[193] Not being able to find victims, this pleasant deity, to satisfy her thirst for the curious juice, cut her own throat that the blood might spout up into her mouth. She once found herself dancing on her husband, and was so shocked that in surprise she put out her tongue to a great length, and remained motionless. She is often represented in this form.
[194] This ashtanga, the most ceremonious of the five forms of Hindu salutation, consists of prostrating and of making the eight parts of the body—namely, the temples, nose and chin, knees and hands—touch the ground.
[195] ‘Sidhis,’ the personified Powers of Nature. At least, so we explain them; but people do not worship abstract powers.
[196] The residence of Indra, king of heaven, built by Wishwa-Karma, the architect of the gods.
[197] In other words, to the present day, whenever a Hindu novelist, romancer, or tale writer seeks a peg upon which to suspend the texture of his story, he invariably pitches upon the glorious, pious, and immortal memory of that Eastern King Arthur, Vikramaditya, shortly called Vikram.
Transcriber's note
- Obvious printer errors have been silently corrected.
- Original spelling, hyphenation and punctuation have been kept, but variant spellings were made consistent when a predominant usage was found.
- Footnotes have been renumbered and moved to the end of the book.
- Blank pages have been skipped.
- Illustrations have been slightly moved so that they do not break up paragraphs while remaining close to the text they illustrate.
- Illustration captions have been harmonized and made consistent so that the same expressions appear both in them and in the List of Illustrations.
- Both “Bramha” and “Brahma” have been kept as distinct even though they probably denote the same deity.