among the ruins of old cities, buried in the depth of
the forest, are nothing less than the bodies of the kings of the
earth turned into stone for their temerity in contending with these
demigods in battle. Ponds among the rocks of the Nerbudda, where all
the great fairs are held, still bear the names of the five brothers,
who are the heroes of this great poem;[12] and they are every year
visited by hundreds of thousands who implicitly believe that their
waters once received upon their bosoms the wearied limbs of those
whose names they bear. What is life without the charms of fiction,
and without the leisure and recreations which these sacred imaginings
tend to give to the great mass of those who have nothing but the
labour of their hands to depend upon for their subsistence! Let no
such fictions be believed, and the holidays and pastimes of the lower
orders in every country would soon cease, for they have almost
everywhere owed their origin and support to some religious dream
which has commanded the faith and influenced the conduct of great
masses of mankind, and prevented one man from presuming to work on
the day that another wished to rest from his labours. The people were
of opinion, they told me, that the Ganges, as a sacred stream, could
last only sixty years more, when the Nerbudda would take its place.
The waters of the Nerbudda are, they say already so much more sacred
than those of the Ganges that to see them is sufficient to cleanse
men from their sins, whereas the Ganges must be touched before it can
have that effect.[13]

At the temple built on the top of a conical hill at Bheraghat,
overlooking the river, is a statue of a bull carrying Siva, the god
of destruction, and his wife Parvati seated behind him; they have
both snakes in their hands, and Siva has a large one round his loins
as a waistband. There are several demons in human shape lying
prostrate under the belly of the bull, and the whole are well cut out
of one large slab of hard basalt from a dyke in the marble rock
beneath. They call the whole group 'Gauri Sankar', and I found in the
fair, exposed for sale, a brass model of a similar one from Jeypore
(Jaipur), but not so well shaped and proportioned. On noticing this
we were told that 'such difference was to be expected, since the
brass must have been made by man, whereas the "Gauri Sankar" of the
temple above was a real Pakhan, or a conversion of living beings into
stone by the gods;[14] they we