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Updated: May 3, 2025
Then the King went and brought his own sons. The Fakir chose the eldest son and took him away, and set off with him on his journey, When he got home he told the King's son to go out to gather fuel. So the King's son went out to gather cow-dung, and when he had collected some he brought it in. Then the Fakir looked at the King's son and put on a great pot, and said, "Come round here, my pupil."
This is the first part of the ceremony: the second consists in its purification by fire. The pickaxe is again placed upon the brass dish, along with a cocoa-nut, some sugar, cloves, white sandal-wood, and other articles. A fire of the mango tree, mixed with dried cow-dung, is then kindled; and the officiating Thug, taking the pickaxe with both hands, passes it seven times through the flames.
He mixed the messy stuff, cow-dung and lime and water and earth, carefully with his hands, as if he understood that too. He was not a worker. He was a creature in intimate communion with the sensible world, knowing purely by touch the limey mess he mixed amongst, knowing as if by relation between that soft matter and the matter of himself.
On such occasions upwards of a thousand natives would arrive from different villages, in their full-dress costume, consisting of plumes of ostrich feathers, leopard-skin mantles, and their faces painted a frightful colour with fresh cow-dung.
They alighted out of the coach near a small foot-path in a field, and Glumdalclitch setting down my travelling box, I went out of it to walk. There was a cow-dung in the path, and I must need try my activity by attempting to leap over it. I took a run, but unfortunately jumped short, and found myself just in the middle up to my knees.
Cleanliness and order and establish the superiority of one place over another, which may likewise have the advantages of a rich soil, a neighbourhood, and be ornamented with fine spreading and shady trees; but the form of the houses and squares is every-where the same; irregular and badly built clay walls, ragged looking thatched roofs, and floors of mud polished with cow-dung, form the habitations of the chief part of the natives of Youriba, compared topmost of which, a common English barn is a palace.
There were fakeers in plenty, with their bodies dusted over with ashes and their long hair caked together with cow-dung; for the cow is holy and so is the rest of it; so holy that the good Hindoo peasant frescoes the walls of his hut with this refuse, and also constructs ornamental figures out of it for the gracing of his dirt floor.
Then kindling a fire of dried cow-dung and mango-wood, the fakir taking the pickaxe, and holding it in both hands, passed it seven times through the fire.
This also, as time went on, gradually lost its original look of comfort. Hens, and goats, and cow-dung cakes, and rubbish of all sorts by degrees got the upper hand, and proportionate to the increase of apparent discomfort was the increase of contentment in the minds of the young couple who lived there. Houses begun and never completed. The projected laundry. Abandoned wells.
The cottage was thus: One large hall; my bedroom on the right, S-'s on the left; the kitchen behind me; Miss Rietz behind S-; mud floors daintily washed over with fresh cow-dung; ceiling of big rafters, just as they had grown, on which rested bamboo canes close together ACROSS the rafters, and bound together between each, with transverse bamboo a pretty BEEHIVEY effect; at top, mud again, and then a high thatched roof and a loft or zolder for forage, &c.; the walls of course mud, very thick and whitewashed.
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