40. The devouring fire gnawed down the bones with crackling noise, and filled the atmosphere with the filthy stink and stench. It gorged up all that was soft or hard, as the elephant devours the reeds with the moisture contained in their cellular vessels. CHAPTER XLV. GÁDHI REBORN AS A CHANDÁLA, AND MADE KING OVER THE KIR TRIBE. Argument. Gádhi reborn in a Chandalí, His Life and Election as King of Kir. Vasishtha said:—Then Gádhi, standing as he was amidst the water with his sorrowful heart, saw many other occurrences in the clearness of his mind. 2. He saw a village in the vicinity of Bhuta mandala (Butan) full of its inhabitants, and that he was reborn there in the womb of a Chandála woman, in which he remained with great pain. 3. Confined in the cavity of the womb, he felt his body pressed by the pressure of the intestines, while his senses were sorely annoyed by being constrained to abide the stink of the ordure and filth in the intestinal parts of Chandála woman. 4. After the foetus was matured, he was born in proper time, with its black complexion like a dark cloud of the rainy season, and soiled with filth all over its body. 5. It grew up to childhood and then to boyhood in the Chandála’s house, and moved about here and there like a pebble thrown up by the current of the Yamuna stream. 6. It reached its twelfth and then its sixteenth year of age, and had its body fully developed like a rainy cloud increasing in its size. 7. Then accompanied by a pack of hounds, the lad roved from one forest to another, and continued to hunt after and kill the wild deer, in his occupation of a huntsman. 8. He was then joined with a Candáli spouse, as black as the leaf of a tamála plant, and who with her budding breasts, and palms, resembled the newly sprouting stalks and leaves of trees. 9. She was black and swarthy in her whole complexion, except her two rows of milk white teeth, and had all her limbs as brisk and supple as the tender creepers of the forest. 10. They sported together in the skirts of the forest in their youthful dalliance, and wandered about the flowery meadows, like a couple of nigrescent bees. 11. When tired they took their seats on beds of leaves and creepers, which were spread over the plains, like those strewn over the skirts of the Vindhya hills, by the driving winds. 12. They reposed in woodland groves, and slept in the caverns of mountains; they sat on heaps of leaflets, and had their abode under shrubberies and bowers of creeping plants. 13. They decorated their heads with _kinkirata_ flowers, and their necks and bosoms with blossoms of various kinds. They hung _ketaka_ flowers in their earholes, and made necklaces of _amra_ florets. 14. They rolled on beds of flowers and roved about the foot of the mountain; they knew all the arbours where to resort, and were skilled in archery and hunting the deer.