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The Rakshases do not travel in the way mortals do. See a Dinájpur story told by Mr. G. H. Damant in the Indian Antiquary (February 1875, vol. IV. p. 54), where the hero, who has married both the Rakshas-king’s daughter and his niece, asks his father-in-law’s leave to return home with his Rakshas-wives. The King consents (p. 58), but says, “We Rakshases do not travel in pálkís (palanquins), but in the air.” Accordingly the prince, his two Rakshas wives and his mortal wife, all travel towards his father’s country through the air “along the sky.” One kind of jinn travel in the same way (Lane’s Arabian Nights, vol. I., “Notes to Introduction,” p. 29). So do the drakes and kobolds in Northern Germany. The drake is as big as a cauldron, “a person may sit in him,” and travel with him to any spot he pleases. Both drakes and kobolds look like fiery stripes. The kobolds appear sometimes as a blue, sometimes as a red, stripe passing through the air (Thorpe’s Northern Mythology, vol. III. pp. 155, 156).

3. Dunkní says, “All Rakshases keep their souls in birds.” Those that do so resemble in this respect some of the Indian demons, and the giants, trolls, and such like noxious actors in the Norse, Scotch, and other popular tales.

Tylor (Primitive Culture, vol. II. pp. 152, 153) mentions the Tatar story of the giant who could not be killed till the twelve-headed snake in which he kept his soul was destroyed. This tale, he says, “illustrates the idea of soul-embodiment,” and “very likely” indicates the sense of the myths where giants, etc., keep their souls out of their own bodies. The civilized notion of soul-embodiment, he adds (quoting from “Grose’s bantering description of the art of laying ghosts in the last century,”) is that of conjuring ghosts into different objects: “one of the many good instances of articles of savage belief serving as jests among civilized men.” Possibly these giants, trolls, rakshases, demons, once belonged to that class of spirits who could, in popular belief, enter at pleasure into stocks and stones and other objects of idolatrous veneration.

But all Rakshases do not keep their souls in birds. Some have their souls in bees (see a Dinájpur tale published by Mr. G. H. Damant in the Indian Antiquary for April 6, 1872, p. 115): and in another Dinájpur story printed by Mr. Damant in the Indian Antiquary for June 7, 1872, p. 120, a whole tribe of Rakshases dwelling in Ceylon kept theirs in one and the same lemon.

4. In the first quoted of these stories collected by Mr. Damant, that where the Rakshases keep their life in bees, the hero is a prince who starts in search of the wonderful tree mentioned in paragraph 8 of the note to Phúlmati Rání (p. 244). In his wanderings he finds himself in the Rakshas country. There he meets with the woman who when cut up turns into the tree he seeks. When he first sees her she lies dead on a bed with a golden wand on one side of her, and a silver wand on the other. He accidentally touches her with the golden wand and she wakes. She tells him the Rakshases, every morning when they go out in search of food, make her dead by touching her with the silver wand, and wake her with the golden wand when they return at night. Mr. Damant has another story in the Indian Antiquary (July 5, 1872, vol. I. p. 219), from Dinájpur, in which there is a prince Dalim who dies and is laid in a tomb above ground, not buried. Daily the Apsarases, the dancing-girls in the court of Indra, wake him from death by touching his face with a golden wand, and make him dead again by touching him with a silver wand. These wands they always leave lying beside him. His wife comes one day to mourn over him and accidentally discovers the secret of bringing him to life. He is, finally, restored to her by the Apsarases.