3. There lived among them a Bráhman by name of Indu, a descendant of the patriarch Kasyapa, who was of a saintly soul, virtuous and acquainted with divine knowledge.
4. He resided in his residence with all his relatives, and passed his time agreeably in company with his wife, who was dear to his heart as his second self. (That, woman is ardhánga or half of the body of man, is established in Hindu law; and represented in mythology in the androgyne figures of Hara-Gaurí and Umá-Maheswara).
5. But there was no issue born of this virtuous pair, as there grows no grass in a sterile soil; and the wife remained discontented at the unfruitfulness of her efflorescence or seed.
6. With all the purity and simplicity of their hearts, and the beauty and gracefulness of their persons and manners; they were as useless to the earth, as the fair and straight stem of the pure paddy plant, without its stalk of corn. The discontented pair then repaired to the mountain, in order to make their devotion for the blessing of progeny.
7. They ascended the Kailása mountain, which was unshaded by shady trees, and unpeopled by living beings; and there they stood fixed on one side, like a couple of trees in the barren desert.
8. They remained in their austere devotion, subsisting upon liquid food which supported the trees also. They drank but a draught of water, which they held in the hollow of their palms, from a neighbouring cascade at the close of the day. (There is no single word for a gandusha or chuluka of water in English; the word handful being equivalent to mushthi and prastha).
9. They remained standing and unmoved as immovable trees, and continued long in that posture, in the manner of an erect wood in heat and cold. (Várkshivritti means intense meditation conducted by forgetting one’s self to wood or stone).
10. They passed in this manner the period of two ages, before their devotion met with the approbation of the god, who bears the crescent of the moon on his forehead. (This crescent was no doubt the missile disk, which the war-like god Siva held on his head in the manner of the Seiks).
11. The god advanced towards the parching pair, with the cooling moon-beams on his forehead; as when that luminary casts her dewy light on the dried trees and scorched lotuses, under the burning sun beams of a summer day.
12. The god, mounted on his milk-white bull, and clasping the fair Umá on his left, and holding the beaming moon on his head, appeared to them, as the vernal season was approaching to a green wood (or furze), with strewing flowers upon them. (There is an alliteration of soma and soma in the double sense of Uma and the moon. This kind of play upon words is very characteristic of metaphysical writers in all ages, as Alethes melethon. Lewis Hist. Phil. I. 69).