Savitri

     VIII

      'THE WORLD OF FALSEHOOD, THE MOTHER

         OF EVIL, AND THE SONS OF DARKNESS'

      The nether-most circle in Hell; the hidden heart of Night. Aswapati has gravitated to the bottom, and sees revealed there "the endless terrible Inane", the zero begetter of the worlds. All is dark, hideous, false, and vile; perverse Thought, priestess-sorceress,

      In darkling aisles with evil eyes for lamps

      And fatal voices chanting from the apse,

      In strange infernal dim basilicas

      Intoning the magic of the unholy Word,

      The ominous profound Initiate

      Performed the ritual of her Mysteries.⁸⁸

 Like the figure of Satan chewing a human skull in Inferno's ultimate circle, here is a horrid shape too, squatting on Death, and swallowing "all things born". "No worse, there is none".⁸⁹

      When in the beginning inconscient Matter was about to be kindled with life and the journey of evolution was about to commence, a shadow fell across, being cast by "the grey python Night". Life's move had thus been countered and criss-crossed ere ever it even got into its stride. This shadow

      .. .falsified the primal cosmic Will

      And bound to struggle and dread vicissitudes

      The long slow process of the patient Power.⁹⁰

 Working against the Mother of Light, this Mother of Evil "with a grey distorted silhouette in the Night" strove to thwart the steady

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climb of the soul and pull it to the depths if she could. This primal struggle goes on, in changing climes with changing vicissitudes; and still the Mother of Darkness "prowls around each light" and tries to slay in the cradle "the divine Child". She is verily "a cowled fifth-columnist" who converts the climber of the worlds to defeatism and death!

      Like the Mother, so her sons: "terrible agencies", they are "offspring of the gulfs" and "haters of light" who "load the dice of Doom with wizard lies". They have usurped all holy places, all cells of life, all nerves of joy:

      Armoured, protected by their lethal masks,

      As in a studio of creative Death

      The giant sons of Darkness sit and plan

      The drama of the earth, their tragic stage.⁹¹

This is the Hell Aswapati traverses on his way to Heaven. Hoping to gauge the whole malignant forces of Hell, its presiding Mother Evil, her sons, Aswapati takes a close view of them all, "challenging the darkness with his luminous soul". What deserts of joylessness, what infinitudes of pain! No peace, no ease; only pain and tears. The soul, caught in the spider's web of ignorance, worships the pitiless Power. Science and technology fashion iniquitous edifices of woe and engines of summary massacre and liquidation. And blasphemy of blasphemies! the murderers brazenly take the name of God and "make him an accomplice of their crimes".

      In Hell's deepest hole, while numbed and awed he stands, Aswapati still seeks the cause-—the clue—"the root and cause of Hell" and the clue to Night's "dreadful heart". Nay more, he is ready to drink the poison to know its taste. By a feat of forged identity he sees through its secret essence, and infers that behind it, behind even quintessential Hell, is a cosmic Will:

Torn were the formats of the primal Night

And shattered the stereotypes of Ignorance.⁹²

When this sudden blaze of realisation flashes before him, Aswapati feels a whole load removed; like a house of cards crashes down Hell's "huge abrupt facade"; Night opens, and vanishes "like a gulf of dream". Verily, verily, the reign of Night would be over soon; what Aswapati has seen in a "vision splendid" must come to be. There pours "a wide intimate and blissful Dawn", and Aswapati shakes off the grim memories of the nightmare death-in-life he has left behind.

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