39. After all, it can have no real entity, being like the picture of a city and not as the city itself. It is as false as the appearance of limpid water in the desert mirage, and that of the double moon in the sky. 40. As it is the practice of magicians, to show magic cities in the air, by sprinkling handfuls of dust before our eyes; so doth our erroneous consciousness represent the unreal world, as a reality unto us. 41. Unless our inborn ignorance (error) like an arbour of noxious plants, is burnt down to the very root by the flame of right reasoning, it will not cease to spread out its branches, and grow the rankest weeds of our imaginary pleasures and sorrows. CHAPTER CXX. LAMENTATION OF THE CHANDÁLA WOMAN. Argument. Lavana goes to the Vindhyan region, and sees his consort and relatives of the dreaming state. Vasishtha continued:—Now Ráma, attend to the wonderful power of the said Avidyá or error, in displaying the changeful phenomenals, like the changing forms of ornaments in the substance of the self-same gold. 2. The king Lavana, having at the end of his dream, perceived the falsehood of his vision, resolved on the following day to visit that great forest himself. 3. He said to himself: Ah! when shall I revisit the Vindhyan region, which is inscribed in my mind; and where I remember to have undergone a great many hardships in my forester’s life. 4. So saying, he took to his southward journey, accompanied by his ministers and attendants, as if he was going to make a conquest of that quarter, where he arrived at the foot of the mount in a few days. 5. There he wandered about the southern, and eastern and western shores of the sea (_i.e._ all round the Eastern and Western Ghats). He was as delighted with his curvilinear course, as the luminary of the day, in his diurnal journey from east to west. 6. He saw there in a certain region, a deep and doleful forest stretching wide along his path, and likening the dark and dismal realms of death (Yama or Pluto). 7. Roving in this region he beheld everything, he had seen before in his dream; he then inquired into the former circumstances, and wondered to learn their conformity with the occurrences of his vision. 8. He recognised there the Chandála hunters of his dream, and being curious to know the rest of the events, he continued in his peregrination about the forest. 9. He then beheld a hamlet at the skirt of the wilderness, foggy with smoke, and appearing as the spot where he bore the name of Pushta Pukkasa or fostered Chandála. 10. He beheld there the same huts and hovels, and the various kinds of human habitations, fields and plains, with the same men and women that dwelt their before. 11. He beheld the same landscapes and leafless branches of trees, shorn of their foliage by the all devouring famine; he saw the same hunters pursuing their chase, and the same helpless orphans lying thereabouts.