दक्षिणस्यां दिशि शप्तवनेऽन्वेषणम्

With Tāra and Aṅgada beside him, the monkey Hanumān set out at once for the region Sugrīva had assigned. Three troop-leaders have already come home in the last sarga; this one is only now beginning, and by shifting the time the poet opens the southern band's story on its own. Travelling a long way with all those fine monkeys, Hanumān searched the caves and thickets of the Vindhya, the mountain peaks, the country made hard to cross by rivers, the lakes, the great trees, the clumps of trees of every kind and the wooded mountains. The Vindhya was their starting-point, for it is the gateway to the southern road, and these were the very lands Sugrīva had named, so the search was nothing haphazard. Yet though they searched in every direction, none of those heroic monkeys saw Sītā, Mithilā's princess, the daughter of Janaka. The south really was Sītā's quarter, yet they failed at the very start: the poet describes the toil first and at length, and grants success only after long delay, and that delay heightens the glory of the Sundara Kāṇḍa.

Living on roots and fruits of every kind as they searched, those unassailable monkeys camped now here, now there; they had no fixed lodging and no regular meals, but stopped wherever evening found them. The country was hard to search, full of caves and thickets, and vast; it was waterless, without people, empty, dense and dreadful to look at. The many caves were the chief obstacle, since every one had to be entered. Searching such wild tracts, they were sorely distressed, and the next stretch too was hard to search, full of caves and thickets, and vast. The repetition conveys how long the search dragged on and how the toil kept recurring: leaving one hard region they found another just like it. Then, leaving that region, all the troop-leaders entered another, one no one could assail, and they entered it fearing nothing — their fearlessness is mentioned because a fight with an asura lies ahead. Hanumān, Aṅgada and Tāra kept together; no one went off alone.

There the trees bore no fruit and no blossom and had lost their leaves; the rivers had no water; even a root was hard to find. There were no buffaloes, no deer, no elephants, no tigers, no birds, nor any other creature of the woods; no trees, no herbs, no creepers, no shrubs. So, heaping one denial on another, the poet makes the forest's emptiness ever more complete. And yet on the dry ground grew lotus plants with glossy leaves and open flowers, lovely to look at and fragrant, but with never a bee near them. Lotuses that bloom not in water but on dry land are a marvel: the forest was pleasing to the eye, but in truth lifeless. The lotuses flowered and gave off scent, yet there was no bee — the rule of the world that where there is fragrance there are bees is broken here, and that alone shows the forest lay under a curse, whose cause the next verses tell. The picture also sets the scene for the monkeys' hardships.

A great and blessed seer named Kaṇḍu had lived there, truthful and rich in austerity, fiercely quick to anger and made unassailable by his vows — a subtle portrait of a seer, in whom impatience lives alongside austerity. His son, a boy of ten, was lost in that forest and died, and the great sage was enraged. Righteous though he was, he cursed the whole of that great forest, so that it became a shelter to no one, unapproachable, empty of beast and bird. It is striking that even a righteous man could empty a forest out of grief for his son; the emptiness was not natural but brought on by the curse. What the earlier verses described is explained here — the poet's way is first the scene, then the cause. The monkeys searched with fixed attention the edges of its woods, the caves in its mountains and the springs of its rivers, since someone might hide even at a river's source; but there too those great monkeys did not find Janaka's daughter.

Eager to please Sugrīva though they were, they did not find Rāvaṇa, her abductor, either — no Sītā, no abductor, not a single trace. Then, entering a fearful place overgrown with creepers and bushes, they saw an asura of terrible deeds who did not fear even the gods, a sign of his strength. Seeing that dreadful being standing there like a second mountain, all the monkeys girded themselves tightly, which is how monkeys make ready for battle. The mighty asura shouted at them, "You're as good as dead!" and rushed at them in fury with his fist raised — first a blow of words, then of the fist, in the usual order. As he charged, Vālī's son Aṅgada, thinking "This is Rāvaṇa!", struck him with the flat of his hand. Rāvaṇa was in all their minds, so the first asura they saw seemed to be him, and that made Aṅgada's blow all the fiercer; like his father, Aṅgada acted fast, struck first and thought afterwards.

Struck by Vālī's son, the asura spewed blood from his mouth and fell to the ground like a toppled mountain. A single slap brought down that mountain of a demon, and Aṅgada's strength, like his father's, shows itself here for the first time. While he lay there without breath, the monkeys, flushed with victory, searched nearly the whole of that mountain cavern, their spirits lifted and the search taken up again. When they had searched it all, those forest-dwellers entered yet another dreadful cavern. They searched that too, grew weary, came out, gathered together and sat down in a lonely spot at the foot of a tree, dejected. Three phrases — a lonely spot, the foot of a tree, dejected hearts — complete the picture of defeat. The sarga began with effort, was lifted in the middle by victory, and ends in despondency; in the next Aṅgada will comfort these same disheartened monkeys and set the story moving again. Meanwhile their labour has run beyond the month's limit, and their fear grows with it.