Note 211 — KĀDAMBARĪ.

(223) ‘“Then his father himself for that time took the chamberlain’s wand to make way for him, and he went to the hall of assembly and mounted the royal throne, like the moon on Meru’s peak. Then, when he had received due homage from the kings, after a short pause the great drum that heralded his setting out on his triumphal course resounded deeply, under the stroke of golden drum-sticks. Its sound was as the noise of clouds gathering at the day of doom; or the ocean struck by Mandara; or the foundations of earth by the earthquakes that close an aeon; or a portent-cloud, with its flashes of lightning; or the hollow of hell by the blows of the snout of the Great Boar. And by its sound the spaces of the world were inflated, opened, separated, outspread, filled, turned sunwise, and deepened, and the bonds that held the sky were unloosed. The echo of it wandered through the three worlds; for it was embraced in the lower world by Çesha, with his thousand hoods raised and bristling in fear; it was challenged in space by the elephants of the quarters tossing their tusks in opposition; it was honoured with sunwise turns in the sky by the sun’s steeds, tossing211 their heads in their snort of terror; (224) it was wondrously answered on Kailāsa’s peak by Çiva’s bull, with a roar of joy in the belief that it was his master’s loudest laugh; it was met in Meru by Airāvata, with deep trumpeting; it was reverenced in the hall of the gods by Yama’s bull, with his curved horns turned sideways in wrath at so strange a sound; and it was heard in terror by the guardian gods of the world.