Where the horses are leaf-dark and a match for the sun's own, where the elephants stand mountain-high and rain like you from their burst temples, and where the first of the fighters, who stood against the ten-faced one in battle, wear their jewellery outshone by the scars of Candrahāsa. **The stanza names no city, and its two readers put it in two.** Mallinātha writes यत्र विशालायाम् — in Viśālā, which is Ujjayinī — because in his edition this stanza stands in the first canto, among the three he prints without numbers after 1.31 and calls interpolated, in the middle of the Ujjayinī passage. This text prints it as 2.13, twelve stanzas into Alakā, where यत्र has meant Alakā every time. Nothing in the stanza settles it, and one thing outside it leans: the story of warriors scarred by Rāvaṇa's sword is Alakā's story, because Rāvaṇa is Kubera's half-brother, took Alakā from him and took the flying chariot with it. There is no such fight at Ujjayinī. That is the reader's argument and not the commentator's. **What he does name is the figure, and he names it with an 'also'**: अत्रापि भाविकालङ्कारः, 'here too the figure is bhāvika'. भाविक is vividness — something past or still to come set in front of the eye as though it were happening — and the stanza he means by 'too' is the one this text numbers 1.33, which carries the same figure and his quotation of the handbooks' definition. In his edition the two stanzas are neighbours. In this one they are forty-five apart, in different cantos, and the अपि is the thread between them. **The last line is the whole point of the stanza in one word.** प्रत्यादिष्ट is what you do to a suitor you refuse: the scars have turned the ornaments away. Mallinātha will not leave it implicit — शस्त्रप्रहारा एव वीराणां भूषणमिति भावः, 'the sense is that weapon-strokes are the ornament of heroes'.
uncheckedthe reader's reading, following Mallinātha's gloss; the reading of यत्र as Viśālā, the derivation of अग्रणी with क्विप् and the vārttika for its ण, the identification of दशमुख as Rāvaṇa and of चन्द्रहास as his sword with Śāśvata behind it, the naming of भाविक with अपि, and the closing sentence about weapon-strokes are his. The argument that the Rāvaṇa story belongs to Alakā rather than to Ujjayinī is the reader's“he jalada, yatra viśālāyām … pratidaśamukham abhirāvaṇaṃ tasthivāṃsaḥ … śastraprahārā eva vīrāṇāṃ bhūṣaṇam iti bhāvaḥ | atrāpi bhāvikālaṅkāraḥ”
Where the horses are leaf-dark and a match for the sun's own, where the elephants stand mountain-high and rain like you from their burst temples, and where the first of the fighters, who stood against the ten-faced one in battle, wear their jewellery outshone by the scars of Candrahāsa. Three sentences — horses, elephants, warriors — and the one simile in the stanza is the elephants' raining, त्वम् इव, 'like you', the rut-fluid of a great elephant likened to the water of a cloud. The stanza is the last of the twelve that describe Alakā, and it closes the city not on a pleasure but on a war: the scars of Rāvaṇa's sword, worn where jewels would be.
- Mallinātha, Sañjīvinī — 2.13, whole-verse gloss