[4] Had the awful words passed her lips, Nandi was a doomed bull, as a curse once uttered is irrevocable.
[5] Because he is the Lord of Creatures animate or inanimate, which all obey him.
II
The heart of a Woman
I
As the black cobra sits up, and puffs his hood, and hisses, giving warning to his prey, ere he strikes: so I, Shatrunjaya[6] the lute-player, son of a king, do send this my menace to thee, Narasinha, the lover of a queen too good for so vile a thing as thou art: that none hereafter may be able to say, I struck thee unwarned, or took thee unawares. Know, that night doth not more surely or more swiftly follow day, than I and my vengeance will follow on the messenger who carries this threat: whom I have bidden to reach thee with his utmost speed, so as to allay my thirst for thy life; since every day that I wait seems to me longer than a yuga. And I will slay thee with no other weapon than my two bare hands—
And suddenly, the great god stopped, and he laughed aloud. And he exclaimed: See now, how this poor lute-player deceived himself! For his message not only never reached his enemy at all, but almost as soon as it had left him, he was himself slain by the emissaries of the very man he meant to kill, who never sent him any warning at all, but took him unawares, and slew him, escaping by anticipation the fate that was in store for himself, without even knowing anything of all that this letter would have taught him, and so far from dying, living to a very great age. And this instance shows, that the most dangerous of enemies is the one that never threatens till he actually strikes, resembling not the cobra, but the adder, as Shatrunjaya discovered to his cost, too late.[7]
And the Daughter of the Snow exclaimed, in wrath: Why hast thou stopped, to tell me the end of the story, before even reaching the beginning?