Page:Karl Gjellerup - The Pilgrim Kamanita - 1911.djvu/46

 pearl, with my wishes for sails, and steered by my will, that it might bear us on the bosom of that silver stream upward to its source. Then should Hastinapura rise again from its ruins and the towering palaces ring with the banqueting of the revellers and the strife of the dice-players. Then the sands of Kurukshetra should yield up their dead. There the hoary Bhishma in silver armour, over which hang his white locks, should tower above the field on his lofty chariot and rain his polished arrows upon the foe; the valiant Phagadatta should come dashing on, mounted on his battle-inflamed, trunk-brandishing bull elephant; the agile Krishna should sweep with the four white battle steeds of Arjuna into the fiercest tumult of the fight. Oh! how I envied the ambassador his belonging to the warrior caste, when he told me that his ancestors also had taken part in that never-to-be-forgotten encounter. But that was foolish. For not by descent only do we possess ancestors. We are our own ancestors. Where was I then? Probably even there, among the combatants. For, although I am a merchant's son, the practice of arms has always been my greatest delight; and it is not too much to say that, sword in hand, I am a match for any man."

Vasitthi embraced me rapturously and called me her hero; I must quite certainly be one of those heroes who yet live in song; which of them, we could not, of course, know, as the perfume of the coral tree would scarcely penetrate to us through the sweet aroma of the "sorrowless" trees.

I asked her to tell me something of the nature of that perfume of which, to say truth, I had never heard. Indeed I found that romance, like all things else, blossomed far more luxuriously here in the valley of the Gunga than with us among the mountains.

So she related to me how once, on his progress through