THE RENEWED BATTLE OF THE GODS AND DEMONS.
Argument. The rising Desires of the Demons, causing them to resume the
Battle.
Vasishtha continued:—Saying so, the god Brahmá vanished from the sight
of the gods, as the wave of the sea retires and mixes with its waters,
after having dashed and crashed against the shore.
2. The gods, having heard the words of Brahmá, returned to their
respective abodes; as the breeze bearing the fragrance of the lotus,
wafts it to the forests on all sides.
3. They halted in their delightsome houses for some days, as the bees
rest themselves in the cells of flowers after their wanderings.
4. Having refreshed and invigorated themselves in the course of time,
they gave the alarm of their rising, with the beating of their drums,
sounding as the peal of the last day.
5. Immediately the demons rose from the infernal regions, and met the
gods in the midway air, and commenced their dreadful onset upon them.
6. Then there was a clashing of the armours, and clattering of swords
and arrows, the flashing of lances and spears, and the crackling of
mallets and various other weapons, as battle axes and discuses,
thunderbolts, and hurling of rockstones and huge trees and the like.
7. There was also many magical instruments, which ran on all sides like
the torrents of rivers; while rocks and hills, high mountains and huge
trees, were flung and hurled from both sides, filling the earth with
confused noise and rumbling.
8. The encampment of the gods, was beset by a magical flood of the
demons, resembling the stream of the Ganges; while showers of firearms
and missiles of all sorts, were hurled upon their heads from above.
9. Many big bodies of the gods and demons, rose and fought and fell by
turns, as the elemental bodies of earth and the other elements, rise to
and disappear from view by the act of Máyá or illusion. (The enormous
bodies of the warriors, fought with one another in the same manner, as
the jarring elements clash against each other).
10. Big bombs broke the heads of mountains, and the earth became a vast
sheet of blood like a sanguine sea. The heaps of dead bodies on both
sides, rose as forests to the face of heaven.
11. Living lions with iron bodies, and rows of saw-like teeth and nails
white as Kása flowers, were let loose by the magic art to roam rampant
in the airy field; devouring the stones, flung by the gods and demons,
and bursting out into shells and shots and many other weapons.
12. The serpentine weapons flew with their mountainous shapes in the
ocean of the sky; having their eyes flashing with their venomous heat,
and burning with the fire of the twelve suns on the last day of
desolation.
13. The hydraulic engine sent forth floods of weapons, whirling as
whirlpools, and sounding loud as the rattling thunder; and sweeping the
hills and rocks in their current.
14. The stone missiles which were thrown by the Garuda engine, to the
aerial battle-field of the gods, emitted at intervals water and fire,
and sometimes shone as the sun, and at others became altogether dark.
15. The Garuda weapons flew and roared in the sky, and the fire-arms
spread a conflict of burning hills above; the burning towers of the
gods fell upon the earth and, the world became as unendurable as in its
conflagration on the last day.
16. The demons jumped up to the sky from the surface of the earth, as
birds fly to heaven from mountain tops. The gods fell violently on the
earth, as the fragment of a rock falls precipitately on the ground.
17. The long weapons sticking to the bodies of the deities and demons,
were as bushes with their burning pain; thus their big statures
appeared as rocks decorated with arbors growing upon them.
18. The gods and demons, roving with their mountainous bodies, all
streaming in blood, appeared as the evening clouds of heaven, pouring
the purple floods of celestial Gangá (Mandákiní).
19. Showers of weapons were falling as water-falls or showers of rain,
and the tide of thunders flowed as fast as the fall of meteoric fire in
promiscuous confusion.
20. Those skilled in the arts, were pouring floods of purple fluids,
mixed with the red clay of mountains, from the pipes of elephants’
trunks; as they sputter the festive water of Phagua, mixed with the red
powder (phága) through the syringe (phichkári). (The pouring, of holy
(hori) water is a sacrament of Krishnites, as well as of Christians;
but this baptismal function of Krishna among his comrades, is now
become a mockery and foolery even among the coreligionist-vaishnavites.
The text expresses it as—_punyavarsana_ or purifying sprinkling).
21. The _Devas_ and Asuras, though worried by one another, did not yet
give up their hope of victory, but hurled the weapons from their hands
for mutual annoyance; and riding on the broad backs of big elephants,
they wandered in the air, spreading their effulgence all around.
22. They then wandered in the sky like flights of inauspicious locusts,
with their bodies pierced in the heads, hands, arms, and breasts, and
filled the vault of the world like the flying clouds, obscuring the sun
and the sides of heaven, and the surface and heights of the earth.
23. The earth was battered and rent to pieces by the fragments of
broken weapons, falling from the waists of the combatants, who assailed
one another with their loud shouts.
24. The sky re-echoed to the thunder-claps of the mutual strokes of the
weapons, the clattering of the stones and trees, and the blows of the
warriors on one another, as it was the bustle of the day of universal
destruction.
25. The disordered world seemed to approach its untimely end, by the
blowing of the furious winds mixed with fire and water (as in the
chaotic state); and the many suns of the deities and demons, shining
above and below (as it is predicted of the dreaded last day).
26. All the quarters of heaven, seemed to be crying aloud, with the
sounds of the hurling weapons, rolling as mountain peaks, roaring as
lions, and borne by the blowing winds on all sides.
27. The sky appeared as an ocean of illusion, burning with the bodies
of the warriors like flaming trees, and rolling in surges of the dead
bodies of the gods and demons, floating on it like mountains; while the
skirts of the earth, seemed as forest, made by the clubs and lances and
spears, and many other weapons incessantly falling upon them.
28. The horizon was surrounded by the big and impenetrable line of
demoniac bodies, resembling the chain of Sumeru mountains girding the
earth; while the earth itself resembled the ocean filled with the
mountainous bodies of fallen warriors, and towers of the celestial
cities blown down by the winds.
29. The sky was filled with violent sounds, and the earth and its
mountains, were washed by torrents of blood; the blood-sucking goblins
danced on all sides, and filled the cavity of the world with confusion.
30. The dreadful warfare of the gods and Titans, resembled the tumults
which rage through the endless space of the world, and that rise and
fall with the vicissitudes of pleasure and pain, which it is
incessantly subject to. (_i.e._ The world is a field of continued
warfare of good and evil, like the battle-field of the gods and demons).