सम्पातिना निशाकराय पक्षदाहवृत्तान्तकथनम्

Hearing the sage Niśākara's question, Sampāti began to tell of that terrible, hard deed, the chase after the sun, done on impulse without a thought, and he told the sage the whole of it. "On impulse" names the root fault: thoughtlessness was the seed of all the grief that followed. But first he described his own state. "Reverend sir, my body is racked with wounds and my senses are confused with shame; I am so exhausted I can hardly put my words together." The poet counts shame as well as bodily pain, for the vulture king's defeat was not only of the body but of his pride. Yet he did not stop, because the sage had asked.

"Jaṭāyu and I, deluded by pride born of rivalry, flew up into the sky from far away, eager to test the limits of our strength. On the peak of Kailāsa, before the sages, we made a wager: we would follow the sun until it reached the great mountain where it sets." With sages as witnesses and a holy place as the setting, the contest became a vow, and that wager, made in sport, would put their lives in peril. By saying "from far away" and admitting both the pride and the rivalry, Sampāti hides nothing of his fault, which shows his honesty. "We rose together, and looking down we saw the cities on the earth, each no bigger than a chariot wheel. Here and there we heard the sound of music, here and there the jingle of ornaments, and we saw many women in red clothes, singing." At the start of the flight the earth seems lovely and small, and the ears hear sounds of celebration — the first fruit of pride, soon to be reversed. The smallness of the cities measures how high they had climbed.

"Flying up swiftly, we took our place on the sun's path, and from there we looked down on the forest lying green with grass. The earth seemed strewn with mountains like pebbles and wrapped in rivers like threads. The Himālaya, the Vindhya and mighty Meru shone on the face of the earth like elephants standing in a pool." With three images the poet measures the distance: mountains the size of pebbles, rivers the size of threads, great ranges the size of elephants. Then the picture suddenly reverses. "Then a fierce sweat, exhaustion and fear came over us; we were stupefied, and after that we fell into a terrible swoon. We could not tell the south from the south-east or the west; the world seemed burnt, as if by fire at the end of an age." Losing their sense of direction was the first sign of disaster: the two who flew up with a wager now did not even know which way was which. This turn from seeing beauty to feeling the burning heat is the centre of the sarga. Yet the world itself was unchanged; the fault lay in the eyes of those who saw it, and what looked like the world's destruction was only the reflection of their own swoon.

"My mind was undone, and my eyes, once they found something to rest on, were undone again; yet with a great effort I fixed my mind and eyes on the sun and we looked at him. With another great effort we looked at the sun again, and to us he seemed as big as the earth itself." How close they were to the sun is measured by its size: what from the ground seems a small disc was, up close, as vast as the earth. Before, the cities had shrunk to chariot wheels; now the sun had swelled to the size of the earth, and this reversal of scale marks the height of their climb.

"Then Jaṭāyu, without so much as a word to me, dropped towards the earth, and seeing him fall, I at once let myself drop from the sky too. Sheltered by my wings, Jaṭāyu was not burned; it was I who, falling carelessly from the path of the wind, was scorched there. I suspect he came down in Janasthāna, while I fell on the Vindhya, my wings burnt and my body left helpless." Shielding his younger brother was the cause of his burning; here love proved stronger than valour, and an elder brother's duty stronger than pride. "Robbed of my kingdom, robbed of my brother, robbed of my wings and my strength, I want only to die, and I will throw myself from the mountain peak." Four times he says "robbed", counting up his emptiness. All this is a past event told in his own words before the monkeys, and the sarga ends here; the sage's reply comes in the next.