The Missionary: An Indian Tale; vol. I

by Lady Morgan

  CHAPTER V.

  The institutes of a religion which form a regular system ofsuperstitious rites, sanctioned by all that can secure the devotion ofthe multitude, are rigidly observed by the followers of Brahma; andamong the many splendid festivals held in honour of their gods, there isnone so picturesque, and none so imposing, as that instituted in honourof Durga, the goddess of nature, whose festival is ushered in by ruralsounds and rural games. “It is thus,” say the Puranas, or holy text,“she was awakened by Brahma, during the night of the gods.”

  The dawn had yet but faintly silvered the plantain-trees which thatchedthe Christian’s hut, when the distant strains of sylvan music stole onhis ear, as he knelt engaged in the exercise of his morning devotions.The sounds approached: he arose, and observed a religious processionmoving near his tent towards a pagoda, which lay embosomed in the darkshades of the forest. The band was led by faquirs and pilgrims. The idolwas carried by women, underneath a canopy of flowers. A troop ofofficiating priestesses danced before its triumphal car: the splendourof their ornaments almost concealed their charms, and they moved withlanguid grace, to the strains of pastoral instruments, while smallgolden bells, fastened round their wrists and ancles, played with themotion of their feet, and kept time to the melody of their hymns. Theywere succeeded by the Guru of Cashmire, reposing on a palanquin, and theBrahmins of the temple followed. The Prophetess led the band oftributary votaries; _her_ eyes, with a celestial meekness, threw theirsoft and dewy beams on the offerings which she carried in a small goldenvase; and her cheek seemed rather to reflect the tint of the scarletberries of the mullaca, which twined her dark hair, than to glow withthe blush of a human emotion. The folds of her pure drapery, soft andfleecy as it was, but faintly defined the perfect forms of her perfectfigure, of which an exquisite modesty, a mysterious reserve, were thedistinguishing characteristics. Her thought seemed to belong to Heaven,and her glance to the offering she was about to make at its shrine. Atrain of religious women surrounded her, and the procession was filledup with votaries of every description, and of every class, from theprincely Chittery to the humble Soodar, all laden with their variousofferings of rice and oil, of fruit and flowers, of precious stones andexquisite odours.

  As they proceeded, they reached an altar erected to _Camdeo, the god ofmystic love_. At the sight of this object, every eye turned withdevotion on his consecrated Priestess. The procession stopped. The sibylPriestess stood at the foot of the shrine of her tutelar deity, and thesuperstitious multitude fell prostrate at the feet of the Prophetess.They invoked her intercession with the god she served: mothers held uptheir infants to her view; fathers inquired from her the fate of theirabsent sons; and many addressed her on the future events of their lives;while she, not more deceiving than deceived, became the victim of herown imposition, and stood in the midst of her votarists, in all theimposing charm of holy illusion. Her enthusiasm once kindled, herimagination became disordered; believing herself inspired, she lookedthe immortality she fancied, and uttered rhapsodies in accents soimpressive and so tender, and with emotions so wild, and yet sotouching, that the mind no longer struggled against the imposition ofthe senses, and the spirit of fanatical zeal confirmed the influence ofhuman loveliness.

  Hitherto, curiosity had induced the Missionary to follow the procession;but he now turned back, horror-struck. Too long had the apostle ofChristianity been the witness of those impious rites, offered by theidolaters to the idolatress; and the indignation he felt at all he hadseen, at all he had heard, produced an irritability of feeling, new to amind so tranquil, and but little consonant to a character so regulated,so subdued, so far above even the laudable weakness of human nature. Heconsidered the false Prophetess as the most fatal opponent to hisintentions, and he looked to her conversion as the most effectual meansto accomplish the success of his enterprise. He shuddered to reflect onthe weakness and frailty of man, who is so often led to truth by theallurements which belong to error; and he devoted the remainder of theday to the consideration of those pious plans, by which he hoped, oneday, to shade the brow of the Heathen Priestess with the sacred veil ofthe Christian Nun.

