Page:Under the Sun.djvu/281

Rh been lost forever. Cruel drought bound the ground as with iron, and so the seed sown never gave its increase. Starvation crept round the hamlet, and one by one the weakest died.

Yet the wheels of time rolled on, and another harvest-time came round. The seasons were kindly, rain was abundant, and the ground returned to the sower’s hand its hundred-fold. And back to the earth, glad with full harvests, crept the poor defunct. What more natural?

Not, of course, in the likeness of their old selves, for it is not given to man to live twice as man, nor yet in nobler form, for what had the pitiful starved dead given in alms to the Brahmins? So they came back to the world that had treated them so badly — as rats. Killed by the want of grain, they returned as grain devourers, and the round completeness of this retaliation sufficed to satisfy the Hindoo mind as to the iniquity of injuring the still hungry victims of the great famine. That they suffered from their depredations, their own memorials to the authorities attested amply. “We had promise of a good crop. But in came a multitude of rats, which have carried to their holes our ears of corn. Thus the morsel was taken from between our teeth, and the cornstalks stand headless in the fields.” The government, in reply, assured them of its sympathy assured them also of its knowledge of rat habits, and begged them to kill the rats. But there came the rub. Could a Hindoo who was about to be starved kill another Hindoo already once starved to death? Was it not just possible that when he himself had been starved he might return as a rat? To set such a precedent might be to commit suicide while committing murder; so they declined to kill the rats.