Page:Ancient India as described by Megasthenês and Arrian.djvu/181

 162 three together. In the course of the protracted journey which they had then to undergo, the old people succumhed to fatigue and died, and the hoy showed them no light regard, hut huried them in . himself, having cutoff his head with a sword. Then, as the Brachmanes tell us, the all-seeing sun, in admiration of this surpassing act of piety, trans- formed the hoy into a hird which is most heauti- ful to hehold, and which lives to a very advanced age. So on his head there grew up a crest which was, as it were, a memorial of what he had done at the time of his flight. The Athenians have also related, in a fable, marvels somewhat similar of the crested lark ; and this fable Aristo- phanes, the comic poet, appears to me to have followed when he says in the Birdsy " For thou wert ignorant, and not always bustling, nor always thumbing iEsop, who spake of the crested lark, calling it the first of all birds, bom before ever the earth was ; and telling how afterwards her father became sick and died, and how that, $is the earth did not then exist, he lay unburied till the fifth day, when his daughter, unable to find a grave elsewhere, dug one for him in her own head."|| 11 Lines 470-75:— " You're such a dull incurious lot, unread in ^sop's lore, Whose story says the lark was bom first of the feathered quire, Before the earth ; then came a cold and carried off his sire : Earth was not : five days lay the old bird untombed : at last the son Buried the father in his head, since other grave was none." Dr. Kennedy^s translation. Digitized by Google