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JOURNAL, R.A.S. (CEYLON). [VOL. XXI. 



and the rest — and then, if you think it beautiful, hanker after 

 it. Women's breasts, once decked with strings of rarest pearl, 

 become the food of dogs in the burial ground. Her soft 

 fragrant locks, her eyes that deal destruction, who can escape 

 their power ? Pleasant at first, painful in the end, she is 

 Cupid's net to catch men, she is the bait by which the death- 

 god catches them into hell. I seek not the pleasures of 

 woman, that chest of love, jealousy, anger, locked with the 

 lock of dire sorrow. Deliverance from sexual desire is the 

 beginning of heavenly bliss. 



Old age, which follows on youth, is a time of greater 

 sorrow still. Wisdom runs away from old age as love of first 

 wife runs away from the heart of him who has married 

 a second. Weakness of body, disease, excessive desire, 

 inability to satisfy it, are the lot of the old. Their tottering 

 gait, their failings, are the laughing-stock of children and 

 women, of servants, kinsmen, and friends. Desire comes 

 home to roost in old age, fear of the next world torments 

 it. Gray heads are ripe fruit to feed the messengers of death. 

 The king of death comes in state attended by an army of 

 diseases and fanned with chouris 1 of gray hair. He lives in a 

 palace washed with gray, and his wives are weakness, disease, 

 danger. What availeth life so beset with pain and sorrow at 

 every step, its string hourly gnawed by time ? 



What thing in the universe can escape Time, which swallows 

 all like the fire that dries up oceans ? The greatest and the 

 least he destroys — he will not grant a moment's grace. Oceans 

 and mighty mountains yield to his power as a leaf or a grain 

 of dust. Worlds resonant with the buzzing of countless gnats , 

 are apples dropped by the tree of Time. With his eye, the 

 sun, Time watches throughout the ancient garden of the 

 universe and eats the fruit as they are ripe, to wit, the warders 2 

 of the world. He wears a necklace of world-clusters strung 



1 Tail of the Yak (a wild ox of the mountains of Tibet) used by 

 Eastern princes as fans and fly-flappers. 



2 Regents or presiding deities appointed for the four cardinal and the 

 four intermediate points of the compass by Brahma at each creation of 

 the world. 



