Page:Atharva-Veda samhita volume 2.djvu/541

997 of various maladies; and, when one of these remains unhealed, boils and sores etc. (? piṭakavraṇādīni) show themselves. Also, that kalās are anupādeyāvayavopalakṣaṇa, and worthless parts of cattle etc. are collected in old pits. And in like manner collected ill-dreaming is made over to an enemy. That is his idea, and a wholly unacceptable one, of the general meaning of the verse. ⌊The verse is prose, no triṣṭubh; but may be stretched so as to count as 43 syllables.⌋

3. Embryo of the wives of the gods, instrument of Yama, excellent dream; the evil [dream] that is mine, that do we send forth to him that hates us.

4. Thee that art "harsh" by name, mouth of the black bird (-çakúni)—thee, O sleep, we thus know completely; do thou, O sleep, as a horse a halter, as a horse a girth, scatter him who is not of us, the god-reviler, the mocker.

⌊Prose.⌋ The translation here is of no authority, including various venturesome emendations of the text; it follows our text except at the end, where, instead of badhāna, it implies the (unsatisfactory) vapa of the comm. and SPP.; all the mss. read vápus ⌊or vápu⌋. At the beginning, the pada-mss. give mā́tṛṣṭā: nāma: asi: kṛṣṇa॰çakune: múkham; and the saṁhitā-mss. agree with them, with worthless variations of accent ⌊and some slight differences besides⌋, and with -kuner in one or two. SPP. reads, however, mā́ tṛṣṭā́nām asi kṛṣṇaçakunér múkham, won, as he claims, by adding accents to the comm's text; but this differs from the mss. only by ⌊the word-division and⌋ by -nāmasi and -ner; how the comm. divides and understands mātṛṣṭānāmasi is unknown, as his explanation of the words is wanting (though SPP. notes no lacuna). So much (to múkham) is, as was noted above, added to vs. 3 by Anukr., comm., and SPP. In the next division of the verse, for kakṣyā̀m, the mss., the comm., and SPP., give kāyám, which might mean 'body'; the comm. is apparently imperfect here, reading açvo yathā svakīyaṁ rajodhūsaraṁ [kāyaṁ] dhunoti yathā cā ’çvo nīnāham palyāṇakavacādikam avakirati: with kāyam is perhaps omitted also çarīram, its gloss. Our mss. end vs. 4 with nīnāhám, and it was our emendation to add the next clause; but this the comm. does also, ending with vapa, while SPP. goes on to gṛhe without making a verse-division; the sense (so far as we can be said to understand it) favors our division and the comm's. The latter reads avā ’smākam, finding thus an ava...vapa, which he