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SETUBANDHA
67
40. All at once, the mountains remembered their terror of the thunder-bolt,22 and the earth the thrusts of the hooves of the Primeval Boar,23 and the ocean the commotion of the churning that had been forgotten by them.24
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41. Imperilled through Ravana's fault, the ocean that flooded25 the sandal groves of the Malaya mountain, roared, battered by the mountain peaks, as if it remembered the pain caused when it was churned.
42. As the mountains disappeared in the waters, crumbling as they crashed, a cloud of spray, tinged with red by the broken corals, rose aloft, even like the swirling dust from the minerals.
43. Heaving as they were stirred up by the mountain peaks, the broad waters of the sea, tinged with a different hue by the sap of the broken sandal trees and by the broken plants, roared as they rolled amidst the mountains, with the waves coloured by the dissolving minerals.
44. Severed from the mountains, and tumbling into the sea, the trees whose leafy branches reached the depths of the surging waters, emerged, being light, and rose to the sky, even without being drawn above.26
45. Incensed by rivalry with one another, the hosts of apes cleft the waters of the sea asunder with the mountains, biting the lower lip with their protruding white teeth, and striking terror into the nymphs as they scattered the clouds stretched out in the sky.
46. Spanned with a rainbow rising across the cascades on the summit, a section of the Mahendra mountain, whose rocky
22. The wings of the mountains were once clipped by Indra with his thunder-bolt. Cf. 5.37; 7.13.
23. During the Boar incarnation of Visnu while lifting the earth submerged in the ocean.
24. i.e., the uprooting and dropping of the mountains on the sea reawakened the memories of similar upheavals in days of old.
25. Nourished, acc. to Ramadasa's reading.
26. i.e., rose sky-high on the crest of the waves.
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