40. The devouring fire gnawed down the bones with crackling noise, and filled the atmosphere with the filthy stink and stench. It gorged up all that was soft or hard, as the elephant devours the reeds with the moisture contained in their cellular vessels.
CHAPTER XLV.
GÁDHI REBORN AS A CHANDÁLA, AND MADE KING OVER THE KIR TRIBE.
Argument. Gádhi reborn in a Chandalí, His Life and Election as King of Kir.
Vasishtha said:—Then Gádhi, standing as he was amidst the water with his sorrowful heart, saw many other occurrences in the clearness of his mind.
2. He saw a village in the vicinity of Bhuta mandala (Butan) full of its inhabitants, and that he was reborn there in the womb of a Chandála woman, in which he remained with great pain.
3. Confined in the cavity of the womb, he felt his body pressed by the pressure of the intestines, while his senses were sorely annoyed by being constrained to abide the stink of the ordure and filth in the intestinal parts of Chandála woman.
4. After the foetus was matured, he was born in proper time, with its black complexion like a dark cloud of the rainy season, and soiled with filth all over its body.
5. It grew up to childhood and then to boyhood in the Chandála’s house, and moved about here and there like a pebble thrown up by the current of the Yamuna stream.
6. It reached its twelfth and then its sixteenth year of age, and had its body fully developed like a rainy cloud increasing in its size.
7. Then accompanied by a pack of hounds, the lad roved from one forest to another, and continued to hunt after and kill the wild deer, in his occupation of a huntsman.