has revealed the secret?  He called her Urvasi?” “And who, your honor, is Urvasi?” says the maid.  “She is one of the apsaras,” he says.  “The sight of her has infatuated the king’s senses so that he tortures not only the queen but me, the Brahman, too, for he no longer thinks of eating.”  But he expresses his conviction that the folly will not last long, and the maid departs.

Urvasi, tortured, like the king, by love and doubt, suppresses her bashfulness and asks one of her friends to go with her to get her pearl necklace which she had left entangled in the vine.  “Then you are hurrying down, surely, to see Pururavas, the king?” says the friend; “and whom have you sent in advance?” “My heart,” replied Urvasi.  So they fly down to the earth, invisible to mortals, and when they see the king, Urvasi declares that he seems to her even more beautiful than at their first meeting.  They listen to the conversation between him and the viduschaka.  The latter advises his master to seek consolation by dreaming of a union with his love, or by painting her picture, but the king answers that dreams cannot come to a man who is unable to sleep, nor would a picture be able to stop his flood of tears.  “The god of love has pierced my heart and now he tortures me by denying my wish.”  Encouraged by these words, but unwilling to make herself visible, Urvasi takes a piece of birch-bark, writes on it a message, and throws it down.  The king sees it fall, picks it up and reads: 

“I love you, O master; you did not know, nor I, that you burn with love for me.  No longer do I find rest on my coral couch, and the air of the celestial grove burns me like fire.”

“What will he say to that?” wonders Urvasi, and her friend replies, “Is there not an answer in his limbs, which have become like withered lotos stalks?” The king declares to his friend that the message on the leaf has made him as happy as if he had seen his beloved’s face.  Fearing that the perspiration on his hand (the sign of violent love) might wash away the message, he gives the birch-bark to the viduschaka.  Urvasi’s friend now makes herself visible to the king, who welcomes her, but adds that the sight of her delights him not as it did when Urvasi was with her.  “Urvasi bows before you,” the apsara answers, “and sends this message:  ’You were my protector, O master, when a demon offered me violence.  Since I saw you, god Kama has tortured me violently; therefore you must sometime take pity on me, great king!’” And the king retorts:  “The ardor of love is here equally great on either side.  It is proper that hot iron be welded with hot iron.”  After this Urvasi makes herself visible, too, but the king has hardly had time to greet her, when a celestial messenger arrives to summon her hastily back to heaven, to her own great distress and the king’s.

Left alone, the king wants to seek consolation in the message written on the birch-bark.  But to their consternation, they cannot find it.  It had dropped from the viduschaka’s hand and the wind had carried it off.  “O wind of Malaya,” laments the king,