reat river actually eating off the soft bank in huge
slices, five or six feet in breadth at a time. Something higher up, it
might have been the grounding of a floating tree, had turned the current
towards the bank, and at five-minute intervals, it seemed, these huge
slices were falling in. Not fifty yards back from the bank stood a
cottage, whose garden was already part gone; a banana tree standing upon
one of these slices fell in and was swept down before our eyes. Within
an hour the cottage itself would meet the same fate, and the people were
already rushing in and out. Or pass to another aspect of nature. For a
season every year the unveiled Indian sun in a sky of polished steel
glares with cruel pitiless eye. The light is fierce. Then, arbitrarily,
as it seems, the rains may be withheld, and the hard-baked, heat-cracked
soil never softens to admit the ploughshare, and hundreds of thousands
of the cultivators and field hands are overtaken by famine. At one time
during the famine of 1899-1900, it will be remembered that six million
people were receiving relief. Or, equally arbitrarily, betokening some
unknown displeasure of the gods, plague may take hold of a district and
literally take its tithe of the population. At any moment, life is
liable to be terminated with appalling suddenness by cholera or the bite
of a venomous serpent.

With French imagination and grace, in his _Introduction to General
History_, Michelet describes the tyranny of nature--"Natura maligna"--in
India. "Man is utterly overpowered by nature there--like a feeble child
upon a mother's breast, alternately spoiled and beaten, and intoxicated
rather than nourished by a milk too strong and stimulating for it."[106]
One cannot help contrasting the supplicating Indian villagers--of whom a
University matriculation candidate told in his essay, how, when the
rains were withheld, they carried out the village goddess from her
temple and bathed the idol in the temple tank--with the English
fisher-woman of whom Tennyson tells us, who shook her fist at the cruel
sea that had robbed her of two sons. As she looked at it one day with
its lines of white breakers, she shook her fist at it and told it her
mind--"How I hates you, with your cruel teeth."

Can this Indian aspect of nature, one wonders, be the true explanation
of the fierceness of her goddesses as contrasted with her gods, and the
offering of bloody sacrifices to goddesses only? Mother Nature is
malign