He held a
freshly plucked crow in his hand, and in reply to my question climbed slowly
on a platform of sand which ran in front of the holes, and commenced lighting
a fire there in silence. Dried bents, sand-poppies, and driftwood burn
quickly; and I derived much consolation from the fact that he lit them with an
ordinary sulphur-match. When they were in a bright glow, and the crow was
neatly spitted in front thereof, Gunga Dass began without a word of preamble:
"There are only two kinds of men, Sar. The alive and the dead. When you are
dead you are dead, but when you are alive you live." (Here the crow demanded
his attention for an instant as it twirled before the fire in danger of being
burned to a cinder.) "If you die at home and do not die when you come to the
ghat to be burned you come here."
The nature of the reeking village was made plain now, and all that I had known
or read of the grotesque and the horrible paled before the fact just
communicated by the ex-Brahmin. Sixteen years ago, when I first landed in
Bombay, I had been told by a wandering Armenian of the existence, somewhere in
India, of a place to which such Hindus as had the misfortune to recover from
trance or catalepsy were conveyed and kept, and I recollect laughing heartily
at what I was then pleased to consider a traveler's tale.
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