  The complexional springs of passion in the character of the Missionaryhad been regulated and restrained by the habits of his temperate andsolitary life; the natural impetuosity and ardour of his feelings hadbeen tranquillized and subdued, by the principles of his pure andspiritual religion; and though his perceptions were quick and rapid intheir exercise, yet he had so accustomed his mind to distrust its firstimpulse, that, all enthusiast as he was, he was yet less so from thevivacity of a first impression than from the mental operation whichsucceeded to it. The idea which was coolly admitted into his mind,gradually possessed itself of his imagination, and there gave birth to aseries of impressions and emotions, which, in their combined force,finally mastered every thought and act of his life. Thus he becamezealous in any pursuit, not because it had, in the first instance,struck him powerfully, nor that he had suffered himself to be borne awayby its immediate impression, but because that, suspicious of himself, hehad examined it, in all its points of view, considered it in all itsreferences, and studied it in all its relations, till it exclusivelyoccupied his reveries, received the glow of his powerful fancy, andengaged all the force of his intellectual being. It was thus that hefrequently meditated himself into passion, and that the habits of hisartificial character produced an effect on his conduct similar to thatwhich the indulgence of his natural impulses would eventually have givenbirth to.

  When the description of the Priestess of Cashmire first met his ear, itmade no impression on his mind: when he beheld her receiving the homageof a deity, all lovely as she was, she awakened no other sentiment inhis breast than a pious indignation, natural to his religious zeal, atbeholding human reason so subdued by human imposition. When her storyhad been related to him, and her influence described, he then consideredher as the powerful rival of his influence, and the most fatal obstacleto the success of the enterprise he had engaged in; but when the Pundithad awakened the hope of her conversion, and asserted the possibility ofher influence becoming the instrument of divine grace to her nation,then the Indian gradually became the sole and incessant subject of histhoughts; and her idea was so mingled with his religious hopes, soblended with his sacred mission, so intimately connected with all hisbest, his brightest views and purest feelings, that, even in prayer, shecrossed his imagination; and when he sued from Heaven a blessing on hisenterprise, the name of the idolatress of Cashmire was included in theorison.

  The Guru and his train had left Lahore, on the evening of the festivalof the goddess Durga, for his native province; and, a few weeks afterhis departure, the Missionary commenced his pilgrimage towards UpperIndia. He was now equal to his undertaking; for he spoke the pure Hinduwith the fluency of an educated native, and read the Shanscrit with easeand even with facility. He had made himself master of the topography ofthe country--the valley of Cashmire, its villages, its capital, itspagodas, and the temple and Brahminical college, in which the Gurupresided; and already furnished with the means of providing for the fewcontingencies of his pilgrimage, the most necessary luxury of which isafforded by the numerous tanks and springs, whose construction isconsidered a religious duty, the apostolic Nuncio left Lahore, andcommenced his journey towards Cashmire.

  The black robe of his order flung over his lighter Indian vestment, hisbrow shaded by the monastic cowl, his hand grasping the pastoralcrosier, wearing on his breast the sacred crucifix, and nourished onlyby the fruits and nutritious grains, with which a bounteous naturesupplied him. His, resembled the saintly progress of the Apostles ofold; a fine image of that pure, tender, and self-denying faith, whosedivine doctrines he best illustrated by the example of his own sinlesslife; but he observed, with an acute feeling of disappointment, that theharvest bore no proportion to the exertions of the labourer. In whateverdirection he turned his steps, the zeal of Hindu devotion met his view,while every where the religion of the Hindus gave him the stronges
t ideaof the wild extravagance which superstition is capable of producing, orthe acute sufferings which religious fortitude is equal to sustain.Every where he found new reason to observe, how perfectly the human mindcould bend its plastic powers to those restraints, which the law ofsociety, the prejudices of country, or the institutes of religion,imposed. He felt, how arbitrary was the law of human opinion; how littleresorted to were the principles of human nature; how difficult toeradicate those principles impressed on the character without anyoperation of the reason, received in the first era of existence,expanding with the years, and associating with all the feelings, thepassions, and the habits of life. But these reflections, equallyapplicable to human character in the West and in the East, were nowfirst made under the new impressions formed by the observation of novelprejudices in others, not stronger, perhaps, but different from his own;and he whose life had been governed by a dream, was struck by theimbecility of those who submitted their reason to the tyranny of abaseless illusion.

  Amidst the tissue of prejudices, however, which disfigure the faith ofthe Hindus, he sometimes perceived the force of their mild andbenevolent natures bearing away the barriers of artificial distinctions;and though it is deemed infamous, and hazards loss of cast, for afollower of Brahma to partake of the same meal with the professor ofany other faith, yet the Missionary found in India the true region ofhospitality; choulteries, or public asylums for travellers, frequentlyoccurred in the course of his route; while the master of every simplehut was ready to spread the mat beneath the stranger’s feet, and toweave the branches of his plantain-tree above the stranger’s head; topresent to the parched lip of the wanderer the milk of his cocoa-nut,and to his aching brow the shade of his humble roof. Happy are they whopreserve, amidst the wreck of human reason, the dear and preciousvestiges of human tenderness!

