Page:Myths of the Hindus & Buddhists.djvu/42

Myths of the Hindus & Buddhists sweet-singing birds; and it was cool and green. All holiness might be attained under its soothing influence. Any austerity might be practised in its ennobling solitudes. But it was also the home of deadly beasts of prey. And many of these were surrounded by an added and supernatural terror; for was it not known that the demon Mārīcha had the power to change his shape at will? Who, then, could tell whether even tiger or bear were what it seemed, or something more subtle and fearsome still? Amongst the evening shadows walked strange forms and malefic presences. Misshapen monsters and powerful fiends, owning allegiance to a terrible ten-headed kinsman in distant Lankā, ranged through its fastnesses. How often must the belated hunter have listened in horror to whispering sound from the darkness of trees and brushwood, feeling that he was acting as eavesdropper to the enemies of the soul!

But the gods were ever greater than the powers of evil. It was, after all, the twilight of divinity that hung so thick about the forest-sanctuary. Were there not there the gandharvas and siddhas—musical ministrants of the upper air? Were there not apsarās, the heavenly nymphs, for whose sake, at the moment of nightfall, we must not venture too near the edge of the forest pools, lest we catch them at their bathing and incur some doom? Were there not kinnaras, the human birds, holding instruments of music under their wings? Was it not known that amidst their silence slept Jatāyu, king for sixty thousand years of all the eagle-tribes, and that somewhere amongst them dwelt Sampati, his elder brother, unable to fly because his wings had been scorched off in the effort to cloak Jatāyu from sunstroke? And all about the greenwood came and went the monkey hosts, weird with a more than human 20