416
as their garlands of flowers fell from their loosened braids, while it gently stroked their waists with its waves like hands, and made itself slightly yellow with the unguents which its embraces rubbed off from their bodies. I then went to the south of the lake, and behold a clump of trees, which looked like the body of Cupid being consumed by the fire of Śiva's eye: its tápinchas did duty for smoke, its kinśukas for red coals, and it was all aflame with twining masses of the full-blown scarlet aśoka.
There I saw a certain maiden gathering flowers at the entrance of an arbour composed of the atimukta creeper; she seemed with her playful sidelong glances to be threatening the lotus in her ear; she kept raising her twining arm and displaying half her bosom; and her beautiful loosened hair, hanging down her back, seemed like the darkness seeking shelter to escape from her moon-like face. And I said to myself " Surely the Creator must have made this girl, after he had got his hand in by creating Rambhá and her sister-nymphs, but one can see that she is mortal by the winking of her eyes."
The moment I saw that gazelle-eyed maid, she pierced my heart, like a crescent-headed javelin of Mara, bewildering the three worlds. And the moment she saw me, she was overcome by Cupid, and her hands were rendered nerveless and listless by love, and she desisted from her amusement of gathering flowers. She seemed, with the flashings of the ruby in the midst of her moving flexible chain,*[1] to be displaying the flames of affection that had broken forth from her heart in which they could not be contained; and turning round, she looked at me again and again with an eye that seemed to be rendered more charming by the pupil coming down to rest in its corner.
While we stood for a while looking at one another, there arose there a great noise of people flying in terror. And there came that way an infuriated elephant driven mad by the smell of the wild elephants; it had broken its chain, and thrown its rider, and the elephant-hook was swinging to and fro at the end of its ear. The moment I saw the animal, 1 rushed forward, and taking up in my arms my beloved, who was terrified, and whose attendants had run away, I carried her into the middle of the crowd. Then she began to recover her composure, and her attendants came up; but just at that moment the elephant, attracted by the noise of the people, charged in our direction. The crowd dispersed in terror at the monster's approach, and she disappeared among them, having been carried off by her attendants in one direction, while I went in another.
At last the alarm caused by the elephant came to an end, and then I searched in every direction for that slender-waisted maid, but I could
- ↑ * More literally " creeper-like chain."