  As the Missionary proceeded towards the north, he was still hailed withthe pensive welcome of the Indian smile. Some few of the simple andpatriarchal people, who had heard of Europe, knew him by his complexionfor a native of the West; but the greater number believed him to be awandering Arab, from the lofty dignity of his stature, from thebrilliant expression of his countenance; and then they would ask him tospeak of the Genii of his religion, or to relate to them those splendidtales for which his nation is so celebrated: but when he sought toundeceive them, when he declared that he came, not to amuse by fiction,but to enlighten by truth; when he openly avowed to them the nature andobject of his sacred mission, they fled him in fear, or heard him withincredulity.

  It was in vain that he invoked from Heaven some part of that miraculouspower granted to those who had preceded him; that he might be able, withFrancis Xavier, to cure the sick by a touch, or raise the dead by alook[15]. He could, indeed, watch with the saint, pray with the saint,and suffer with the saint, perhaps even far beyond those who hadsucceeded him: he could overwhelm by his eloquence, command by hisdignity, attach by his address, and awe by his example; but he couldnot subvert a single law of nature, nor, by any miraculous power, changethe immutable decree of the First Will:--for, to him it was still deniedto convert those from error, through the medium of astonishment, whom hecould not subdue by the influence of truth.

  In less than a fortnight from his departure from Lahore, he reached theupper region, those dreadful and desolate plains, which stretch towardsthe base of the great and black rock of Bimbhar. Alone in the drearywaste, the Missionary felt all the value of an enterprise, marked byperils so terrific; but he felt it unsubdued. The dry and hot air[16]parched his lip; his feet trod in the channel of a torrent, dried up,whose bed seemed strewed with burning lava; a fever preyed upon thesprings of being, and a parching thirst consumed his vitals; death, inthe most dreadful form, met his view, but found him unappalled; and thetide of life was almost exhausted in his veins, when, worn out andfeeble, he reached the foot of the rock of the pass of Bimbhar,denominated _The Mouth of the Vale of Cashmire_. High, sharp, and rude,it held a menacing aspect. Weak and enfeebled, the Missionary withdifficulty ascended its savage acclivities. Nature seemed almost to havemade her last effort when he reached its summit: his strength was whollyexhausted. Supported by his crosier, he paused, and cast one look behindhim. He beheld the terrific wastes he had passed, and shuddered: heturned round, and flung his glance on the scene which opened at hisfeet; and the heaven which receives the soul of the blessed, met hisview[17].

  Confined within the majestic girdle of the Indian Caucasus, Cashmire,the birth-place of Brahma, the scene of his avatars, came at once underhis observation. The brilliant scene, the balmy atmosphere, renovatedhis spirits and his frame. He rapidly descended the rock, now no longerbleak, no longer rude, but embossed with odoriferous plants, and shadedby lofty shrubs. His vital powers, his mental faculties, seemed todilate to the influence of the pure and subtil air, which circulatedwith a genial softness through his frame, and gave to his whole being asense of vague but pure felicity, which made even life itself enjoyment.The cusa-grass, which shrunk elastically beneath his steps, emitted adelicious odour; the golden fruit of the assoca-tree offered a lusciousrefreshment to his parched lip, and countless streams of liquid silvermeeting, in natural basons, under the shade of the seringata, whosebeauty has given it a place in the lunar constellations, offered to hisweary frame the most necessary luxury that he could now enjoy.

  It was evening when he reached the vale of Cashmire[18]. Purple mistshung upon the lustre of its enchanting scenes, and gave them, in fairyforms, to the stranger’s eye. The fluttering plumage of the peacocks andlories fanned the air, as they sought repose among the luxuriant foliageof the trees: the silence of the delicious hour knew no interruption,but from the soothing murmurs of innumerable cascades. All breathed atranquil but luxurious enjoyment; all invited to a repose whichresembled a waking dream. The Missionary had no power to resist the softand new emotions which possessed themselves of his whole being; itseemed as if sensation had survived all power of perception; and,throwing himself on the odorous moss, which was shaded by themagnificent branches of the pamelo, the oak of the East, he slept.