But Maheshwara, from his seat on Kailás, saw them go, for as fate would have it, he chanced to be looking in that direction. And grasping the whole truth by mystical intuition[23], he remembered his boon to the Spirit of the Air, and he said to himself: Now has the future which I foresaw become the present[24], and the blue eyes of Anushayiní have produced a catastrophe. But I must not leave her lovely body to the play of chance, for it has in it something of my own divinity. And Kamalamitra, after all, was not very much to blame. For he was bewildered by my glory, reflected in her eyes. So I am the culprit, who is responsible for this state of affairs: and so I must look after this pair of lovers. Moreover, I have a mind to amuse myself with their adventures[25]. So after considering awhile, that Master Yogi took a lotus, and placing it on the earth in a distant sea, it became an island. And he made in it, by his magic power, an earthly copy of a heavenly type, of a nature known to himself alone, for the future to unfold. And having completed his arrangements, he allowed the chain of events to take its course. But the old sage Pápanáshana, when those two lovers had disappeared, remained in the forest alone. And their images forsook the mirror of his eyes, and faded away from his mind, like the shadow of a cloud travelling over the surface of a great lake, and vanished, and were utterly forgotten. [1] For Ganesha's trunk is usually smeared with vermilion. The other deity is, of course, Shiwa. [2] '_The lover of the lotus_,' i.e. the Sun. _Mitra_ is also one of his names. [_Kam-_ rhymes with _drum_.] [3] i.e. Shiwa. Umá is his wife. [4] This is a sort of Hindoo _façon de parler_: it must not be supposed to make him any the older. [5] _nila_. As this colour is the keynote of the story, it should be observed, that it is a deep, intense blue, inclining to black, essentially associated in Hindoo literature with the moon-crested God, peacocks, and the lotus. [6] Characters in the Mahábhárata. [7] _digambara_. [8] '_a devoted wife_.' But the word has another technical philosophical significance: it connotes evil, clinging to the soul by reason of sin in a former birth, and begetting the necessity of expiation in another body. [9] _Kuwalayamayamjagat_. When I was young, sings Bhartrihari, the whole world seemed to me to be made of woman (_nárimayam_). [10] Death, who is represented with a noose (_pásha_). [11] Love, whose weapon is his bow. [12] There is here an untranslateable play on the word _bhoga_: which means both the coil of a snake and enjoyment. [13] Alluding to the legend that Shiwa annihilated the god of love, who was endeavouring to inflame him, by a fiery glance from his third eye. Love's sacred fire met in this case, for once, with an element more potent than his own.