Page:Castes and Tribes of Southern India.djvu/425

Rh every human being born into the world, with the resulting merit (punya) and demerit (pāpa), and to produce a debtor and creditor account properly made up and balanced on the day when that being is brought before Yama. According to the balance on the side of merit or demerit is judgment pronounced. The road by which Yama's two officers force a wicked man to descend to the regions of torment is described in the first two chapters of the Garuda Purāna. The length of the way is said to be 86,000 leagues (yojanas). The condemned soul, invested with its sensitive body, and made to travel at the rate of 200 leagues a day, finds no shady trees, no resting place, no food, no water. At one time it is scorched by a burning heat equal to that of twelve meridian suns, at another it is pierced by icy cold winds; now its tender frame is rent by thorns; now it is attacked by lions, tigers, savage dogs, venomous serpents, and scorpions. In one place it has to traverse a dense forest, whose leaves are swords; in another it falls into deep pits; in another it is precipitated from precipices; in another it has to walk on the edge of razors; in another on iron spikes. Here it stumbles about helplessly in profound darkness; there it struggles through loathsome mud swarming with leeches; here it toils through burning sand; there its progress is arrested by heaps of red-hot charcoal and stifling smoke. Compelled to pass through every obstacle, however formidable, it next encounters a succession of terrific showers, not of rain, but of live coals, stones, blood, boiling water and filth. Then it has to descend into appalling fissures, or ascend to sickening heights, or lose itself in vast caves, or wade through lakes seething with fœtid ordures. Then midway it has to pass the awful river Vaitarani, one hundred leagues in breadth, of unfathomable depth;