194 FOOTFALLS OF INDIAN HISTORY
or Krishna. There is, on the other hand, a serpent possessed of mysterious knowledge. And the Brahmans are represented as servants, not as governors, of kings. One of the next stories, in that wonderful Vana Parva in which Nala and Damayanti occurs, is the tale of Sita and Rama. And third and last of the series is Savitri. This sequence is undoubtedly true to the order of their evolution. Sita is the woman of sorrow, the Madonna of serenity. And Savitri, which is late Vedic, and referred to in the Ramayana—showing little or no trace of Saivite or Vaishnavite influence, save perhaps in the mention of Narada—is the fully Hinduised conception of the faithful wife. Her birth as the incarnation of the national prayer is an instance of the highest poetry. And the three heroines together—Damayanti, Sita, Savitri—constitute an idealisation of woman to which I doubt whether any other race can show a parallel.
That such tales as the Kirat-Arjuniya, again, belong to the Saivite recension, there can be no question. Equally certain is it, that some incidents, such as that of Draupadi's cry to Krishna for protection, and Bhishma's absorption in Krishna on his death-bed, must belong to the Gupta version. The rude vigour of the gambling scene, however, and the old warrior's death on the bed of arrows, as well as the marriage of five Pandavas to one queen, would appear to come straight out of the heroic age itself.
It would greatly aid us in our conception of
