Nature thus provides the accompaniment to the dance of the peacocks. The poets were sensitive in their perception of smells and sounds. The hillside is said to be fragrant with the odour of sandalwood or the kaantal, or as fragrant as a house where the wedding feast is celebrated. The ripe fruits of the jack-tree too are smelt far and wide on the hilly ranges. Among the sounds which fill the hillsides are the trumpeting of elephants at fight with the tiger or of elephants bathing in the swift waters of the river; the shrill cry of monkeys whose young ones have perished because they did not clutch more firmly to their mothers; the shouts of children gathering veenkai flowers, or the singing of the women of the hills pounding panicum or soothing with song their men who have been wounded by the tigers.9 Evening descends with a slow and sad note and the night comes when the hero under its cover stealthily hastens to meet his beloved. The mule path along the hill lies "like a rope on the back of an elephant". It is so steep that it seems like a road of the plain that has been set up almost perpendicularly. Lightning which flashes as if "tearing the veil of night" sometimes lends merciful light. But the hero believes that the thought of his heroine's radiant beauty is sufficient to light him along the steep path.10 It may be that he comes in a downpour of rain or in the shivering cold. He must reckon with so many odds, especially with the wild animals and the mountain serpents. He may himself be taken for a wild elephant or for a god or spirit by those who keep awake, guardians of the crops. The Neṭunalvaaṭai, the "Long Dreary Winter", is a poem of 317 lines, and portrays both the cold season and midnight, the "seasons" prescribed for the poetry of this kind. P. Sundaram Pillai says of this poem "I would request the reader to study it in the original, and to say whether the author does not deserve to be placed among the very best of the poets of any ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 9 For a chained listing of mountain sounds, see Malaipatukataam, 291 ff. 10Nar; 192. |