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IS 213.2 Story of an Emigrant.
the dry wood. The melting butter flows through it, the
flames roar and crackle, and the dead body makes writhing
muscular motions under the influence of the fire, the skin
bursting open in several places, and a thin fluid trickling out
which adds fuel to the flames. The face shrinks and vanishes
under our eyes, an unpleasant smell of burnt flesh
permeates the air, ai d in a little while all is over, and the
Brahmins gather the ashes and scatter them on the waters of the
sacred Ganges.
Who can wonder that a stranger, witnessing such a
ceremony, experiences in his own breast questions and surmises
such as these: Is this, then, all ? Where is the Fakir who
mortified his body by all kinds of torture, who struggled
and suffered in order to become acceptable to the gods?
Was there nothing more than that shell, consumed before our
eyes? Is the man who spent half of his life-time gazing
into the boundless realm of space and yearning and longing
for the unknown, the infinite, no longer in existence? Was
his longing only a mockery, or was it a foreshadowing of
that which is to come? What would life be if all terminated
in the pvre or in the grave? To what purpose, then, all
noble endeavors, whose aim and object only relate to the
uncertain future? The deepest premonitions of the human
soul, and the most beautiful hopes of the heart, how far are
these from the thought that all our feelings, our loftiest
ambitions,— in one word the best part of our being,— can be
annihilated in a crematory! The Fakir whose body was
now reduced to ashes had lived in the faith of his
immortality, had worshiped the deities of his people, because he
knew no better, but was he 011 that account less welcome in
the everlasting mansions?
Formerly the wife was burned alive on the pyre of her
husband, but this practice has been abolished by the English
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