on side by side with the other. Until near midday [214] the other flew with the sun, and then he grew faint and felt as though a fire had been kindled in the joints of his wings. Making a sign to the Great Being, he cried, "Brother, I cannot do it!" Him too the Great Being comforted in the same way, and taking him on his outspread wings, bore him to Cittakuta. At that moment the sun was plumb overhead. The Great Being thought, "To-day I will test the sun's strength;" and darting back with one swoop, he perched on Yugandhara. Then rising with one swoop he overtook the sun, and flying now in front, now behind, thought to himself, "For me to fly with the sun is profitless, born of mere folly: what is he to me? Away I will to Benares, and there tell my comrade the king a message of righteousness and truth." Then turning, ere yet the sun had moved from the middle of the sky, he traversed the whole world from end to end; then slackening speed, traversed from end to end the whole of India, and came at last to Benares. The whole city, twelve leagues in compass, was as it were under the bird's shadow , there was not a crack or crevice; then as by degrees the speed slackened, holes and crevices appeared in the sky. The Great Being went slower, and came down from the air, and alighted in front of a window. "My comrade is come!" cried the king in great joy; and getting a golden seat for the bird to perch on, said, "Come in, friend, and sit here," and recited the first stanza:

"Come, noble Goose, come sit you here; dear is your sight to me;
Now you are master of the place; choose anything you see."

The Great Being perched on the golden seat. The king anointed him under the wings with unguents a hundred times refined, nay, a thousand times, gave him sweet rice and sugared water in a golden dish, and talked with him in a voice of honey--[215] "Good friend, you have come alone; whence come you now?" The bird told him the whole matter at large. Then the king said to him: "Friend, show me too your swiftness against the sun."--"O mighty king, that swiftness cannot be shown."--"Then show me something like it." "Very good, O king, I will show you something like it. Summon your archers who can shoot swift as lightning." The king sent for them. The Great Being chose four of these, and with them went down from the palace into the courtyard. There he caused to be set up in the ground a stone column, and about his own neck a bell to be bound. He then perched on the top of the stone pillar, and placing the four archers looking away from the pillar towards the four points, said, "O king, let these four men shoot four arrows at the same moment in four