The Hungry Stones by Rabindranath Tagore
In a lonely marble palace above a shrinking river, a young tax collector discovers that solitude is never truly empty. Footsteps sound where no one walks. A Victorian ghost story but different!
Listen to "The Hungry Stones" by Rabindranath Tagore
In a lonely marble palace above a shrinking river, a young tax collector discovers that solitude is never truly empty. Footsteps sound where no one walks. Laughter rings out from an invisible bath of unseen maidens. Music trembles through dry, silent halls. Are these memories of a vanished court, or something far more hungry, feeding on the living through echoes of the dead? As night after night the house presses closer around him, the difference between dream, desire and possession begins to thin—and the stones themselves seem to listen.
A Victorian ghost story but different!
First published in English translation in The Hungry Stones, and Other Stories (Project Gutenberg eText #2518).
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2518/pg2518-images.html
Originally written in Bengali and collected in Rabindranath Tagore’s short fiction of the early 20th century.
Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) was a Bengali poet, novelist, dramatist and composer, and the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1913).
His work ranges from mystical lyric poetry to psychologically acute ghost stories that probe the borderlands between history, memory and the supernatural.
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