from the city with a great retinue, and passing through a succession of villages and hamlets reached the frontiers. Then he turned back the people of the country and went on with the dwellers on the borders till he entered the forest, and passing beyond the haunts of men he sent back the border people too, and proceeded quite alone on a road to a distance of thirty leagues, traversing a dense growth of kuca and other grasses, thickets of basil, reeds and rest-harrow, clumps of thick-thorn and canes, thickets of mixed growth, jungles of reed and cane, dense forest growth, impenetrable even to a snake, thickets of trees and bamboos, tracts of mud and water, mountain tracts, eighteen regions in all, one after another. The jungles of grass he cut with a sickle, the thickets of basil and the like he cleared with his instrument for cutting bamboos, the trees he felled with an axe, and the oversized ones he first pierced with an auger. Then, pursuing his way, he fashioned a ladder in the bamboo grove and climbing to the top of the thicket, he laid a single bamboo, which he had cut, over the next clump of bamboos, and thus creeping along on the top of the thicket he reached a morass. [47] Then he spread a dry plank on the mud, and stepping on it he threw another plank before him and so crossed the morass. Then he made a canoe and by means of it crossed the flooded region, and at last stood at the foot of the mountains. Then he bound a three-pronged grappling-iron with a rope and flinging it aloft he caused it to lodge fast in the mountain. Then climbing up by the rope he drilled the mountain with an iron staff tipped with adamant, and knocking a peg into the hole he stood on it. Then drawing out the grappling-iron he once more lodged it high up on the mountain, and from this position letting the leather rope hang down, he took hold of it and descended and fastened the rope on the peg below. Then seizing the rope with his left hand and taking a hammer in his right he struck a blow on the rope, and having thus pulled out the peg he once more climbed up. In this way he mounted to the top of the first mountain and then commencing his descent on the other side, having knocked as before a peg into the top of the first mountain and bound the rope on his leather sack and wrapped it round the peg, he sat within the sack and let himself down, uncoiling the rope like a spider letting out his thread. Then letting his leather parachute catch the wind, he went down like a bird--so at least they say. Thus did the Master tell how in obedience to Subhadda's words the hunter sallied forth from the city and traversed seventeen different tracts till he reached a mountainous region, and how he there crossed over six mountains and climbed to the top of Golden Cliff:

The hunter hearing, unalarmed,
Set forth with bow and quiver armed,
And crossing o'er seven mountains vast
Reached noble Golden Cliff at last.