Page:Katha sarit sagara, vol2.djvu/567

 win be your sureties, so take our jewels from the regions of Pátála, and make them your own."

When she said this, king Merudhvaja said to her, "I will see about that, but you must remember your promise." When the king had said this, he bathed and worshipped Háțakeśa. And those Daitya princesses, having now seen his sons with their own eyes, had their minds entirely fixed on them. Then all the inhabitants of Rasátala fell at the feet of the virtuous king Merudhvaja, and asked that Trailokyamálin should be set at liberty; and then king Merudhvaja, with his wife, sons, and servants, left the world of the Asuras, and returned to his own city, covering the regions with his umbrellas white as his own glory. There his son Malayadhvaja spent the night in thinking on the younger daughter of the king of the Dánavas, being tortured with the fever of love, and though he closed his eyes, lie never slept. But that sea of self-control Muktáphaladhvaja, though he thought upon the elder daughter of the Asura monarch who was deeply in love with him, and though he was young, and she was fair enough to shake with love the saintly minds of anchorites, still in virtue of the boon he had! craved from the hermit, was no whit disturbed is mind. But Merudhvaja, finding that his elder son was determined not to take a wife, while Malayadhvaja was desperately in love, and that on the other hand that great Asura was averse ta giving him his daughters, remained with his mind bewildered as to how to devise an expedient.

 

Then king Merudhvaja, seeing that Malayadhvaja was thus over- powered with the fever of love, said to his queen, "If those two daughters of Trailokyamálin, whom I saw in Pátála, do not become the wives of my two sons, what advantage shall I have gained? And my son Malayadhvaja is consumed with smouldering flame, because he cannot obtain the younger of the two, though shame makes him conceal the fire of love. It is for this very reason that, though I promised Trailokyamálin's queen that I would set him at liberty, I do not at once make my promise good. For, if he is set free from his imprisonment, his pride as an Asura will prevent 