But Kamalamitra rushed forward, and caught her in his arms. Then as they stood together, the old ascetic spoke and cursed them, saying slowly: Irreverent lovers, now shall that beauty which occasioned this insolence meet with its appropriate reward. Descend now, ye guilty ones, into mortal wombs, and suffer in the lower world the pangs of separation, till ye have purged away your guilt in the fire of human sorrow.

Then hearing the doom of separation, wild with grief they fell at his feet, and implored him, saying: Fix at least a term to the curse, and a period to our pain. And he said again: When one of you shall slay the other, the curse shall end.

Then those two unhappy lovers looked at each other in mute despair. And they drew in that instant from each other's eyes a deep draught of the nectar of mutual contemplation, as if to sustain them in their pilgrimage over the terrible sea of separation, saying as it were to each other, but in vain[[22]]: Remember me! Then all of a sudden they disappeared and went, like flashes of lightning, somewhere else.

But Maheshwara, from his seat on Kailás, saw them go, for as fate would have it, he chanced to be looking in that direction. And grasping the whole truth by mystical intuition[[23]], he remembered his boon to the Spirit of the Air, and he said to himself: Now has the future which I foresaw become the present[[24]], and the blue eyes of Anushayiní have produced a catastrophe. But I must not leave her lovely body to the play of chance, for it has in it something of my own divinity. And Kamalamitra, after all, was not very much to blame. For he was bewildered by my glory, reflected in her eyes. So I am the culprit, who is responsible for this state of affairs: and so I must look after this pair of lovers. Moreover, I have a mind to amuse myself with their adventures[[25]].

So after considering awhile, that Master Yogi took a lotus, and placing it on the earth in a distant sea, it became an island. And he made in it, by his magic power, an earthly copy of a heavenly type, of a nature known to himself alone, for the future to unfold. And having completed his arrangements, he allowed the chain of events to take its course.

But the old sage Pápanáshana, when those two lovers had disappeared, remained in the forest alone. And their images forsook the mirror of his eyes, and faded away from his mind, like the shadow of a cloud travelling over the surface of a great lake, and vanished, and were utterly forgotten.

[[1]] For Ganesha's trunk is usually smeared with vermilion. The other deity is, of course, Shiwa. [[2]] 'The lover of the lotus,' i.e. the Sun. Mitra is also one of his names. [Kam- rhymes with drum.]

[[3]] i.e. Shiwa. Umá is his wife.

[[4]] This is a sort of Hindoo façon de parler: it must not be supposed to make him any the older.

[[5]] nila. As this colour is the keynote of the story, it should be observed, that it is a deep, intense blue, inclining to black, essentially associated in Hindoo literature with the moon-crested God, peacocks, and the lotus.