Bubbles of the Foam

Bubbles of the Foam, by
Unknown

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Title: Bubbles of the Foam
Author: Unknown
Translator: F. W. Bain
Release Date: November 20, 2006 [EBook #19874]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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OF THE FOAM ***

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BUBBLES OF THE FOAM

So Life's sad Sunset prizes What Life's gay Dawn despises, And always
Winter wise is When Summer is no more: While Love than lightning
fleeter Turns all he touches sweeter, To leave it incompleter Behind
him, than before.
AMARA
Years, looking forward, all too slow, Yet looking back, too fast, What
is your joy, what is your woe, But scented ash that used to glow, A
sandalwood of long ago, A camphor of the past?
SULOCHANA
[Illustration]

BUBBLES OF THE FOAM
([Sanskrit])
TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT
BY
F. W. BAIN
What! Mortal taste Immortal? Earth, kiss Heaven? Confusion
elemental!, ah! beware!
SOMADEWA
WITH A FRONTISPIECE
METHUEN & CO. LTD. 36 ESSEX STREET W.C. LONDON
First Published in 1912

DEDICATED
TO
LADY GLENCONNER

CONTENTS
PAGE I. A SPOILED CHILD 1
II. THE THIRST OF AN ANTELOPE 27
I. A DAPPLED DAWN 29
II. A GLAMOUR OF NOON 63
III. THE DESERT AND THE NIGHT 89

INTRODUCTION
Four things are never far from you, in old Hindoo literature: underfoot,
all round you, or away on the horizon, there they always are: the Forest,
the Desert, the River, and the Hills.
It is never very easy, to understand the Past that really is a past: and the
age of Forests, like that of chivalry, is gone. But in the case of ancient
India, the chief obstacle to understanding arises from our bad habit of
always looking at the map with the North side up. Why this inveterate
apotheosis of the North? Would you understand the old Hindoos, you
must turn the map of India very nearly upside down, so as to get
Peshawar at the bottom, and the Andaman Islands exactly at the top.
And then, history lies all before you, right side up, and you get your
intellectual bearings, and take in the early situation, at a glance.
Entering, like those old nomads, through the Khaibàr, you find yourself

suddenly in the Land of Streams: and as you drift along, you go, simply
because you must, straight on, down the River "ganging on" (Gangá)
towards the rising sun, "ahead," (which is the Sanskrit term for East,)
all under the colossal wall of Hills, the home of Snow, where the gods
live, on your left (uttara, the North, the heights;) while on the South,
(the right hand, dakshina, the Deccan) you are debarred, not by
Highlands, but by two not less peremptory rebutters: first, by the Desert,
Marusthali, the home of death: and then again, a little farther on, by the
Forest of the South: the vast, mysterious, impenetrable Wood, of which
the Rámáyana preserves for us the pioneering record and original idea,
with its spell of the Unknown and the Adventure (like the Westward
Ho! of a later age) with its Ogres and its Sprites, its sandal trees and
lonely lotus-tarns, its armies of ugly little ape-like men, and its
legendary Lanka (Ceylon) lost in a kind of halo of shell-born pearls,
and gems, and their Ten-headed Devil King, Ráwana, away, away, at
the very end of all: so distant, as to be little more than mythical, little
better than a dream. No! Those who wish to see things with the eyes of
old Hindoos must not begin, as we did, and do still, with Ceylon, and
the adjacent coasts of Coromandel and Malabar. That is the wrong, the
other end: it is like starting English history from "the peak in Darien."
But our particular concern, in these pages, is with the Desert. The
conventional notion of a desert, as a colourless and empty flat of sand,
is curiously unlike the thing itself, which is a constantly changing,
kaleidoscopic sea of colour, made up of rainbow stripes, black, golden,
red, dazzling white, and blue, with every kind of lights and shadows,
strange hazes, transparencies, and gleams. True, the ground you
actually tread upon is bare: but it is clothed with raiment woven by that
magic artist, Distance, out of cloud and heat and air and sky. And so,
when these old Hindoo people came to make a closer acquaintance with
the Desert, so