16. Time, O sage, is the subtlest of all things. It is divided though indivisible, it is consumed though incombustible, it is perceived though imperceptible in its nature. 17. Time like the mind is strong enough to create and demolish any thing in a trice, and its province is equally extensive with it. 18. Time is a whirlpool to men; and being accompanied with desire his insatiable and ungovernable mistress and delighting in illicit enjoyments, he makes them do and undo the same thing over and again. 19. Time is prompted by his rapacity to appropriate every thing to himself, from the meanest straw, dust, leaves and worms, to the greatest Indra and the mount Meru itself. 20. Time is the source of all malice and greediness, and the spring of all misfortunes, and intolerable fluctuations of our states. 21. As boys with their balls play about their play-ground, so does time in his arena of the sky, play with his two balls of the sun and moon. 22. Time at the expiration of the _kalpa_ age, will dance about with a long chain of the bones of the dead hanging from his neck to the feet. 23. The gale of desolation rising from the body of this desolator of the world at the end of a _kalpa_ age, causes the fragments of mount Meru to fly about in the air like the rinds of the _bhoja-petera_ tree. 24. Time then assumes his terrific form of fire (प्रलयाग्नि), to dissolve the world in empty space, when the gods Brahmá and Indra and all others cease to exist. 25. As the sea shows himself in a continued series of waves rising and falling one after another, so it is time that creates and dissolves the world, and appears to rise and fall in the rotation of days and nights. 26. Time plucks the gods and demigods as ripe fruits, from their great arbor of existence, at the end of the world (to make them his food). 27. Time resembles a large fig tree (Ficus religiosus), studded with all the worlds as its fruits, and resonant with the noise of living beings like the hissing of gnats about them. 28. Time accompanied by Action as his mate, regales himself in the garden of the world, blossoming with the moon-beams of the Divine Spirit. 29. As the high and huge rock supports its body upon the basis of the earth, so does time rest itself in endless and interminable eternity. 30. Time assumes to himself various hues of black, white and red (at night, day and midday) which serve for his vestures. 31. As the earth is the great support of hills which are fixed upon it, so is time the support of all the innumerable ponderous worlds that constitute the universe. 32. Hundreds of great _kalpa_ ages (of the creation and dissolution of the world) may pass away, yet there is nothing that can move eternity to pity or concern, or stop or expedite his course. It neither sets nor rises (as time). 33. Time is never proud to think, that it is he who without the least sense of pain and labor, brings this world into play and makes it to exist.