The Poets Herds. 285 



inseparable, and the animal, the twin, as it were, of the 

 holy " twice-born," takes rank above many castes of men. 

 To save the life of a cow, to do it a service, to tend it in 

 sickness, to revere it at all times, are almost as advantageous 

 in the hereafter as if the same acts had been done towards 

 a Brahmin. To kill a cow, to wound it, or to insult it, is 

 reckoned, in the full austerity of Brahminism, a more 

 heinous offence than similar wrongs inflicted upon the 

 lower orders of Hindoos. 



The camel selected to carry the Sultan's annual gift of 

 the new veil to Mecca is, in memory of El Kaswa which the 

 Prophet rode, treated, while on the road, with all the pomp 

 and care that would be extended to majesty itself, and the 

 competition for the honourable posts of attendance upon 

 the brute is sometimes very keen. So too in Egypt the 

 sacred animals became, once a year, by priestly condescen- 

 sion, the objects of public solicitude and recipients of 

 public services. But among the Hindoos the kine live in 

 the same sanctity perennially, and enjoy a universal tender- 

 ness of treatment from year's end to year's end. During 

 all the rest of the twelvemonth, when it is not loitering 

 along the caravan-route to the Holy City, the camel of 

 Islam receives but scant respect from a provoked rider or 

 short-tempered owner. So, too, the furry obliquities of 

 Egyptian adoration relapsed in the majority of cases and 

 for the greater part of the year into their proper places in 

 the animal world. But the glory of the cow of Hindostan, 

 like that of its prototype in Vedic legends, is never in 

 eclipse. It is always at the meridian. So to this day we 

 find it in Hindoo zoolatry as the supreme expression of the 

 kindliness of the powers of Nature to man, an authentic 

 proof of the goodness of the gods. Though all the herds 

 that other peoples worshipped have gone from the earth 

 w^ith the credulities upon which they pastured, the bull of 

 Shiva and the cow of Brahma have still their altars in a 



