Page:Little Clay Cart (Ryder 1905).djvu/77

P. 74.14]

The elephant rogue wants the blood of a man.

Escape! Run away! Can't you see?

And:

How they lose their ankle-rings!

Girdles, set with gems and things,

Break away from fastenings!

As they stumble, trip, and blunder,

See the bracelets snap asunder,

Each a tangled, pearly wonder!

And that rogue of an elephant dives with his trunk and his feet and his tusks into the city of Ujjayinī, as if it were a lotus-pond in full flower. At last he comes upon a Buddhist monk. And while the man's staff and his water-jar and his begging-bowl fly every which way, he drizzles water over him and gets him between his tusks. The people see him and begin to shriek again, crying "Oh, oh, the monk is killed!"

Vasantasenā. [Anxiously.] Oh, what carelessness, what carelessness!

Karnapūraka. Don't be frightened. Just listen, mistress. Then, with a big piece of the broken chain dangling about him, he picked him up, picked up the monk between his tusks, and just then Karnapūraka saw him, I saw him, no, no! the slave who grows fat on my mistress' rice-cakes saw him, stumbled with his left foot over a gambler's score, grabbed up an iron pole out of a shop, and challenged the mad elephant—

Vasantasenā. Go on! Go on!

Karnap. I hit him—in a fit of passion, too—

He really looked like some great mountain peak.

And from between those tusks of his I drew

The sacred hermit meek.

Vasantasenā. Splendid, splendid! But go on!

Karnapūraka. Then, mistress, all Ujjayinī tipped over to one side,