Verse 12

¹²In them men live ten thousand years and are like gods, with the strength of ten thousand elephants, their bodies knit like the thunderbolt. Glad in the joy of that strength and that youth, they take great pleasure in coupling, and at its end their wives carry one child for a year. The time that runs there is like the Treta age. ¹³There the lords of the gods, greatly honoured by their own troop-leaders, wander as they please, their minds and their eyes drawn away by the tangled desire, the play, the laughter and the sidelong looks of graceful heavenly women. They wander in lovely woods and hermitages and dwellings and in the valleys of the boundary mountains, where trees make everything beautiful and the branches and creepers bend under the wealth of clustered flowers and fruit and new shoots of every season; and by clear pools loud with royal geese and moorhens and ducks and cranes and ruddy geese, all glad with the scent of fresh water flowers of many kinds newly opened, and with swarms of bees over them; and they wander with water games and every kind of strange amusement.

¹⁴In all nine regions the Bhagavan Narayana, the great Person, is present to this day for the grace of men, by his own self, in an array of what the self is. ¹⁵But in Ilavrta the revered Bhava is the only man; no other man goes in there. He knows the ground of Bhavani's curse: whoever enters becomes a woman. I shall tell that afterwards. ¹⁶Hemmed in by thousands of ten millions of hosts of women, who are Bhavani's own, Bhava draws near the fourth form of the four-formed great Person, the Bhagavan's dark form, which is his own nature and is called Sankarsana. He sets it before him by gathering himself into himself, and praises it in these words.