the skies, the gods, the Gandharvas, the Yakshas, the Rishis and other crowned with (ascetic) success, and the Apsaras, all came there.  Crowded then with gods and Gandharvas, and Yakshas, and Rishis crowned with (ascetic) success, and Apsaras, and the spirits of slain warriors about to enter the celestial regions, the field of battle looked like a second heaven.  Teeming with cars and steeds and elephants, brilliantly illumined with lamps, with angry combatants and horses slain or wandering wildly, that vast force of arrayed warriors and steeds and elephants looked like the arrays of the celestials and the Asuras in days of old.  The rush of darts formed the fierce winds; great cars, the cloud; the neigh and grunt of steeds and elephants, the roars; shafts, the showers; and the blood of warriors and animals, the flood, of that tempest like nocturnal encounter between those god-like men.  In the midst of that battle, that foremost of Brahmanas, viz., the high-souled Aswatthaman, scorching the Pandavas, O ruler of men, resembled the midday sun at the end of the season of rains, scorching everything with his fierce ray.’"[217]

SECTION CLXIII

“Sanjaya said, ’When the field of battle which had before been enveloped in darkness and dust had thus become illuminated, heroic warriors encountered one another, desirous of taking one another’s life.[218] Encountering one another in battle, O king, those combatants, armed with lances and swords and other weapons, gazed at one another under the influence of rage.  With thousands of lamps blazing all around and with the more blazing lamps of the gods and the Gandharvas, set upon golden stands decked with jewels, and fed with fragrant oil, the field of battle, O Bharata, looked resplendent like the firmament bespangled with stars.  With hundreds upon hundreds of blazing brands, the earth looked exceedingly beautiful.  Indeed, the earth seemed to be in a conflagration, like what happens at the universal destruction.[219] All the points of the compass blazed up with those lamps all around and looked like trees covered by fire-flies at an evening in the season of rains.  Heroic combatants, then, O king, engaged in battle with heroic rivals.  Elephants engaged with elephants, and horsemen with horsemen, and car-warriors with car-warriors, filled with joy, on that fierce night at the command of thy son.  The clash of the two armies both consisting of four kinds of forces, became terrible.  Then Arjuna, O monarch, began, with great speed, to destroy the Kaurava ranks, weakening all the kings.’