Thinking that our great Rudra (the Vedic
name for this god) is omnipresent, we repre-sent him with his face
turned simultaneously in all directions.
Eight hands indicate his
omnipotence, and his single body serves to remind us that he is One,
though he is everywhere, and nobody can avoid his all-seeing eye,
or his chastising hand."
The padre was going to say something when the train stopped; we
had arrived at Narel.
It is hardly twenty-five years since, for the first time, a white
man ascended Mataran, a huge mass of various kinds of trap rock,
for the most part crystalline in form. Though quite near to Bombay,
and only a few miles from Khandala, the summer residence of the
Europeans, the threatening heights of this giant were long considered
inaccessible. On the north, its smooth, almost vertical face rises
2,450 feet over the valley of the river Pen, and, further on,
numberless separate rocks and hillocks, covered with thick vegetation,
and divided by valleys and precipices, rise up to the clouds. In
1854, the railway pierced one of the sides of Mataran, and now has
reached the foot of the last mountain, stopping at Narel, where,
not long ago, there was nothing but a precipice. From Narel to
the upper plateau is but eight miles, which you may travel on a
pony, or in an open or closed palanquin, as you choose.
Considering that we arrived at Narel about six in the evening,
this course was not very tempting. Civilization has done much
with inanimate nature, but, in spite of all its despotism, it has
not yet been able to conquer tigers and snakes. Tigers, no doubt,
are banished to the more remote jungles, but all hinds of snakes,
especially cobras and coralillos, which last by preference inhabit
trees, still abound in the forests of Mataran as in days of old,
and wage a regular guerilla warfare against the invaders. Woe
betide the belated pedestrian, or even horseman, if he happens to
pass under a tree which forms the ambuscade of a coralillo snake!
Cobras and other reptiles seldom attack men, and will generally try
to avoid them, unless accidentally trodden upon, but these guerilleros
of the forest, the tree serpents, lie in wait for their victims. As
soon as the head of a man comes under the branch which shelters the
coralillo, this enemy of man, coiling its tail round the branch,
dives down into space with all the length of is body, and strikes
with its fangs at the man's forehead. This curious fact was long
considered to be a mere fable, but it has now been verified, and
belongs to the natural history of India. In these cases the natives
see in the snake the envoy of Death, the fulfiller of the will of
the bloodthirsty Kali, the spouse of Shiva.
But evening, after the scorchingly hot day, was so tempting, and
held out to us from the distance such promise of delicious coolness,
that we decided upon risking our fate.
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