10. Their waving plumes, that late
    Fluttered above their brows, are motionless.

The Chamari, or chowrie, formed of the white bushy tail of the Yak, or Bos grunniens, was placed as an ornament between the ears of horses, like the plume of the war-horse of chivalry.  The velocity of the chariot caused it to lose its play, and appear fixed in one direction, like a flag borne rapidly against the wind.

11. The steeds of Indra and the Sun.

That is, the speed of the chariot resembled that of the Wind and the Sun.  Indra was the god of the firmament or atmosphere—­the Jupiter Tonans of Hindu mythology—­and presided over the forty-nine Winds.  He has a heaven of his own (Swarga), of which he is the lord, and, although inferior to the three great deities of the Hindu Triad (Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva), he is chief of the secondary gods.  The Hindus represent the Sun as seated in a chariot, drawn by seven green horses, having before him a lovely youth without legs, who acts as his charioteer, and who is Aruna, or the Dawn personified.

12. Puru’s race.

See Dushyanta’s pedigree detailed at page xxxviii of the
Introduction.

13. The great sage Kanwa.

The sage Kanwa was a descendant of Kasyapa, whom the Hindus consider to have been the father of the inferior gods, demons, man, fish, reptiles, and all animals, by his twelve wives.  Kanwa was the chief of a number of devotees, or hermits, who had constructed a hermitage on the banks of the river Malini, and surrounded it with gardens and groves, where penitential rites were performed, and animals were reared for sacrificial purposes, or for the amusement of the inmates.  There is nothing new in asceticism.  The craving after self-righteousness, and the desire of acquiring merit by self-mortification, is an innate principle of the human heart, and ineradicable even by Christianity.  Witness the monastic institutions of the Romish Church, of which Indian penance-groves were the type.  The Superior of a modern Convent is but the antitype of Kanwa; and what is Romanism but humanity developing itself in some of its most inveterate propensities?

14. He has gone to Soma tirtha.

A place of pilgrimage in the west of India, on the coast of Gujarat, near the temple of Somanath, or Somnat, made notorious by its gates, which were brought back from Ghazni by Lord Ellenborough’s orders in 1842, and are now to be seen in the arsenal at Agra.  These places of pilgrimage were generally fixed on the bank of some sacred stream, or in the vicinity of some holy spring.  The word tirtha is derived from a Sanskrit root, tri, ‘to cross,’ implying that the river has to be passed through, either for the washing away of sin, or extrication from some adverse destiny.  Thousands of devotees still flock to the most celebrated Tirthas on the Ganges, at Benares, Haridwar, etc.