With his broad-headed arrows,
and those equipped with heads flat and sharp as razors, and cloth-yard
shafts of bright polish, Partha mangled the bodies of his foes and cut
off their heads. The field of battle became strewn with falling warriors,
some with bodies cut and mangled, some divested of armour and some
deprived of heads. Like the great Vaitarani (separating the regions of
life from those of the dead), the field of battle, O king, became uneven
and impassable and unsightly and terrible, in consequence of steeds and
cars and elephants, which struck with Dhananjaya's shafts, were mangled
and crushed and cut off in diverse ways. The earth was also covered with
broken shafts and wheels and axles, and with cars that were steedless or
that had their steeds and others that were driverless or that had their
drivers. Then four hundred well-trained and ever-furious elephants,
excited with wrath, and ridden by warriors cased in mail of golden hue
and adorned with ornaments of gold, and urged by fierce guides with
pressure of heels and toes, fell down, struck by the diadem-decked Arjuna
with his shafts, like loosened summits, peopled with living creatures, of
gigantic mountains. Indeed, the earth became covered with (other) huge
elephants struck down by Dhananjaya with his arrows. Like the sun
piercing through masses of clouds, Arjuna's car passed through dense
bodies of elephants with juicy secretions flowing down their bodies and
looking like masses of clouds.
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