Verse 17

¹⁷So he went out from the city named for the elephant, whom the Kurus had held by their merit alone, and wanting to do good he set his steps on the earth where the one of a thousand forms, he whose feet are the holy fords, had set his. ¹⁸Through cities, through holy groves and mountain thickets, by rivers and lakes whose water carries no mud, through the seats of the fords adorned with the marks of the Endless, he wandered with nothing else in mind. ¹⁹Going round the earth, living clean and apart, always freshly bathed, sleeping on the ground, unkempt, unrecognised by his own in the dress of a wanderer, he kept the vows that please Hari.

²⁰Travelling in this way through the land of Bharata and no other, he came in time to Prabhasa. By then the son of Prtha, with the Unconquered beside him, was ruling the earth under one wheel and one parasol. ²¹There he heard how his own people had been destroyed, as a forest is destroyed by a fire that starts in its own bamboo: they had burned each other in rivalry. Grieving over it, he went in silence westward to the Sarasvati. ²²On that river he waited at the ford of Trita, of Usanas, of Manu, of Prthu, of Agni, of Asita, of Vayu, of Sudasa, of the cows, of Guha, and the ford of Sraddhadeva. ²³And other seats of Visnu here of many kinds, made by the brahmins and by the gods and their lords, their houses marked with the chief signs he carries on his body, at the sight of which people remember Krsna.