The Pondicherry eagle soars screaming
to the clouds, and the sorrow-stricken Gheber bends over the dear
corpse. Is it Heaven or Hell? _the right eye or the left?_ Alas, the
left!
He beats his breast, he falls upon his knees, and cries with frantic
gestures to the setting Sun; but the sullen god only draws a cloud
before his face, and leaves his poor worshipper to despair. Then my
Parsee neighbor arises and girds up his loins, muffles his haggard face
more closely than before, and with dishevelled beard, and chin sadly
sunk upon his breast, turning neither to the right hand nor to the left,
and meeting no man's gaze, wends silently homeward.
To-morrow he will take his wife and go to Bombay, to feed with
consecrated sandal-wood and oil the Sacred Flame the Magi brought from
Persia, when they were driven thence with all their people to Ormuz. But
the name of little Kirsajee will cross their lips no more; his memory is
a forbidden thing in the household; he is as if he never had been.
When Brahminee kite, and adjutant, and white-breasted crow have done
their ghoulish office on little Kirsajee, his bones shall lie bleaching
under the pitiless eye of his people's blazing god, till the rains
come, and fill the pit, and carry the waste of Gheber skeletons by
subterraneous sewers down to the sea.
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