This was the case with the many-headed Ravenan. Whether the strain of thinking with seven heads at a time destroyed his judgment, or whether he did not think at all but allowed his conceit to get the better of him, we do not know, at any rate the avalanche was at hand in the form of his enemy, Rama. The moment that God heard of Ravenan’s intentions, he cried aloud with Jovelike fury: “By Brahma, it shall not be!” and there and then bore down upon Ravenan with his army. A great battle ensued, but alas! to no purpose as far as Rama was concerned. He was not only routed by the Cingalese soldiers, but his consort, Sides, was carried away to the enemy’s camp. Other encounters followed the first, but still Ravenan’s army conquered. Probably they might have gained the final victory had not Rama assumed a Siegfried characteristic. He appealed to Brahma and obtained from him a magic spear, with which he ended Ravenan’s despotic reign. Of course in these so-called enlightened days, the Oriental tradition of the ravanastron (Ravenan’s invention was named after him) is laughed down. But after all one must own the truth of the saying: “There is no smoke without a fire,” and also allow that even the most poetic fancy must have some species of realism to give it birth. Possibly this instrument attributed to Ravenan was but the “rushy Zampogna” alluded to by Sir Roger North[3] as employed “to stir up the vulgar to dance.” Call it by what name you will, specify the fingers that made it to be dusky or white, there is no doubt that our grave and learned historians of the subject give evidence of the existence of a stringed instrument played with a bow in India at a very early date. The first duty of all historians--as we know--is to be truthful, therefore, when they reiterate the statement that the fiddle-bow is mentioned in Sanskrit characters which cannot be less than two thousand years old, we must believe implicitly. And then again, we are told that the description of India’s musical instruments found in Sanskrit treatises, reveal that the forms of the instruments there mentioned, have scarcely altered during the last thousand years. Here is another point in favour of the ravanastron’s Indian origin. Finally, Monsieur Pierre Sonnerait--the oft quoted--in his “Voyages aux Indes oriental” (Paris, 1782), records that this identical instrument was then in use among a religious sect called the Ponderons. [Illustration: Fig. 1.--RAVANASTRON]