Here the picture itself is held to be a living emu, perhaps the source or centre from which all emus will originate, and the men, pretending to be emus, will cause numbers of actual emus to be produced.

[136] Before sowing the crops, a common practice is to sow small quantities of grain in baskets or pots in rich soil, so that it will sprout and grow up quickly, the idea being to ensure that the real crop will have a similarly successful growth.

These baskets are the well-known Gardens of Adonis fully described in _The Golden Bough_.

They are grown for nine days, and on the tenth day are taken in procession by the women and deposited in a river.

The women may be seen carrying the baskets of wheat to the river after the nine days' fasts of Chait and Kunwar (March and September) in many towns of the Central Provinces, as the Athenian women carried the Gardens of Adonis to the sea on the day that the expedition under Nicias set sail for Syracuse.