The Dark and Dangerous Adventure, pp. 229-231

Opening Remarks
Aswapati ventured into this dark and dangerous realm to know its source of power and remedy. He enters the pit and the cave of Night.

Infernal realm
In this infernal realm he dared to press
Even into its deepest pit and darkest core,
Perturbed its tenebrous base, dared to contest
Its ancient privileged right and absolute force:
In Night he plunged to know her dreadful heart,
In Hell he sought the root and cause of Hell.

Aswapati now plunges into the absolute core of the Night. He seeks to discover its secret heart and source of Power. He seeks to challenge its authority and discover the root cause and the radical cure of Hell.

Anguished gulfs
Its anguished gulfs opened in his own breast;
He listened to clamours of its crowded pain,
The heart-beats of its fatal loneliness.

Aswapati approaches the core of Night. The anguished gulfs filled with the murmurs of pain opened their doors in his breast and he experienced the fatal and grim loneliness of the Night. This loneliness of the Abyss is the loneliness and pain of an utter sense of separation from the Divine.

Deaf eternity
Above was a chill deaf eternity.

The eternity above him seemed to be deaf and cold impervious to all aspiration and prayer and hope.

Passages of Doom
In vague tremendous passages of Doom
He heard the goblin Voice that guides to slay,
And faced the enchantments of the demon Sign,
And traversed the ambush of the opponent Snake.

Travelling through passages where one is doomed forever he heard voices of goblins that misguide the soul towards its doom. He also faced the dubious enchantments of a demonic force and the ambush of the hostile forces opposing his soul’s advance.

Fierce inner wounds
In menacing tracts, in tortured solitudes
Companionless he roamed through desolate ways
Where the red Wolf waits by the fordless stream
And Death’s black eagles scream to the precipice,
And met the hounds of bale who hunt men’s hearts
Baying across the veldts of Destiny,
In footless battlefields of the Abyss
Fought shadowy combats in mute eyeless depths,
Assaults of Hell endured and Titan strokes
And bore the fierce inner wounds that are slow to heal.

It is a menacing journey through tortured spaces where he must go companionless and desolate. Here the hostile forces, the red wolf and black eagles of Death awaited and screamed drawing him closer to an adverse destiny. He trod across battlefields in the Abyss where one has no foothold as support and fought blindfold combats in blind depths that knew not Light. He endured the inner wounds that are slow to heal inflicted by Hell as punishment for his adventure into its realm.

Drank her poison draughts
A prisoner of a hooded magic Force,
Captured and trailed in Falsehood’s lethal net
And often strangled in the noose of grief,
Or cast in the grim morass of swallowing doubt,
Or shut into pits of error and despair,
He drank her poison draughts till none was left.

Captive of a hooded magic force he trailed in falsehood’s lethal net and felt the strangling grip of grief. Or he experienced the morass of doubt threatening to swallow his being. Or shut into pits of despair he drank the poison draughts like a veritable Shiva until all was absorbed.

Ordeal suffered
In a world where neither hope nor joy could come
The ordeal he suffered of evil’s absolute reign,
Yet kept intact his spirit’s radiant truth.

He suffered the long ordeal of a joyless hopeless state which marks evil’s absolute reign. Yet in spite of all this torture and torment he kept intact the radiant truth of his spirit with which he was born.

Blank denial
Incapable of motion or of force,
In Matter’s blank denial gaoled and blind,
Pinned to the black inertia of our base
He treasured between his hands his flickering soul.

Stuck in the utter inertia of inconscient and the blank denial of Matter he stayed as in a gaol as if without any force. All that he kept intact was his soul treasured between his hands.

Mindless Void
His being ventured into mindless Void,
Intolerant gulfs that knew not thought nor sense;
Thought ceased, sense failed, his soul still saw and knew.

It is a realm where thought and mind cease to be. These gulfs were intolerant of thought and sense and light and rushed to slay them as soon as they were born. Yet his soul, intact and luminous still knew and saw through the darkness.

Closing Remarks
Thus Aswapati enters the core of Night where despair and doom and a blank denial are the very way and law of life.