grief and
weeping and crying around them in woe, O tiger of Vrishni's race! The
faces of those beautiful ladies, O Keshava, though pale, look resplendent
still, like an assemblage of red lotuses! Those Kuru ladies have ceased
to weep, with their respective followers and companions. They are all
filled with anxiety. Overwhelmed with sorrow, they are running hither and
thither. The faces of those fair ones have, with weeping and anger,
become resplendent as the morning sun or gold or burnished copper.
Hearing each other's lamentations of incomplete sense, those ladies, in
consequence of the loud wails of woe bursting from every side, are unable
to catch each other's meaning. Some amongst them, drawing long sighs and
indulging in repeated lamentations, are stupefied by grief and are
abandoning their life-breaths. Many of them, beholding the bodies (of
their sons, husbands, or sires), are weeping and setting up loud wails.
Others are striking their heads with their own soft hands. The earth,
strewn with severed heads and hands and other limbs mingled together and
gathered in large heaps, looks resplendent with these signs of havoc!
Beholding many headless trunks of great beauty, and many heads without
trunks, those fair ones have been lying senseless on the ground for a
long while. Uniting particular heads with particular trunks, those
ladies, senseless with grief, are again discovering their mistakes and
saying, "This is not this ones," and are weeping more bitterly! Others,
uniting arms and thighs and feet, cut off with shafts, are giving way to
grief and losing their senses repeatedly (at the sight of the restored
forms). Some amongst the Bharata ladies, beholding the bodies of their
lords,--bodies that have been mangled by animals and birds and severed of
their heads,--are not succeeding in recognising them. Others, beholding
their brothers, sires, sons, and husbands slain by foes, are, O destroyer
of Madhu, striking their heads with their own hands. Miry with flesh and
blood, the Earth has become impassable with arms still holding swords in
their grasp, and with heads adorned with earrings. Beholding the field
strewn with their brothers and sires, and sons, those faultless ladies,
who had never before suffered the least distress, are now plunged into
unutterable woe. Behold, O Janardana, those numerous bevies of
Dhritarashtra's daughters-in-law, resembling successive multitudes of
handsome fillies adorned with excellent