propitiatory rites.  Agriculture and keep of cattle were given up.  Markets and shops were abandoned.  Stakes for tethering sacrificial animals disappeared.  People no longer collected diverse kinds of articles for sacrifices.  All festivals and amusements perished.  Everywhere heaps of bones were visible and every place resounded with the shrill cries and yells of fierce creatures.[428] The cities and towns of the earth became empty of inhabitants.  Villages and hamlets were burnt down.  Some afflicted by robbers, some by weapons, and some by bad kings, and in fear of one another, began to fly away.  Temples and places of worship became desolate.  They that were aged were forcibly turned out of their houses.  Kine and goats and sheep and buffaloes fought (for food) and perished in large numbers.  The Brahmanas began to die on all sides.  Protection was at an end.  Herbs and plants were dried up.  The earth became shorn of all her beauty and exceedingly awful like the trees in a crematorium.  In that period of terror, when righteousness was nowhere, O Yudhishthira, men in hunger lost their senses and began to eat one another.  The very Rishis, giving up their vows and abandoning their fires and deities, and deserting their retreats in woods, began to wander hither and thither (in search of food).  The holy and great Rishi Viswamitra, possessed of great intelligence, wandered homeless and afflicted with hunger.  Leaving his wife and son in some place of shelter, the Rishi wandered, fireless[429] and homeless, and regardless of food clean and unclean.  One day he came upon a hamlet, in the midst of a forest, inhabited by cruel hunters addicted to the slaughter of living creatures.  The little hamlet abounded with broken jars and pots made of earth.  Dog-skins were spread here and there.  Bones and skulls, gathered in heaps, of boars and asses, lay in different places.  Cloths stripped from the dead lay here and there, and the huts were adorned with garlands of used up flowers.[430] Many of the habitations again were filled with sloughs cast off by snakes.  The place resounded with the loud crowing of cocks and hens and the dissonant bray of asses.  Here and there the inhabitants disputed with one another, uttering harsh words in shrill voices.  Here and there were temples of gods bearing devices of owls and other birds.  Resounding with the tinkle of iron bells, the hamlet abounded with canine packs standing or lying on every side.  The great Rishi Viswamitra, urged by pangs of hunger and engaged in search after food, entered that hamlet and endeavoured his best to find something to eat.  Though the son of Kusika begged repeatedly, yet he failed to obtain any meat or rice or fruit or root or any other kind of food.  He then, exclaiming, ‘Alas, great is the distress that has overtaken me!’ fell down from weakness in that hamlet of the Chandalas.  The sage began to reflect, saying to himself, ‘What is best for me to do now?’ Indeed, O best of kings, the thought that