Patel with a cup of hot coffee in his hand shouting in broken English,
"Good-night, God Save the King!"




XIV.

A KONKAN LEGEND.


Legend and tradition have rendered many a spot in India sacrosanct for all
time; and to no tract perhaps have such traditions clung with greater
tenacity than to the western littoral which in the dawn of the centuries
watched the traders of the ancient world sail down from the horizon to
barter in its ports. As with Gujarat and the Coast of Kathiawar, so with
the Konkan it is a broken tale of strange arrivals, strange building,
strange trafficking in human and inanimate freight that greets the student
of ancient history and bewilders the ethnologist. The Konkan, in which in
earliest days "the beasts with man divided empire claimed," and which
itself is dowered with a legendary origin not wholly dissimilar in kind
from the story of Rameses III and his naval conquest, offers a fair sample
of these semi-historical myths in the tale of the arrival of the Chitpavans
at Chiplun in Ratnagiri. For, so runs the tale, on a day long buried in the
abyss of Time it chanced that a terrific storm gathered over the western
waters; and as night drew on the sky, black with serried ranks of clouds,
burst into sharp jets of fire, the rain poured forth in torrents
unquenchable, and the shriek of a mighty whirlwind, mingling with the deep
echoes of Indra's thunder, drowned even the roar of the storm-lashed seas.
Among the ships abroad on that night was one of strange device with high