Page:An Indian Study of Love and Death.pdf/68

64 associated in the minds of the living with thoughts of sanctity and worship. Thus, with perhaps a burning light or two, does the dead lie, in simple state, awaiting the coming of the heaters who will take him to the burning-ghât. And now and again, as one or another steals a look at the quiet face, the breath is sharply indrawn, to see the vexed record of the personal life erased, and the tortured lines smoothed out, while death establishes his throne securely, and writes, to end all things, his signature of peace. Now becomes plain the innermost secret, between himself and God, of this man’s soul. Now weariness leaves him, and his main purpose, self-recorded on lips and brow, shines forth before us. Or we catch an ancestral likeness, or a broad humanity, hitherto unsuspected, even as we see the contour of some receding landscape, generalised and softened.

The women hush their sobs, and bow their heads under their white veils,