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CHAPTER FOUR
elephant-jewel, like a gleaming lamp on a lamp-stand. Then, following the cakra, the Cakrin, with unstumbling gait like a lion, entered the cave Tamisrā fifty yojanas long. As he went, the King drew circles with the cowrie to destroy darkness, forty-nine of them, a yojana apart, alternating on the two walls of the cave, five hundred bows in length and width. The door of the cave remains open and the circles inside the cave remain as long as the Cakrabhrt lives. A light was produced in the cave by them resembling the row of suns and moons at the boundary of Mānuşottara.
In the middle he arrived at two rivers, named 'Unmagnā' and 'Nimagnā,' flowing from the east and west walls of the cave, going to the Sindhu.305 Even a stone thrown in Unmagnā floats, but even a gourd thrown in Nimagnā sinks. The King with his army crossed them as easily as a house-stream by a road paved at once by the carpenter-jewel. Gradually he arrived at the north door of Tamisrā. Its leaves opened of their own accord like a lotus-bud. Sagara, seated on an elephant's back, left the inside of the cave like the sun the ocean, with his retinue.
Conquest of northern half of Bharata (196–242)
As soon as they had seen Sagara causing humiliation to the sun by the light of his weapons on all sides, making the eyes of the Khecara-women wink especially by the dust from the ground, shaking the earth by the weight of his multitude of soldiers, producing deafness of heaven and earth by tumultuous noises, resembling some one who has appeared unexpectedly from a curtain, or has come down from the sky, or risen from Pātāla, with a dense array of endless soldiers, terrifying by the cakra in advance, like an ocean attacking, Kirātas, named Apātas, whose
305 191. See I, p. 235.
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