Twelve Days in the House of the Sun

The Ribhus had a father and a mother, and the father and mother were very old.

The hymns do not soften it. The two of them, one poet says, were lying "like posts that moulder", like the timbers of a house that have stood too long in the damp. They were worn out with the length of their days. They could no longer get up and walk.

Their three sons were Ribhu, Vaja and Vibhvan, mortal men, the cleverest craftsmen alive. They had built a chariot for the Ashvins and made a pair of bay horses for Indra. Now they turned their skill on the two old people at home.

The poets do not say how it was done. They say only what it took: "true prayers", "honest hearts" and "work that did not stop". And they say what came of it. The parents were made young again, "young for ever", says one hymn. Another adds the detail that matters most to anyone who has watched old people struggle across a room. They were made young, it says, "so that they moved as they wished".

"How the parents helped their children at the work!" a poet exclaims, and that is all we hear of the old couple afterward.

There was a cow as well. Nothing was left of her but the hide, and her calf was alone.

The brothers took the hide and brought a cow out of it. It was slow work. For a year, the hymn says, they tended her. For a year they built up her body. For a year more they kept her brightness in her. One verse seems to show the three of them on an ordinary evening in the middle of that labour. One brother is driving the lame cow down to the water. Another is trimming meat on the board. The third is carrying out the day's rubbish as the sun goes down.

In the end she stood whole, a cow of every colour, and they led the mother back to the side of her calf.

After that they travelled.

"Seeking your fortune, onward from far away," a poet says to them, and he calls them his own kinsmen, "you wandered on your road." They went round the sky, another says, as fast as the wind. Someone on the way raised his arm against them, and they cursed him. Someone called out to them, and they answered. And after long journeying they came to a house.

It was the house of Savitr, the Sun. The hymns give him an old name here, Agohya, which means the one who cannot be hidden. They came, a poet says, "proclaiming him".

He took them in as guests, and they lay down and slept.

They slept for twelve days. The Rigveda says what happened in the world while they did. Fields became fair and fertile. The rivers were led along their courses. Plants spread over the dry ground, and water filled the hollows. There was grass on the high places for people's herds and water in the valleys, and the poets say plainly that this was the brothers' doing, though they were asleep.

Then they woke.

"Agohya," they asked, "who has woken us?"

It was not the Sun who answered. A goat spoke up.

"It was the hound," said the goat.

That is the whole exchange. The hymn does not say whose hound it was, or why a goat should be standing in the house of the Sun, or what the dog had done. It adds one line: that day, when a full year had come round, they opened their eyes.

Savitr gave them a gift, the greatest he had. Because they had come to him, the hymn says, he gave them immortality. The three men who had made their own parents young would not grow old themselves. "You have sat down in heaven," says a later verse, "like falcons."

One poet, calling them to his own sacrifice long afterward, cannot resist a joke about it.

"You are not doing today what you did then," he tells them, "sleeping in the house of the one who cannot be hidden."