Harsha Charita by Banabhatta

Author:Banabhatta [Banabhatta]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bonzuri
Published: 2018-04-08T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter V

The Harsha-Charita of Bana

As the inconstant lightning, having shown a splendour,

lets fall the thunderbolt,

Fate after ordaining happiness to men superadds heart-

rending affliction.

As Ananta, moving his coils, lays the mountains in

ruins, so does the one endless time by its revolu-

tions

Lay great souls low in the dust, many together, re-

specting none.

Subsequently the king one day summoned Rajyavardhana, whose age now fitted him for wearing armour, and, as a lion despatches his whelp against the deer, placed him at the head of an immense force and sent him attended by ancient advisers and devoted feudatories towards the north to attack the Hunas.

For several stages my lord Harsha followed his march with the horse. When however his brother had entered the region which blazes with Kailasa's lustre, being at youth's adventure-loving age, he spent several days away from camp on the skirts of the Himalaya, where lions, sharabhas, tigers, and boars are plentiful, a fawn-eyed hunter with his bright form dappled by the radiant glances of love-smit wood-nymphs. His bow drawn to the ear, he emitted a rain of shining shafts, which in a comparatively few days left the forests empty of wild creatures.

One day however at the fourth watch of the night, dawn being almost come, he saw in a vision a lion burning in an overpowering forest fire, which reddened the whole sky with a sea of flickering flame. Into that same fire he saw the lioness, leaving her cubs, hurl herself with a plunge. At this the thought arose in his heart--'Stronger of a truth than steel are the bonds whose tissue is love, when even brutes are drawn on by them to acts like this.' On awakening his left eye incessantly throbbed; a mysterious tremour overspread his frame; his heart started without cause from its internal moorings; for no reason at all a profound dejection came over him. What could it mean? Various conjectures wracked his mind, until losing all self-command he bowed his face in thought, so that the fixed pupils of his partridge eyes seemed to make the earth for an instant a bed of sprouting land lotuses. A void as it were was in his heart during that day's sport, and, when the sun had ascended to mid-day, he returned home, where, lying on a bamboo couch stretched on the ground with a pillow white as moonshine and cool sandal unguent covering its frame, he remained with small hand-fans softly waving on either side, full of apprehension.

Anon he beheld afar off a certain Kurangaka approaching with a billet tied in a forehead-wrap of rags of deep indigo hue. Weariness and heat had combined to give him such a blackness of body, that he seemed turning into charcoal through some inner fire of grief. Disguised as the dust excited by the quick trot of his hurried approach, the very earth appeared to pursue him out of curiosity to learn news of its king. Flapped by the opposing breeze, the long hem of his robe fanned both his flanks, just as if his rapid advance had given him wings.

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