Bubbles of the Foam | Page 4

if
they must presently slide away into the water and disappear. And as I
floated slowly down, I watched with curiosity, half wondering if I was
dreaming, the throng of devotees, sitting, lying, gliding here and there,
like an antique procession on an old Greek frieze or vase; some
muttering and praying, others bathing, others again standing motionless

as statues in the stream, buried in a sort of samádhí meditation: every
outline of every attitude, in that clear Indian air, as sharp as if cut with
scissors out of paper. And lying close beside, cheek by jowl with the
bodies still alive, the ashes of dead bodies just burned or still burning
on the Ghát. Life and Death touching, running into one another, and
nobody amazed: all as it should be, and a matter of course!
England and India, bureaucracy, democracy, sedition, education,
politics and Durbars:--the world with all its tumult and its roaring
passes clean over their heads, unheeded, unobserved: for them the noise
and bustle do not matter, do not trouble: they do not hear, they do not
listen, they do not even care. It is curious, this peace, this indifference,
this calm: it does not seem reality; it is like a thing looked at in a
picture, like a dream. And, somehow, as I gazed at it, mechanically
there came into my mind, as it were of its own accord, a story I had
read in some old navigator's "yarn," of the albatross, sleeping on the
great South Sea, in the fury of a storm, with its head beneath its wing.
CEYLON, 1912

I
A SPOILED CHILD

I
A SPOILED CHILD
BENEDICTION
A bow to the mystical evening dance of the Rider on the Mouse,[6] who
whirling round his elephant trunk, smeared with wet vermilion,
suddenly shoots it straight up into the purple sky, and stands for a
single instant still, poised in the yellow twilight, as if to make a coral
handle for the white umbrella of the laughing Moon.

[Footnote 6: Ganesha.]
I
There is, in the western quarter, a land of lonely desolation, that
resembles a very sea, but of sand instead of brine, and rightly named
Marusthali, being a very home of death, sending back to the midday
sun rays hotter than his own, and challenging the midnight sky, with
silent ashy laughter, as though to say: What am I but the rival and
reflection of thyself, with bones instead of stars, and tracks of wasted
skeletons instead of a Milky Way. And there, upon a day, it came about
that Maheshwara was roaming with Párwatí in his arms. And as they
floated swiftly on, over the dusty waste, they watched their own huge
shadows sweeping like the forms of clouds across the burning sand,
exactly underneath, for it was noon: and the surface of the desert shook
and quivered in the stillness, as if the wind, asleep, had, like a tired
traveller, sought refuge from the fury of the sun above their heads. And
all at once, the Daughter of the Snow exclaimed: See, there is the
mirage! Let us descend, and sit for a little while upon the sand: for I
love to watch this wonder, which resembles in its far faint blue the
colour of a dream. And accordingly, to do her pleasure, Maheshwara
sank softly to the earth, settling on it like a cloud gently resting on a
hill.
So as they looked, after a while, that slender goddess said again: Surely
it is a shame, and well may the poor antelopes be mistaken and
deceived. For who could believe yonder water to be only an illusion?
And when the eyes of even gods are bewildered by the cheat, how
much more the eyes of thirsty and unreflecting little deer!
Then the Moony-crested deity said slowly: O Daughter of the Snow,
thy own reflection on this beautiful illusion is the truth. And yet, well
were it for the world, were its illusion limited only to its eyes, not
extending, as it actually does, to its understanding also. For this
deceptive picture on the sand is far inferior in power and importance to
the bewildering delusion of this world below, fluttering about whose
shifting dancing light, like moths about a wind-blown torch, men singe
their silly souls, and burning off their wings, drop helpless, maimed and

mutilated, into the black gulf of birth and death, and lose emancipation;
till, after countless ages, their wings begin to sprout and grow again,
under the influence of works. Yet they who after all emerge, and soar
away, unburdened even by an atom of the guilt that weighs them down,
and brings them back into the vortex of rebirth, are very few. And
yonder bones, now lying in the sand, could they but rise and