial (Cathedral), the nunnery of Santa Monaca, and the churches of St. Francis, St. Gaetano, and Bom Jesus. The latter contains the magnificent tomb of St. Francis Xavier. His saintship, however, is no longer displayed to reverential gazers in mummy or “scalded pig” form. Altogether we reckoned about thirty buildings. Many of them were falling to ruins, and others were being, or had been, partially demolished. The extraordinary amount of havoc committed during the last thirty[26] years, is owing partly to the poverty of the Portuguese. Like the modern Romans, they found it cheaper to carry away cut stone, than to quarry it; but, unlike the inhabitants of the Eternal City, they have now no grand object in preserving the ruins. At Panjim, we were informed that even the wood-work that decorates some of the churches, had been put up for sale.