Page:The Land of the Veda.djvu/514

504 have sad anxieties for her children and their future, knowing well that none can ever be to them what she has been. Coming days of desolation lie before them. For her husband's future she can have little concern, as she knows that she is in no sense essential to his comfort.

The usual means are tried to restore her. Superstition and astrology do their best; but she is sinking. Her symptoms are reported to the Hukeem—the native doctor—and at last he pronounces that hope has fled. No time is to be lost now. If she is too far from the Ganges to be carried there before the vital spark has fled, preparations are made for the burning of the body. Within a few hours after death it is laid upon the pyre and quickly consumed. When the heap is cold, a small portion of the ashes and calcined remains, representing the rest, are taken and put into an earthen vessel to be carried to the sacred river; and the rest of the remains are left there to be, as I have so often seen them, tossed about by the hogs and pariah dogs, or scattered by the winds of heaven.

But, should the Ganges not be more than a few miles away, instead of being kept to be burned at home, the dying wife and mother is laid on a charpoy — the light native bedstead — and raised on the shoulders of four bearers. She leaves her home forever, unattended, however, by her husband; her eldest son instead goes with her, and they hurry her by the shortest route across the country to the sacred river. She is dying; the sun blazes upon her with its fierce rays, often as high as one hundred and thirty-eight degrees, and she is, of course, jolted and shaken by the runners; but they must go on, and she must bear it all. At length the river is reached — those banks where all Hindoos so much desire to die—and now they lift her off, and lay her on her back on the brink, with her feet in “the sacred waters,” and the bearers depart, for no restoration is ever anticipated; none there grow better and return. They think that it would be fitting in such a case to prevent it. So the son takes his station by the dying mother, and every few minutes he wets