Page:Karl Gjellerup - The Pilgrim Kamanita - 1911.djvu/245

 through the gates of death to his paradise of pleasure, and to enjoy the raptures of heaven there. But now, we, their descendants, had come together to hear from the lips of a perfect Buddha the words of truth, in order to learn how to lead a pure and perfect life, and, finally, by a complete victory over desire for the fleeting and perishable, to reach the end of all suffering, to reach Nirvana. In this way he, the Buddha, the Fully Awakened One, completed the work of the dreaming god; in this way we, grown up, completed what our ancestors had, with the noble enthusiasm of childhood, begun.

"There ye see," he said, "how a gifted artist of days long past has reproduced in stone Krishna's combat with the elephant;" and he pointed to a huge relief which lay almost at my feet, one corner pressed into the turf, the other supported by a half-buried capital. The last glow of the setting sun lingered caressingly on the moss-covered relic, and, in its mild radiance, one could still clearly recognise the group—that of a youth setting his foot upon the head of a fallen elephant, one of whose tusks he breaks off.

And the Master now related how the King of Mathura, the horrible tyrant Kamsa, after he had invited Krishna to a prize contest at his court, secretly ordered his mahout to drive his wildest war elephant out of the stables upon the unsuspecting youth, and that, too, at the very entrance to the scene of the coming struggles. And how the latter slew the monster, and, to the terror of the king, entered the arena bespattered with blood, and with the tusk he had broken off in his hand.

"But a the Master also," he added, continuing his discourse, "enemies had hounded a savage elephant. And at the sight of the monster dashing down upon him, the