What a hitherto unknown stillness enveloped me now, O brother, as, after stationing my people, each man at his post, I again entered the house! That I didn't hear the voices of my wives—it wasn't that alone, but that I had heard their voices going out at the gate, away into the distance—that there was no possibility of suddenly hearing out of any corner these scolding voices grow gradually shriller till they finally united or rather became disunited in one discordant brawl-duct—it was that which lent to my house an air of unspeakably salutary quiet, which I could hardly as yet bring myself to believe in.
As I stood there, my palace, surrounded by its beautifully laid-out parks, seemed to me more splendid than ever before, and I trembled at the thought that all this magnificence was to be utterly destroyed within a few hours by the infamous hands of robbers. Fear for my own life troubled me, far less, than the cruel conviction that these well-cared-for avenues of trees would be laid waste, these artistically hewn marble pillars hurled down, and that all this, the building up of which had cost me so much thought and such tedious effort, whose completion had filled me with so much joy, would be a heap of ruins when the sun rose again. For only too well did I know the traces left by Angulimala.
