The Antiquities of Orissa v2.c17.s1.320

v2.c17.s1.320

‘When this huge machine has made its jolting round, these helpless creatures, guiltless of every reproach but that of being the offspring of brutal mothers, having been wheeled round and round for a period of seven hours, are taken down from this fatal machine, already dead or dying. Then ensues a scene impossible to describe—the mothers struggling with each other, screaming and trampling each other down. It not being possible, on account of the number, for each mother to recognise [ 135 ] her own child among the survivors, one disputes with the other the identity of her infant amid a storm of imprecations and the lamentations of the more afflicted, joined to the deafening derision of the spectators and the hooting of the mob. Numbers are thus changed in the confusion. The less fortunate mothers, as they receive the dead bodies of their infants, often already cold, rend the air with their fictitious lamentations, but consoled with the certainty that Maria, enamoured of her child, has taken it with her to Paradise’⁷⁹.