Page:Castes and Tribes of Southern India.djvu/446

BRAHMAN it was impossible to find a suitable consort for her. The girl, in despair at her loveliness, hid herself in the mountains, in the far away Himalayas, and there spent several years in prayer, till at last Vishnu appeared before her, and asked what she wanted. She begged him to tell her how it was that the great creator Brahma, who had made her so beautiful, bad not created a male consort for her of similar perfect form. Then she looked on Vishnu, and asked the god to kiss her. Vishnu could not comply with her request as she was a dancing-girl, and of low caste, but promised by his virtue that she should be reincarnated in the Himalayas in the form of a river, which should bear the name Gandaki, and that he would be in the river as her eternal consort in the shape of a sālagrām. Thereupon the river Gandaki rose from the Himalayas, and sālāgrams were found in it. How the true virtue of the sālagrām was discovered is another strange little fable. A poor boy of the Kshatriya or warrior class once found one when playing by the river side. He soon discovered that when he had it in his hand, or secreted in his mouth, or about his person, his luck was so extraordinary at marbles or whatever game he played, that he always won. At last he so excelled in all he undertook that he rose to be a great king. Finally Vishnu himself came to fetch him, and bore him away in a cloud. The mystic river Gandaki is within the jurisdiction of the Mahārāja of Nepal, and is zealously guarded on both banks, while the four special places where the sacred stones are mostly picked up are leased out under certain conditions, the most important being that all true sālagrāms found are to be submitted to the Māharāja. These are then tested, the selected ones retained, and the others returned to the lessee. The first test of the sālagrāms to prove