The Song That Split the Rock

The messenger had come back with her news. The cattle were found. They stood inside a mountain at the edge of the world, shut behind stone, and the one who held them was named Vala.

It was dark in those days. The cows were not the only thing in the cave. The dawn was in there with them, and the sun, and the fire of morning. Whoever opened that rock would be opening the day.

Brihaspati went, and he did not go alone. Around him walked the Angirases, the first sages, sons of the Sky. They were his friends, and the hymn says their voices rang like the calling of swans.

One of the old fathers had found a song for this work. The poet calls it a song with seven heads, born of truth itself.

"We have the hymn," said the Angirases. "Will a hymn be enough?"

"It is what we have," said Brihaspati. "Sing."

They stood before the rock and sang. Inside, Vala heard them, and he laughed at them. The hymn calls him the reviler.

"Priests," said Vala. "Singers. Go home. No one ever sang a mountain open."

Brihaspati did not answer him. He sang louder. The singers sweated at their work like wild boars in the heat, and their faces shone with it. Then Brihaspati's voice changed. He thundered, as the Sky thunders, and he roared like a lion, and the song came out of him as lightning.

The stone broke.

The poet of the next hymn cannot say it only once. He tries one picture after another.

Brihaspati split the rock as rain splits the skin of the earth. He blew the darkness out of the air as a gale blows a lily off the river. He opened the mountain as an egg opens, and the cows came out like the young of a bird.

He had looked through the stone and seen the sweetness shut inside it, the way a man looks down at a fish in shallow water. Now he lifted it out, as a carver frees a bowl from a block of wood.

And he called the cows. They had a secret name, which they carried with them in the dark of the cave. Brihaspati found that name and spoke it. The hymn does not tell us what it was.

"Come out," he said to them in thunder, and they came.

They poured down from the mountain, red and bright and beautiful, and he scattered them over the world as a farmer shakes barley out of a winnowing basket. In one verse Indra is there too, tearing at Vala as if with a hand. But the hymn belongs to the priest.

Behind the cows came everything else. The dawn walked out, and the sun, and fire, and the lightning. Light stood in the sky where there had been none.

Vala was left with nothing. The hymn has no gloating over him. It says he mourned for his cows the way trees mourn for their leaves when the frost has taken them.

"No one did this before him," the singers said afterwards, "and no one will do it again."

Since that day, the hymn says, the sun and the moon have climbed the sky by turns. The Fathers hung the night with stars, like a dark horse decked with pearls. They put the light in the day and the darkness in the night. And Brihaspati went up to the highest houses of heaven, while people on earth praised him from every side.

The second book of the Rigveda calls him by his other name, Brahmanaspati, the lord of prayer. Its first verse to him hails him as the leader of the heavenly troops, the wisest of the wise.

In these hymns he is armed. He rides the chariot of the sacrifice, a fearful car that kills demons and finds the light. He carries a bow, and its string is truth. His arrows fly wherever he wishes.

Yet when he comes to the mountain he uses none of them.

The hymn says plainly what he did. He went inside the mountain where the wealth was stored. What was firm came loose. What was fixed gave way. He drove the cows out and split Vala with a prayer. Then he hid the darkness and let the light of heaven be seen. Another verse says the mountain parted of itself, to honour him.

There is something in this telling that the tenth book only hints at. Inside the rock was a well. Its mouth was stone, and it was full of honey. Brahmanaspati forced it open, and everyone who sees the light of day drank from it until they had enough. After the honey the waters came, flooding out of the gloom that had closed them in. For that part of the work, the poet says, Indra was his ally.

The cows he did not keep. He shared them out to heaven, the way a full river divides and runs down many channels.

A hymn in the fourth book adds where he came from. He was born out of a great brightness in the highest heaven. He has seven mouths and seven rays, and with a sound like thunder he blew the darkness away. Around him, as always, is his band of singers.

That same hymn then turns to kings. The king who keeps a priest at his side and honours him first, it says, will live safe in his own house, and his people will bow to him freely.