The battle is a terrible one. Ravana has ten heads, and as fast as Rama cuts off one another grows in its place. Finally, Rama, like Apollo, fires the terrible arrow of Brahma, the creator, and the monster falls dead.
"Gods and demons are watching the contest from the sky, and flowers fall down in showers on the victorious hero."
The body of Ravana is consumed by fire. Sita, the furrowed earth, goes through the ordeal of fire, and comes out of it purified and redeemed from all taint of the monster Ravana; and Rama, the sun, and Sita, the earth, are separated for fourteen years; Sita is hid in the dark jungle, and then they are married again, and live happily together ever after.
Here we have the battle in the air between the sun and the demon: the earth is taken possession of by the demon; the demon is finally consumed by fire, and perishes; the earth goes through an ordeal of fire, a conflagration; and for fourteen years the earth and sun do not see each other; the earth is hid in a dark jungle; but
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eventually the sun returns, and the loving couple are again married, and live happily for ever after.
The Phoibos Apollo of the Greek legends was, Byron tells us--
The lord of the unerring bow,
The god of life and poetry and light,
The sun in human limbs arrayed, and brow
All radiant from his triumph in the fight.
The shaft had just been shot, the arrow bright
With an immortal's vengeance; in his eye
And nostril beautiful disdain, and might,
And majesty flash their full lightnings by,
Developing in that one glance the deity."
This fight, so magnificently described, was the sun-god's battle with Python, the destroyer, the serpent, the dragon, the Comet. What was Python doing? He was "stealing the springs and fountains." That is to say, the great heat was drying up the water-courses of the earth.
"The arrow bright with an immortal's vengeance," was the shaft with which Apollo broke the fiend to pieces and tumbled him down to the earth, and saved the springs and the clouds and the perishing ocean.