Verse 20

¹²Grow, enemy of Indra. Do not be slow: kill the one who hates you. Then out of the southern fire there rose one dreadful to look at, ¹³like the ender of the worlds at the time an age closes, swelling out on every side by the length of an arrow, day after day, ¹⁴with the look of a burnt mountain, bright as a bank of evening cloud, his crest and beard like heated copper, his eyes fierce as the midday sun, ¹⁵lifting earth and sky on his blazing three-pointed spear, dancing, roaring out, shaking the ground with his foot, ¹⁶drinking the floor of the sky with a mouth deep as a cave, licking the stars with his tongue, swallowing the three worlds,

¹⁷yawning again and again with his great and terrible fangs. Seeing him, all the worlds ran off in terror to the ten directions. ¹⁸He by whom these worlds were covered over, austerity itself taking the shape of Tvastr's son, was called Vrtra: an evil thing, and utterly terrible. ¹⁹The bulls among the gods ran at him and struck, they and their hosts, with their own floods of divine missiles and weapons; and he swallowed every one of them. ²⁰Then all of them, astonished and downcast, their fire swallowed, came near with gathered minds to the first Person, who faces inward.