Victor of a hundred battles, Arjun bent his homeward way,
  Following still the sacred charger free to wander as it may,
  Strolling minstrels to Yudhishthir spake of the returning steed,
  Spake of Arjun wending homeward with the victor’s crown of meed.

Next we learn that the blind king, still mourning the death of his sons, retired to the bank of the Ganges, where he and his wife spent their last years listening to the monotonous ripple of the sacred waters.  Fifteen years after the great battle, the five Pandavs and Draupadi came to visit him, and, after sitting for a while on the banks of the sacred stream, bathed in its waters as Vyasa advised them.  While doing so they saw the wraiths of all their kinsmen slain in the Great Battle rise from the boiling waters, and passed the night in conversation with them, although these spirits vanished at dawn into thin air.  But the widows of the slain then obtained permission to drown themselves in the Ganges, in order to join their beloved husbands beyond the tomb.

  “These and other mighty warriors, in the earthly battle slain,
  By their valor and their virtue walk the bright ethereal plain! 
  They have cast their mortal bodies, crossed the radiant gate of heaven,
  For to win celestial mansions unto mortals it is given! 
  Let them strive by kindly action, gentle speech, endurance long,
  Brighter life and holier future unto sons of men belong!”

Then the Pandav brothers and their wife took leave of the blind king, whom they were destined never to see again, for some two years later a terrible jungle fire consumed both cottage and inmates.  This death was viewed by the Pandavs as a bad omen, as was also the destruction of Krishna’s capital because his people drank too much wine.  Krishna himself was slain by accident, while a hurricane or tidal wave sweeping over the “city of Drunkenness” wiped it off the face of the earth.

Having found life a tragedy of sorrow, the eldest Pandav, after reigning thirty-six years, decided to abdicate in favor of Arjuna’s grandson, and to start on a pilgrimage for Mount Meru, or Indra’s heaven.  As the Hindu universe consists of seven concentric rings, each of which is separated by a liquid from the next continent, he had to cross successive oceans of salt water, sugar-cane juice, wine, clarified butter, curdled milk, sweet milk, and fresh water.  In the very centre of these alternate rings of land and liquid rises Mount Meru to a height of sixty-four thousand miles, crowned by the Hindu heaven, toward which the Pandav was to wend his way.  But, although all their subjects would fain have gone with them, the five brothers, Draupadi, and a faithful dog set out alone in single file, “to accomplish their union with the infinite.”

  Then the high-minded sons of Pandu and the noble Draupadi
  Roamed onward, fasting, with their faces toward the east; their
       hearts
  Yearning for union with the Infinite, bent on abandonment
  Of worldly things.