Page:The Katha Sarit Sagara.djvu/96



In the meanwhile the ambassador, sent by the king of Vatsa in answer to Chandamahásena's embassy, went and told that monarch his master's reply. Chandamahásena for his part, on hearing it, began to reflect- "It is certain that that proud king of Vatsa will not come here. And I cannot send my daughter to his court, such conduct would be unbecoming; so I must capture him by some stratagem and bring him here as a prisoner." Having thus reflected and deliberated with his ministers, the king had made a large artificial elephant like his own, and, after filling it with concealed warriors, he placed it in the Vindhya forest. There the scouts kept in his pay by the king of Vatsa, who was passionately fond of the sport of elephant-catching, discerned it from a distance;* and they came with speed and informed the king of Vatsa in these words : " O king, we have seen a single elephant roaming in the Vindhya forest, such that nowhere else in this wide world is his equal to be found, filling the sky with his stature, like a moving peak of the Vindhya range."

Then the king rejoiced on hearing this report from the scouts, and he gave them a hundred thousand gold pieces by way of reward. The king spent that night in thinking; "If I obtain that mighty elephant, a fit match for Nadágiri, then that Chandamahásena will certainly be in my power, and then he will of his own accord give me his daughter Vásavadattá." So in the morning 'he started for the Vindhya forest, making these scouts shew him the way, disregarding, in his ardent desire to capture the elephant, the advice of his ministers. He did not pay any attention to the fact, that the astrologers said, that the position of the heavenly bodies at the moment of his departure portended the acquisition of a maiden together with imprisonment. When the king of Vatsa reached the Vindhya forest, he made his troops halt at a distance through fear of alarming that elephant, and accompanied by the scouts only, holding in his hand his melodious lute, he entered that great forest boundless as his own kingly vice. The king saw on the southern slope of the Vindhya range that elephant looking like a real one, pointed out to him by his scouts from a distance. He slowly approached it, alone, playing on his lute, thinking how he should bind it, and singing in melodious tones. As his mind was fixed on his