Verse 5

⁵She had jasmine wound into the knot of her hair, and was broad at hip and breast with a waist hard put to carry them, well dressed, her face set off by curls shining in the light of her trembling earrings; ⁶a woman carrying off the minds of those who lived in the camp with her sweet smiles and her sidelong looks. The cowherd women took her for Sri herself in bodily form, with a lotus in her hand, come to see her husband. ⁷That seizer of children, hunting there for infants, came by chance in Nanda's house upon the child who makes an end of the wicked, his own great light covered over, lying on the bed like a fire laid in ashes.

⁸Knowing her for the seizer who kills children, he, the self of all that moves and does not move, shut his eyes; and she took the Endless into her lap, and it was her death, as a man of no understanding takes up a sleeping snake, thinking it a rope. ⁹Seeing that fine-looking woman, sharp in mind and altogether crooked in her doing, like a sword inside its sheath, and being themselves overborne by the splendour of her, the two mothers stood by and only looked on.