334/ ORADLE TALES OF HINDUISM
less bow Gandiva, and his two inexhaustible quivers. And the God of Fire, satisfied with this supreme renunciation, disappeared from before them.
On and on went the pilgrims, until the circle of their worship was complete. From the salt sea, they proceeded south-west. Then they turned north, and passing Dwarka, the city beloved of Krishna, they saw it covered by the waters of the ocean. For even so had it been prophesied, that all the things they had known should pass away, like a dream. At last they reached the Himalayas, home of meditating souls. Here were the great forests, and here the mighty snow-peaked mountains, where the mind could be stilled and quieted, and centred on itself. And beyond, in the dim north, lay Meru, Mountain of the Gods. And here it was, as they journeyed on, with faces set ever to the goal, that all the errors, of all their lives, took shape and bore fruit. They had been but small, these sins of the Pandavas, — a thought of vanity here, a vain boast, unfulfilled, there 1 Yet small as they were, they had been sufficient to flaw those lives that without them would have been all-perfect, and one by one the heroic pilgrims turned faint with a mortal faintness, and stopped, and fell. Only in the clear mind of Yudisthira- — "the King of Justice and Righteousness," as his subjects had loved to call him — in that clear mind,
