Page:The Tamils Eighteen Hundred Years Ago.djvu/37

Rh was doubtless Kuddanadu, the limits of which I have already described.

Cape Kumari (the modern Comorin) was a sacred bathing place. Brahmin pilgrims came from Vâranâsi (or Benares) to bathe in Kumari and absolve their sins. Similarly the Brahmins of Southern India went round the Pothiya hill, which was famous as the residence of the Vedic sage Agastya, then bathed in the sea at Kumari, and travelled northward to the Ganges to bathe in the sacred waters of that river. Pilgrims from the banks of the Ganges to Kumari, and from Tamilakam to Benares appear to have kept up communication between the Northern and Southern Aryas. At the period of which I now write, the people remembered that in former days the land had extended further south, and that a mountain called Kumarikkodu, and a large tract of country watered by the river Pahruli had existed south of Cape Kumari. During a violent irruption of the sea, the mountain Kumarikkodu and the whole of the country through which flowed the Pahruli had disappeared. Similar irruptions of the sea, and the subsidence of land on the south-western coast of Ceylon in the second century B. C. are recorded in the Buddhist annals of that island.