Markets and shops were abandoned. Stakes
for tethering sacrificial animals disappeared. People no longer collected
diverse kinds of articles for sacrifices. All festivals and amusements
perished. Everywhere heaps of bones were visible and every place
resounded with the shrill cries and yells of fierce creatures.[428] The
cities and towns of the earth became empty of inhabitants. Villages and
hamlets were burnt down. Some afflicted by robbers, some by weapons, and
some by bad kings, and in fear of one another, began to fly away. Temples
and places of worship became desolate. They that were aged were forcibly
turned out of their houses. Kine and goats and sheep and buffaloes fought
(for food) and perished in large numbers. The Brahmanas began to die on
all sides. Protection was at an end. Herbs and plants were dried up. The
earth became shorn of all her beauty and exceedingly awful like the trees
in a crematorium. In that period of terror, when righteousness was
nowhere, O Yudhishthira, men in hunger lost their senses and began to eat
one another. The very Rishis, giving up their vows and abandoning their
fires and deities, and deserting their retreats in woods, began to wander
hither and thither (in search of food). The holy and great Rishi
Viswamitra, possessed of great intelligence, wandered homeless and
afflicted with hunger. Leaving his wife and son in some place of shelter,
the Rishi wandered, fireless[429] and homeless, and regardless of food
clean and unclean.
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