And now? Now his
listless body lay in the dust at the entrance of his favorite tower,
and his wings were half devoured by the rats. The poor old woman,
his mother, was mad with sorrow, and cast, through her tears,
reproachful, angry looks at Mr. Y - -, who, in his new capacity of
a heartless murderer, looked disgustingly composed.
But the affair was growing serious. The comical side of it
disappeared before the sincerity and the intensity of her
lamentations. Her descendants, grouped around her, were too
polite to reproach us openly, but the expression of their faces
was far from reassuring. The family priest and astrologer
stood by the old lady, Shastras in hand, ready to begin the
ceremony of purification. He solemnly covered the corpse with a
piece of new linen. and so hid from our eyes the sad remains on
which ants were literally swarming.
Mr. Y - - did his best to look unconcerned, but still, when the
tactless Miss X - - came to him, expressing her loud indignation
at all these superstitions of an inferior race, he at least seemed
to remember that our host knew English perfectly, and he did not
encourage her farther expressions of sympathy. He made no answer,
but smiled contemptuously. Our host approached the colonel with
respectful salaams and invited us to follow him.
"No doubt he is going to ask us to leave his house immediately!"
was my uncomfortable impression.
But my apprehension was not justified. At this epoch of my Indian
pilgrimage I was far, as yet, from having fathomed the metaphysical
depth of a Hindu heart.
Sham Rao began by delivering a very far-fetched, eloquent preface.
He reminded us that he, personally, was an enlightened man, a man
who possessed all the advantages of a Western education. He said
that, owing to this, he was not quite sure that the body of the
vampire was actually inhabited by his late brother. Darwin, of course,
and some other great naturalists of the West, seemed to believe in
the transmigration of souls, but, as far as he understood, they
believed in it in an inverse sense; that is to say, if a baby had
been born to his mother exactly at the moment of the vampire's death,
this baby would indubitably have had a great likeness to a vampire,
owing to the decaying atoms of the vampire being so close to her.
"Is not this an exact interpretation of the Darwinian school?" he asked.
We modestly answered that, having traveled almost incessantly during
the last year, we could not help being a bit behindhand in the
questions of modern science, and that we were not able to follow
its latest conclusions.
"But I have followed them!" rejoined the good-natured Sham Rao,
with a touch of pomposity. "And so I hope I may be allowed to say
that I have understood and duly appreciated their most recent
developments. I have just finished studying the magnificent
Anthropogenesis of Haeckel, and have carefully discussed in my
own mind his logical, scientific explanations of the origin of
man from inferior animal forms through transformation. And what
is this transformation, pray, if not the transmigration of the
ancient and modern Hindus, and the metempsychosis of the Greeks?"
We had nothing to say against the identity, and even ventured to
observe that, according to Haeckel, it does look like it.
"Exactly!" exclaimed he joyfully. "This shows that our conceptions
are neither silly nor superstitious, as is maintained by some
opponents of Manu. The great Manu, anticipated Darwin and Haeckel.
Judge for yourself; the latter derives the genesis of man from a
group of plastides, from the jelly-like moneron; this moneron,
through the ameoba, the ascidian, the brainless and heartless
amphioxus, and so on, transmigrates in the eighth remove into the
lamprey, is transformed, at last, into a vertebrate amniote, into
a premammalian, into a marsupial animal.... The vampire, in its turn,
belongs to the species of vertebrates. You, being well read people
all of you, cannot contradict this statement." He was right in
his supposition; we did not contradict it.
"In this case, do me the honor to follow my argument...."
We did follow his argument with the greatest attention, but were
at a loss to foresee whither it tended to lead us.
"Darwin," continued Sham Rao, "in his Origin of Species,
re-established almost word for word the palin-genetic teachings
of our Manu. Of this I am perfectly convinced, and, if you like,
I can prove it to you book in hand. Our ancient law-giver, amongst
other sayings, speaks as follows: `The great Parabrahm commanded
man to appear in the universe, after traversing all the grades
of the animal kingdom, and springing primarily from the worm of
the deep sea mud.' The worm be-came a snake, the snake a fish,
the fish a mammal, and so on. Is not this very idea at the bottom
of Darwin's theory, when he maintains that the organic forms have
their origin in more simple species, and says that the structureless
protoplasm born in the mud of the Laurentian and Silurian periods -
the Manu's `mud of the seas,' I dare say - gradually transformed
itself into the anthro-poid ape, and then finally into the human being?"
We said it looked very like it.
"But, in spite of all my respect for Darwin and his eminent follower
Haeckel, I cannot agree with their final conclusions, especially
with the conclusions of the latter," continued Sham Rao. "This
hasty and bilious German is perfectly accurate in copying the
embryology of Manu and all the metamorphoses of our ancestors,
but he forgets the evolution of the human soul, which, as it is
stated by Manu, goes hand in hand with the evolution of matter.
The son of Swayambhuva, the Self Becoming, speaks as follows:
`Everything created in a new cycle, in addition to the qualities
of its preceding transmigrations, acquires new qualities, and the
nearer it approaches to man, the highest type of the earth, the
brighter becomes its divine spark; but, once it has become a Brahma,
it will enter the cycle of conscious transmigrations.' Do you
realize what that means?
