After that, the King said, "What are the things thou wantest for
it?" he asked.
When he asked, he said, "Should I receive a tusk elephant and the
sword, it will do." Afterwards he gave the tusk elephant and sword.
Having waited until the time when he gives them, he went for the
battle. Having gone, and having cut down that army, he came to the
royal palace. Having come, he made obeisance [125] to the King [and
related an account of his victory]. After that, the King having given
half the kingdom to the giant, he remained [there].
Well then, beginning from that day, he remained exercising the
sovereignty [over the half of the kingdom] until the time when he dies.
North-western Province.
I was informed that in the allusion to the Sky Buffalo which gored
the earth, reference is made to the country in which the sky pierces
(that is, touches) the earth (see vol. i, p. 284). The Sky Buffalo
is not mentioned elsewhere in these stories.
In the Katha Sarit Sagara (Tawney), vol. i, p. 6, the God Siva is
represented as saying, "Moreover, this world resembling a skull,
rests in my hand; for the two skull-shaped halves of the [Mundane]
egg before mentioned are called heaven and earth." It is evident that
here also the two halves of the egg, that is, the sky and the earth,
are supposed to be in contact, the sky resting on the earth. In the
Rigveda they are termed two bowls; the sun travelled in the hollow
space between them (i, clx, 2), and the upper one was supported
by pillars.
The feats of the youthful giant in chasing and seizing wild animals
are borrowed from the Mahavansa, chapter xxiii (p. 161 of Professor
Geiger's translation), where it is stated of Khañjadeva, one of the
ten leading chiefs under King Duttha-Gamani in the second century B.C.,
that "when he went a-hunting with the village folk he chased at these
times great buffaloes, as many as rose up, and grasped them by the
leg with his hand, and when he had whirled them round his head the
young man dashed them to the ground, breaking their bones."