Page:The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa (Volume 1).pdf/365

Rh his employer's relatives. He indeed, hath set fire to it. O fie on Dhritarashtra's heart which is so partial ! He hath burnt to death, as if he were their foe, the sinless heirs of Pandu ! O, the sinful and wicked-souled (Purochana) who hath burnt those best of men, the innocent and unsuspicious princes, hath himself been burnt to death as fate would have it!'

Vaisampayana continued.--"The citizens of Varanavata thus bewailed (the fate of the Pandavas), and waited there for the whole night surrounding that house. The Pandavas, bowever, accompanied by their mother, coming out of the subterranean passage, fled in haste unnoticed. But those chastisers of foes, for sleepness and feat, could not with their mother proceed in baste. But, O monarch, Bhimasena, endued with terrible prowess and swiftness of motion took upon bis body all his brothers and mother and began to push through the darkness. Placing his mother on his shoulder, the twins on his sides, and Yudhishthira and Arjuna on both his arms, Vtikodara of great energy and strength and endued with the speed of the wind, commenced his march, breaking the trees with his breast and pressing deep the Earth with his stamp."

Thus ends the hundred and fiftieth section in the Jatugriha Parva of the Adi Parva.

Vaisampayana said, -"About this time, the learned Vidura had sent into those woods a man of pure character and much trusted by him, This person going to where he had been directed, saw the Pandavas with their mother in the forest employed in a certain place in measuring the depth of a river. The design that the wicked Duryyodbana had formed had been, through his spies, known to Vidura of great intelligence, and therefore, he had sent that prudent person unto the Pandavas. Sent by Vidura unto them, he showed the Pandavas on the sacred banks of Ganga (Ganges) a boat with engines and flags, cons. tructed by trusted artificers and capable of withstanding wind and wave and endued with the speed of the tempest or of thought. He then addressed the Pandavas in these words to show that he had really been sent by Vidura.-'O Yudhishthira, he said, "listen to these words the learned Vidura had said (unto thee) as a proof of the fact that I come from him I-Neither the consumer of straw and the wood nor the drier