20. I dug them out plentifully from the woodland grounds and eat them with a zest, as a fortunate man has in tasting his dainty dishes of well cooked meat. 21. I took my food apart and untouched by any body, for fear of being polluted by the touch of a vile and base born family; and because the pungency of my unsavoury diet, made my mouth wry at every morsel. 22. While I was famishing in this manner, I saw others had their venison and sheep’s flesh bought from other places for their food; and who pampered their bodies also with the flesh they cut out from other living animals and devoured raw with great zest. 23. They bought animal flesh sold in iron pots and stuck in spits, for undergoing migrations into as many thousand bodies as they have killed and fed upon. (This is the Pythagorean doctrine of metempsychosis of the soul, as described in Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World). 24. I often repaired to the garden grounds of the Chandálas, with my spade and basket in the cool of the evening, in order to collect the raw flesh, which had been cast about in the dirt, for making any food of them. 25. But the time seemed to turn favourable to me, when I was about to be cast into hell, by leading me to take refuge of the mountain caverns, and seek my supportance there by the roots and plants growing therein. 26. In this state, I was met by my good chance, on some Chandálas appearing in person before me, and driving away the village dogs with their clubs from before them (to the woods). 27. They gave my wife and children some bad rice as the villagers used to take, and we passed the night under the shade of a palm tree, whose withered leaves were rattling with the rain drops, that fell in showers upon them. 28. We passed the night in company with the sylvan apes, with our teeth clattering with cold; and the hairs of our bodies standing on their ends, like a thousand thorns through coldness. 29. The rain drops decorated our bodies with granules of vivid pearls, and our bellies were as lean and lank like an empty cloud through hunger and for want of food. 30. Then there rose a quarrel in this diresome forest, between me and my wife; and we kept answering one another, with our clattering teeth and ruddy eyes by effect of the cold. 31. My foul and dirty person resembled that of a dark black demon, and we roved about the borders of rivers and brooks, to fish with a rod and hook in my hand. 32. I wandered also with a trap in my hand, like Yama with his noose at the desolation of the earth; and caught and killed and drank the heart blood of the deer in my hunger and thirst. 33. I sucked the warm heart blood, as the milk of my mother’s breast, at the time of famishing; and being besmeared in blood, I stood as a blood sucking demon in the cemetery. 34. The Vetálas of the woods fled before me, as they do from the furies of the forests; and I set my snares and nets in the woods, for catching the deer and birds of the air.