"I am your servant, Sadhu-Sahib! give me your blessing!"
Without any apparent reason or cause, we all felt self-conscious
and ill at ease, as if guilty of some indiscretion. But the face
of the mysterious Rajput remained as calm and as dispassionate as
ever. He was looking at the river before this scene took place,
and slowly moved his eyes to the Akali, who lay prostrated before
him. Then he touched the head of the Sikh with his index finger,
and rose with the remark that we also had better start at once,
because it was getting late.
We drove in our carriage, moving very slowly because of the deep
sand which covers all this locality, and the Takur followed us on
horseback all the way. He told us the epic legends of Hardwar and
Rajistan, of the great deeds of the Hari-Kulas, the heroic princes
of the solar race. Hari means sun, and Kula family. Some of the
Rajput princes belong to this family, and the Maharanas of Oodeypur
are especially proud of their astronomical origin.
The name of Hari-Kula gives to some Orientalists ground to suppose
that a member of this family emigrated to Egypt in the remote
epoch of the first Pharaonic dynasties, and that the ancient Greeks,
borrowing the name as well as the traditions, thus formed their
legends about the mythological Hercules. It is believed that the
ancient Egyptians adored the sphinx under the name of Hari-Mukh,
or the "sun on the horizon." On the mountain chain which fringes
Kashmir on the north, thirteen thousand feet above the sea, there
is a huge summit, which is exactly like a head, and which bears
the name of Harimukh. This name is also met with in the most
ancient of the Puranas. Besides, popular tradition considers
this Himalayan stone head to be the image of the setting sun.
Is it possible, then, that all these coincidences are only accidental?
And why is it that the Orientalists will not give it more serious
attention? It seems to me that this is a rich soil for future
research, and that it is no more to be explained by mere chance
than the fact that both Egypt and India held the cow sacred, and
that the ancient Egyptians had the same religious horror of killing
certain animals, as the modern Hindus.
An Isle of Mystery
When evening began to draw on, we were driving beneath the trees
of a wild jungle; arriving soon after at a large lake, we left
the carriages. The shores were overgrown with reeds - not the reeds
that answer our European notions, but rather such as Gulliver was
likely to meet with in his travels to Brobdingnag.
