the husband died, not long
afterwards; but when I came to the village all the people knew it.

I must confess that this story is to me full of the deepest reality,
full of pathos. It seems to me to be the unconscious protestation of
humanity against the dogmas of religion and of the learned. However it
may be stated that love is but one of the bodily passions that dies with
it; however, even in some of the stories themselves, this explanation is
used to clear certain difficulties; however opposed eternal love may be
to one of the central doctrines of Buddhism, it seems to me that the
very essence of this story is the belief that love does not die with the
body, that it lives for ever and ever, through incarnation after
incarnation. Such a story is the very cry of the agony of humanity.

'Love is strong as death; many waters cannot quench love;' ay, and love
is stronger than death. Not any dogmas of any religion, not any
philosophy, nothing in this world, nothing in the next, shall prevent
him who loves from the certainty of rejoining some time the soul he
loves.

FOOTNOTE:

[2] The hereafter = the state to which we attain when we have
done with earthly things.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE FOREST OF TIME

'The gate of that forest was Death.'

There was a great forest. It was full of giant trees that grew so high
and were so thick overhead that the sunshine could not get down below.
And there were huge creepers that ran from tree to tree climbing there,
and throwing down great loops of rope. Under the trees, growing along
the ground, were smaller creepers full of thorns, that tore the wayfarer
and barred his progress. The forest, too, was full of snakes that crept
along the ground, so like in their gray and yellow skins to the earth
they travelled on that the traveller trod upon them unawares and was
bitten; and some so beautiful with coral red and golden bars that men
would pick them up as some dainty jewel till the snake turned upon them.

Here and there in this forest were little glades wherein there were
flowers. Beautiful flowers they were, with deep white cups and broad
glossy leaves hiding the purple fruit; and some had scarlet blossoms
that nodded to and fro like drowsy men, and there were long festoons of
white stars. The air there was heavy with their scent. But they were all
full of thorns, only you could not see the thorns till after you had
plucked the blossom.

This wood was pierced by roads