Note 22 — CHAPTER 1

The wild fable which envelops or adorns the cradle of every illustrious family is not easily disentangled. The bards weave the web with skill, and it clings like ivy round each modern branch, obscuring the aged stem, in the time-worn branches of which monsters and demi-gods are perched, whose claims of affinity are held in high estimation by these ‘children of the sun,’ who would deem it criminal to doubt that the loin-robe (dhoti) of their great founder, Bapa Rawal, was less than five hundred cubits in circumference, that his two-edged sword (khanda), the gift of the Hindu Proserpine, weighed an ounce less than sixty-four pounds, or that he was an inch under twenty feet in height.