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Notes
157
result the sizzling lustre of the thunderbolt is temporarily lost (Fury).
145. Many a winged mountain sought refuge inside the oceanic waters. The thunderbolt pursued them even there and attacked, before their drowning action was complete; for instance, the parts at the bottom had not yet completely submerged and as a result the summit areas stood fully and far exposed in the sky.
146. The Poet perhaps refers in this Gāthā to the mountain Maināka, the son of Himavat and Menā. When Indra clipped the wings of the mountains, this is said to have been the only mountain who escaped.
147. As soon as the mountains dropped down in the ocean, the waters rushed in and flooded its caverns and valleys. One wondered at this sudden, simultaneous action of both, whether it was not the mountain but the ocean that entered and penetrated the mountain.
148. Three factors that cause earth-tremours, are :-first, the oceans agitated by the plunging mountains, the Quarter-elephants thrashing tLeir shoulders i.e. corners and the mountains wriggling in agony.
149. The big rivers on mountain slopes, tossed up and thus swelling in size completely covered up and hid from view the parent mountains. It looked, therefore, as if these mountains were moving on under the protection of the seas although they had not yet reached them.
150. The rocks, disintegrating from the mountain, drop down and cover up (gfodt3t) the smoke-filled area at its base, thus diminishing the density of the smoke and cutting off the flames rising slowly upwards.
151. Mountains falling down, throwing up heaps of dust, with their chunks (3T) of caves and valleys shaken off (Hafrost), became lighter than before.
154. The fires that would burn and blaze during the period intervening between the two Kalpas, old and new (niegtare), appear to be concentrated in the trap of the wings of mountains and they could only be extingusihed by the floods of oceanic waters
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