That King Yudhisthira felt his altered position bitterly is evident from the words he addressed to the Brahmans who accompanied him and his brothers out of the city. “Robbed,” he says, “of our prosperity and kingdom, robbed of everything, we are about to enter the deep woods in sorrow: depending for our food on fruits and roots and the produce of the chase. The forest too is full of dangers and abounds with reptiles and beasts of prey.” However his anticipations were worse than the reality. By the advice of a Brahman the exiled monarch made an appeal to the sun for help, addressing him in such terms as these. “Thou art, O sun, the eye of the universe! Thou art the soul of all corporeal existences! Thou art the origin of all things.... Thou art called Indra, thou art Vishnu, thou art Brahma, thou art Prajapati! Thou art fire and thou art the subtle mind! and thou art the lord and the eternal Brahma.”[75] In response to this appeal the sun-god appeared to the king, and presented him with a copper cooking-vessel, which proved to be an inexhaustible source of fruits and roots, meat and vegetables to the exiles during their twelve years of enforced sojourn in the woods.[76] Their forest wanderings were productive of many stirring adventures, the narrative of which occupies a large portion of the original poem, but we can find space to notice only a few of these. Following the advice of the sage Vyasa, Arjuna visited the Himalayas in order to gain the favour of Siva, and to obtain from him certain most potent celestial weapons for the destruction of the Kauravas, of whom the Pandava heroes seem, notwithstanding their own wonderful fighting qualities, to have had a wholesome dread. Having arrived upon the sacred mountains, Arjuna went through a course of austerities “with arms upraised, leaning upon nothing and standing on the tips of his toes.” For food he at first had withered leaves, but eventually he fed on air alone. Such was the fervour of his penances that the earth around him began to smoke, and the alarmed Rishis came in a body to Siva, and asked him to interfere. The chief of all the gods sent them away with comforting assurances and, having assumed the appearance of a _Kiráta_, or low-class hunter, came upon Arjuna and provoked him to an encounter. The battle was fierce, culminating in a desperate personal struggle; but where one of the combatants was the Supreme Being the issue could not be doubtful, and Arjuna fell smitten senseless by the god. He soon recovered consciousness, and “mentally prostrating himself before the gracious god of gods, and making a clay image of that deity, he worshipped it with offerings of floral garlands.”[77] To his surprise he found the garland he had offered to the clay image adorning the head of his victorious enemy, the _Kiráta_, who thus revealed himself to the much-relieved son of Pandu. Arjuna prostrated himself before the deity, who expressed his approval of his worshipper, and