Chapter 24 — The Ravages of Time

¹ Rama continued:—

Time is a self-willed sportsman, like a prince, who is inaccessible to dangers and whose powers are unlimited. ² This world is like a forest and a sporting ground of time where the poor deluded worldlings are caught in his snare like bodies of wounded stags.

³ The ocean of universal deluge is merely a pleasure-pond for time, and its undersea fires bursting there are merely lotus flowers. ⁴ Time makes his breakfast of this vapid and stale earth, flavored with the milk and curd of the seas of those names. ⁵ His wife Chandi with her train of Matris (the Furies) ranges all about this wide world like a ferocious tigress. ⁶ The earth with her waters is like a bowl of wine in the hand of time, dressed and flavored with all sorts of lilies and lotuses.

⁷ In the hand of time, the lion with his huge body and startling mane, his loud roaring and tremendous groans, seems like a caged bird of sport. ⁸ Mahakala (Transcendent Time), like a playful young cuckoo, appears in the figure of the blue autumn sky, warbling as sweet as the notes of a lute of gourd (in the music of the spheres).

⁹ The restless bow of death is found flinging its sorrowful arrows with ceaseless thunder claps on all sides. ¹⁰ This world is like a forest in which sorrows range about like playful apes, and time like a sportive prince in this forest, is now wandering, now walking, now playing and now killing his game.