Wishwanáth cast a careless glance at the sky. Yes, he said, it looks well from here: but then I have seen it so often. It was a new moon yesterday.
And very soon it will be old. Look, Wishwanáth, here is a strange thing. See, there on that side is the moon, following the sun to rest in a bath of fire, and they will both appear to-morrow all the better for it. But now, look down there. There is another thing passing away in the fire. But how will it be with that?
And I pointed to the burning pyre on the other side.
The Hindoo looked steadily at it for a moment, and then at me. It will be just the same, he said.
What! you think that that will come back again, like sun and moon?
He did not answer for a moment. Then he said slowly, in a low voice, as if speaking rather to himself than me: How should it not return? na jáyate mriyate wa kadáchit[[4]].
I looked at him, but said nothing. He continued to gaze steadily at the burning pyre, in silence, and I did the same. The flames were dying down: their work was done.
Metempsychosis, transmigration, everlasting incarnation and re-incarnation of the immortal soul in body after body, birth after birth: all Hindoo literature is but the kaleidoscopic reiteration of this one identical idea, whose beauty is such that no logic will ever destroy it or oust it in favour of another. For the Sanskrit language is a kind of shrine, consecrated to the embodiment and immortalisation of this philosophical myth. The Hindoos are possessed by it; it is their hereditary heirloom, Kramágatam, the legacy from an immemorial past: it is all that they have left. And nations, like the characters in our story, cling desperately, in periods of degradation and eclipse, to all that reminds them of a former state of ideal prosperity, which lingers in their literature and echoes in their souls, like dim recollections of a forgotten paradise, or faint reminiscences of a former birth. Distance lends enchantment, and time effaces detail, and endows stern realities with dreamy beauty; and thus a rugged stony past fades gradually into a picture, blue, soft, and unutterably beautiful, like some low barren island, seen far away in the haze, over a hot and glittering sea.
POONA,
March 21, 1903.
[[1]] Shrí also means a Sacred Lotus, and it is the name of the twelfth Digit of the Moon: thus indicating the position of this story in the series to which it belongs: for an account of which, and the manuscript, I may refer the reader to the preface to her predecessor Shashiní, entitled A Digit of the Moon.