Note 24 — Chapter LXXIII

There he took food with Padmishṭhá and Mukharaka, and at night he went alone, sword in hand, to the cemetery. It was full of many ghosts, empty of men, inauspicious, full of roaring jackals, covered with impenetrable darkness, but shewed in some places a faint gleam where the funeral pyres were.24 The hero Śrídarśana wandered about in that place of horrors and saw the enchanter in the middle of it. His whole body was smeared with ashes, he had a Bráhmanical thread of hair, he wore a turban made of the clothes of the dead, and he was clad in a black garment. Śrídarśana approached him, and made himself known to him, and then girding up his loins, he said, “Tell me, what shall I do for you?” The enchanter answered in high spirits, “Half a cos only to the west of this place there is an Aśoka tree, the leaves of which are burnt with the hot flame of funeral pyres. At the foot of it there is a corpse, go and bring it here unharmed.”