The Bombay government notified the rao at once that the repetition of such inhuman atrocities would not again be overlooked.[52] This had no doubt some effect on His Highness, but nevertheless some time after this sacrifice the beautiful mother of the rao suddenly fell ill and died, and one of her female attendants voluntarily buried herself alive near her mistress, in order that she should be in readiness to attend her in a future state. It is very difficult for the Western mind to comprehend this utter self-abnegation on the part of Hindoos, and it can only be accounted for by their deep faith in the universal metamorphosis of life and the unreality of form. _Maya_[53] is illusion, the evanescent dream of life, which is only a "sleep between a sleep," the constant flow of form into form, of thought into thought, of life into other life. Even Brahm does not recognize himself in the second person: "I know when I am I, but who am I when I am thou?" It renders individuality illusive, intangible, and uncertain, so that to the Hindoos life and possession assume a meaning entirely different from that with which we are disposed to regard them. It is true that life loses half its charms, but death is robbed of its terrors. Life is valued only in so far as they are prepared to lay it aside, or rather to change it for some other form; for life and death are but the perpetual ebb and flow, the advance or retrograde, of soul toward "the Soul." Under this ardent faith, that everything above, below, beyond, God himself, is illusion, change, metamorphosis, is hidden the secret that helps them to endure suffering not only without a murmur, but with joy, and to count death itself a positive gain in the presence of the eternal, immutable, and solid fact of life to be found at last in the final reunion of the human with the divine life. This faith so potent, so absorbing, so far reaching, has stamped a character hereditary and almost ineffaceable on the Hindoo mind.