290 



Report on ike Mackenzie Mimuscripts. 



[April 



of sand, or mud. This last event however, the manuscript in question 

 aided by some others in the collection, has enabled me to perceive, is to 

 be understood of a popular movement, beginning atConjeveram against 

 a violent Chola prince, directed with effect by a hostile Pandiya-raja, 

 so xXvcxiUriyur was taken by force, and the king compelled to flee, being 

 arrested and killed by the mud shower; that is being overtaken, and 

 slain, by pursuers from the hostile army. It may suffice, for the pre- 

 sent, to point, in general terms, at such clues to the meaning of sym- 

 bolical writing ; but to make full use of the whole can only result from 

 digesting, and comparing all such indications together, which, for the 

 present, at least, is not my task. 



It may not be amiss to show, in passing, that the emblem, or symbol, 

 of a fire-shower is not entirely strange to poets of the west. Thus 

 iMilton, in his absurd pauranical description of war in heaven, puts in- 

 to the mouth of one of his heralds-angelic, this expression : 



no drizzling shower, 



But rattling storm of arrows, Ijarb'cl with fire. 



And Campbell, a poet of our own age, in his Lochiel's warning, and in 

 a passage, Hindu-like, poetically predictive of a past event, that is to 

 say, the battle of Culloden, puts these lines into the midst of an 

 expostulation from a local seer of the land, addressed to Lochiel — 



Why flames the far summit ? Why shoot to the blast 

 Those emhcrs, like stars from the firmament cast ! 

 'Tis the fire shower of ruin, all dreadfully driven 

 From his eyrie, that beacons the darkness of heaven. 

 «- * * * 



Heaven's fire is around thee, &c. 



Here the symbol is precisely the same in kind, as that which I sup- 

 pose to designate some battle against Saiivahana in which he was 

 worsted, and saved himself, with the remnants of his army, by retreat- 

 ing across a river. While, his country being left open, those of his 

 race who had taken refuge in stone-houses (or forts) were besieged and 

 taken ; possibly by starvation, emblematized by the mud-shower : 

 even as the capture of Uriijur is handed down in popular tradition un- 

 der the veil of that capital having been destroyed by a shower of mud. 

 That I formerly* took a more easy and credulous view of this latter 



=^ Orient. Hist. MSS. vol. ii. p, 91. 



