Setubandha

SR No.: 001384
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Krishnakant Handiqui
Publisher: Prakrit Text Society Ahmedabad
Publication Year: 1976
Total Pages: 812
Language: English, Sanskrit
Classification: Book_English & Literature
File Size: 14 MB

Page 226

SETUBANDHA
65
25. Dragged by the stiff trunks of the sea elephants, the lions14 roared and pierced their temples with their fangs, the cavity of their mouths filling up with blood from the former's heads mixed with pearls. 15
26. Infuriated by the commotion of the falling mountains, the elephants plunged into the waters, overturning the sea elephants, but were helpless with their hind legs savagely lacerated by the oncoming crocodiles.
27. Eddying at the mouth of the caves of the partly submerged mountains, the waves whirled round the trees, completely encircling them, and tossing the young coral growths, even as the sylvan creepers whirled, shaking their coral-like shoots.
28. The rumbling nether regions of the earth as well as the ocean were likewise entirely laid bare; the former by the mountains while they were uprooted, and the latter by those plunging into the waters.16
29. Turning round while they were swiftly pushed down, the mountains, which enveloped the clouds, and were surrounded by noisy swirling cascades, dropped into the sea, with the leaning creepers clinging to them.
30. The apes, who broke parts of the mountains as they hurled them down with their arms, and were bathed in the waters surging sky-high, came ashore one by one,17 shaking their massive hair.
31. The nether regions looked like the vault of the sky with its empty expanse, and the sky looked like the nether regions, time and again, when they were respectively abandoned and filled by the waters of the sea, thrown up by the impact of the mountains.18
14. Those on the sinking mountains. 15. i.e., the pearls supposed to be inside the head of an elephant.
16. i.e., the depths of the earth were revealed by the cavities left by the uprooted mountains, and the bottom of the sea by the divided waters as the mountains plunged into them.
17. i.e., to bring in more mountains.
18. The waters of the sea, stirred up by the falling mountains, are fancied as alternately soaring to the sky and coming down, in the course of which the bed of the sea, when empty of the waters, looked like the sky; and the sky, when flooded with water, looked like the sea floor,
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