long years were again filled with joy. The night sped quickly by in tender
conversation, and when morning came, all the dead mounted into their
chariots and disappeared. Those who had come to meet them prepared to
leave the river, but with the permission of Vyasa, the widows drowned
themselves that they might rejoin their husbands.

Not long after his return to Hastinapur, Yudhi-sthira heard that the old
Raja and his wife had lost their lives in a jungle-fire; and soon after
this, tidings came to him of the destruction of the city of the Yadavas,
the capital of Krishna, in punishment for the dissipation of its
inhabitants.

Yudhi-sthira's reign of thirty-six years had been a succession of gloomy
events, and he began to grow weary of earth and to long for the blessings
promised above. He therefore determined to make the long and weary
pilgrimage to Heaven without waiting for death. According to the
Maha-Bharata, the earth was divided into seven concentric rings, each of
which was surrounded by an ocean or belt separating it from the next
annular continent. The first ocean was of salt water; the second, of the
juice of the sugar-cane; the third, of wine; the fourth, of clarified
butter; the fifth, of curdled milk; the sixth, of sweet milk; the seventh,
of fresh water. In the centre of this vast annular system Mount Meru rose
to the height of sixty-four thousand miles.

Upon this mountain was supposed to rest the heaven of the Hindus, and
thither Yudhi-sthira proposed to make his pilgrimage. His brothers and
their wife Draupadi insisted on going with him, for all were equally weary
of the world. Their people would fain have accompanied them, but the
princes sent them back and went unaccompanied save by their faithful dog.
They kept on, fired by their high resolves, until they reached the long