Page:The Tamils Eighteen Hundred Years Ago.djvu/180

Rh husband had been killed. “This king shall die and his palace shall be destroyed by fire,” said Kannaki in the bitterness of her anguish, and invoked the wrath of the god of fire. The palace was soon enveloped in flames. The guards were astonished to find dense smoke issuing from the palace gates. Elephants and horses burst from their stables and rushing out of the palace, escaped from the fire. The high priest and ministers and other officer of state hastened to the palace not knowing that the king and queen had died, and tried in vain to put down the flames.

The goddess of Madura then appeared to the vision of Kannaki and beseeched her to appease her wrath and save the city from total destruction “Your husband was killed,” said the goddess, ”by the effect of the sin he had committed in a former birth. Vasu and Kumara, kings of Simhapura and Kapilapura respectively, in the Kaling a country, were once waging a fierce war with each other, and none approached their cities within a distance of 6 Karathams. Sangaman, a merchant, greedy of large profits, secretly entered Simhapura with his wife, during the war, and was selling his goods, when Bharata, an officer in the service of king Vasu, seized Sangama and reporting to the king that he was a spy, had him unjustly executed. That Bharata was reborn as Kovilan and suffered for his former sin.”

Kannaki broke her bracelets at the temple of Durga, and went out of the city by the western gate, saying to herself, “With my husband I entered this city by the eastern gate, and alone I go out, by the western gate.” The unhappy widow found no rest by day or by night. Distracted with grief and unable to eat or sleep, she walked along the northern bank of the Vaigai river and ascended the hills sacred to Murugan. There in the midst of the villages, inhabited by Kurava, on the fourteenth day after the death of Kovilan, her pure spirit, which had harboured not a single evil thought, but had drunk deep of the cup of misery in this life, ascended to heaven.

When the sad news of the execution of Kovilan and the departure of Kannaki reached the ears of the nun she was so over