5. Karkatí beheld a band of Pisáchis, dancing about her as her companions; but she became motionless as a block of wood, on seeing the giddy Vetálas, moving about with human skeletons in their hands. 6. She saw the sleeping antelopes by her, and the ground matted over by the thick snow falls; while the drizzling drops of dew and frost, were gently shaken by the breeze on the leaves of trees. 7. She heard the frogs croaking in the bogs, and the night ravens cawing from the hollows of trees; while the mingled noise of jocund men and women, were issuing from the inside of the houses. 8. She saw the _ignis fatuus_ burning in the swamps, with the lustre of portentous meteors; and found the banks and bournes, thick with thorns and thistles, growing by their sides, and washed by the waters gliding below them. 9. She looked above and saw the groups of stars shining in the firmament, and beheld the forest about her shaking their fruit and flowers by the breeze. 10. She heard the alternate and incessant cries of owls and crows in the hollows of trees; and listened also the shouts of robbers in the skirts, and the wailings of the villagers at a distance. 11. The foresters were silent in their native woods, and the citizens were fast asleep in the cities; the winds were howling in the forests, and the birds were at rest in their sylvan nests. 12. Furious lions lay in their dens; and the deer were lying in their caves also. The sky was full of hoarfrost, and the woodlands were all still and quiet. 13. The lightnings flashing from amidst the dark inky clouds, resembled the reflexions of ray from the bosom of a crystal mountain. The clouds were as thick as solid clay, and the darkness was as stiff as it required to be severed by a sword. 14. Blown by the storm, the dark cloud fled like the sable Anjaná mountain in the air, and it deluged a flood of pitchy rain, like a water-fall from the bosom of a mountain. 15. The night was as dark as the pit of a coal-mine, and as jet black as the wing of the black bee—_bhramara_; and the whole landscape lulled to sleep, appeared as the world lying submerged under ignorance. (Sleep and ignorance are twin brothers, and a reversion of the comparison of ignorance with sleep. Such reversed similes are not uncommon in oriental poetry, as that of the moon with the beauteous face &c.). 16. In this dreadful dead of night, she saw in the district inhabited by Kirátas, a prince and his minister, wandering together in the forest. 17. The prince was named Vikrama, and was as brave and valorous as his name and conduct implied him to be. He came out undaunted from within the city, after the citizens had fallen fast-asleep. 18. Karkatí beheld them roving in the forest with the weapons of their valour and fortitude, and searching the Vetálas infesting the neighbourhood.