Creatures of the Night (Boxed Set Edition). Редьярд Джозеф Киплинг

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      Then a horrid thought flashed across her mind: she perceived her fatal mistake, and her heart almost ceased to beat.

      “This is thy wife!” cried the Brahman’s head that had been fastened to the soldier’s body.

      “No; she is thy wife!” replied the soldier’s head which had been placed upon the Brahman’s body.

      “Then she is my wife!” rejoined the first compound creature.

      “By no means! she is my wife,” cried the second.

      “What then am I?” asked Devasharma-Gunakar.

      “What do you think I am?” answered Gunakar-Devasharma, with another question.

      “Unmadini shall be mine,” quoth the head.

      “You lie, she shall be mine,” shouted the body.

“Holy Yama,[160] hear the villain,” exclaimed both of them at the same moment.

In short, having thus begun, they continued to quarrel violently, each one declaring that the beautiful Unmadini belonged to him, and to him only. How to settle their dispute Brahma the Lord of creatures only knows. I do not, except by cutting off their heads once more, and by putting them in their proper places. And I am quite sure, O Raja Vikram! that thy wits are quite unfit to answer the question, To which of these two is the beautiful Unmadini wife? It is even said—amongst us Baitals—that when this pair of half-husbands appeared in the presence of the Just King, a terrible confusion arose, each head declaiming all the sins and peccadilloes which its body had committed, and that Yama the holy ruler himself hit his forefinger with vexation.[161]

      Here the young prince Dharma Dhwaj burst out laughing at the ridiculous idea of the wrong heads. And the warrior king, who, like single-minded fathers in general, was ever in the idea that his son had a velleity for deriding and otherwise vexing him, began a severe course of reproof. He reminded the prince of the common saying that merriment without cause degrades a man in the opinion of his fellows, and indulged him with a quotation extensively used by grave fathers, namely, that the loud laugh bespeaks a vacant mind. After which he proceeded with much pompousness to pronounce the following opinion:

      “It is said in the Shastras——”

      “Your majesty need hardly display so much erudition! Doubtless it comes from the lips of Jayudeva or some other one of your Nine Gems of Science, who know much more about their songs and their stanzas than they do about their scriptures,” insolently interrupted the Baital, who never lost an opportunity of carping at those reverend men.

“It is said in the Shastras,” continued Raja Vikram sternly, after hesitating whether he should or should not administer a corporeal correction to the Vampire, “that Mother Ganga[162] is the queen amongst rivers, and the mountain Sumeru[163] is the monarch among mountains, and the tree Kalpavriksha[164] is the king of all trees, and the head of man is the best and most excellent of limbs. And thus, according to this reason, the wife belonged to him whose noblest position claimed her.”

      “The next thing your majesty will do, I suppose,” continued the Baital, with a sneer, “is to support the opinions of the Digambara, who maintains that the soul is exceedingly rarefied, confined to one place, and of equal dimensions with the body, or the fancies of that worthy philosopher Jaimani, who, conceiving soul and mind and matter to be things purely synonymous, asserts outwardly and writes in his books that the brain is the organ of the mind which is acted upon by the immortal soul, but who inwardly and verily believes that the brain is the mind, and consequently that the brain is the soul or spirit or whatever you please to call it; in fact, that soul is a natural faculty of the body. A pretty doctrine, indeed, for a Brahman to hold. You might as well agree with me at once that the soul of man resides, when at home, either in a vein in the breast, or in the pit of his stomach, or that half of it is in a man’s brain and the other or reasoning half is in his heart, an organ of his body.”

      “What has all this string of words to do with the matter, Vampire?” asked Raja Vikram angrily.

      “Only,” said the demon laughing, “that in my opinion, as opposed to the Shastras and to Raja Vikram, that the beautiful Unmadini belonged, not to the head part but to the body part. Because the latter has an immortal soul in the pit of its stomach, whereas the former is a box of bone, more or less thick, and contains brains which are of much the same consistence as those of a calf.”

      “Villain!” exclaimed the Raja, “does not the soul or conscious life enter the body through the sagittal suture and lodge in the brain, thence to contemplate, through the same opening, the divine perfections?”

“I must, however, bid you farewell for the moment, O warrior king, Sakadhipati-Vikramadityal[165]! I feel a sudden and ardent desire to change this cramped position for one more natural to me.”

      The warrior monarch had so far committed himself that he could not prevent the Vampire from flitting. But he lost no more time in following him than a grain of mustard, in its fall, stays on a cow’s horn. And when he had thrown him over his shoulder, the king desired him of his own accord to begin a new tale.

“O my left eyelid flutters,” exclaimed the Baital in despair, “my heart throbs, my sight is dim: surely now beginneth the end. It is as Vidhata hath written on my forehead—how can it be otherwise[166]? Still listen, O mighty Raja, whilst I recount to you a true story, and Saraswati[167] sit on my tongue.”

THE VAMPIRE’S TENTH STORY [168] —Of the Marvellous Delicacy of Three Queens.

       Table of Contents

      The Baital said, O king, in the Gaur country, Vardhman by name, there is a city, and one called Gunshekhar was the Raja of that land. His minister was one Abhaichand, a Jain, by whose teachings the king also came into the Jain faith.

      The worship of Shiva and of Vishnu, gifts of cows, gifts of lands, gifts of rice balls, gaming and spirit-drinking, all these he prohibited. In the city no man could get leave to do them, and as for bones, into the Ganges no man was allowed to throw them, and in these matters the minister, having taken orders from the king, caused a proclamation to be made about the city, saying, “Whoever these acts shall do, the Raja having confiscated, will punish him and banish him from the city.”

Now one day the Diwan[169] began to say to the Raja, “O great king, to the decisions of the Faith be pleased to give ear. Whosoever takes the life of another, his life also in the future birth is taken: this very sin causes him to be born again and again upon earth and to die And thus he ever continues to be born again and to die. Hence for one who has found entrance into this world to cultivate religion is right and proper. Be pleased to behold! By love, by СКАЧАТЬ