le the
dispute, knowing that Ananga was afraid of me, as well might he be[10].
And so, after all were silent, I spoke. And I said, very slowly: O
bender of that bow, whose string is a row of bees, thou art surely
altogether inexcusable, first for thy singing, and secondly for thy loss
of temper, and finally for thy curse. For who could be so harsh as to
strike Saraswati, even with a _shirisha_ petal? But now, the mischief is
utterly beyond repair, and once spoken, the curse cannot be
recalled.[11] And whether she will or no, she must now go to earth, and
leave us for a time, till thy curse has spent its force. And yet, for
all that, it is not right that the doer of injustice such as thine
should escape scot-free. Therefore now I will give thee curse for
curse, and thou shalt eat the fruit of thy own tree. Fall then,
immediately into the body of a man, and suffer that mortality which thou
hast laid upon Saraswati. And thy fortune shall be interwoven with her
own, so that thy curse shall be determined by the quality and period of
hers.

[Footnote 10 Because Maheshwara had burned him, on a previous occasion,
with fire from his eye.]

[Footnote 11: In these and similar ideas, the Hindoos resembled the
ancient Romans: the letter was decisive and irremediable, _uti lingua
nuncupassit, ita jus esto_.]

And then, as he listened to my doom, Kamadewa turned paler than the
ashes to which I had reduced him long ago, finding himself punished for
his insolence by me, for the second time. But the gods all exclaimed,
with approbation and delight: Victory to Maheshwara! who has once more
bitten the biter, and condemned him, by a sentence even more merciful
than he deserved. For what could be more intolerable than even Heaven
without Saraswati, unless it be the curse that is about to produce such
a melancholy condition of affairs?

And then, those two deities disappeared suddenly from Heaven, and
descended to be born as man and woman on the earth.[12]

[Footnote 12: This exordium, which has points of resemblance with that
of the insufferable Bana's _Harsha-charita_, is only the Hindoo method
of declaring that the two characters presently to be brought upon the
scene are mortal incarnations of love and charm: as we call a man, an
Adonis, or a woman, a Venus.]

III

Now just at that very moment, it happened, that there were living in the
desert two Rajpoots of the race of the Moon; and the name of the one was
Bimba, and that of