The Army Moves Forward

With Sītā found and her captivity confirmed, there was no more reason for delay, and Rāma gave the word, and the great vānara host mobilized for war. Sugrīva summoned the full strength of his kingdom, the armies of the monkey- people gathered from every mountain and forest of the world, and they came, a multitude beyond counting, until the whole country seemed to move, and the army set out southward toward the sea, toward the crossing that would carry them to Lankā and to war.

The tellers give us the spectacle of that march, and it was a spectacle indeed. Imagine the vast host on the move: the earth trembling under the tread of numberless vānaras, the dust rising in a great cloud that darkened the sky, the din of the marching army rolling across the land like continuous thunder, the whole enormous force pouring southward with Rāma and Lakshmaṇa at its head, and Sugrīva the king, and Hanumān, and Angada, and Jāmbavān, and all the mighty leaders of the monkey-people, a river of warriors flowing toward the sea.

It was an army such as the world had rarely seen, gathered for a righteous war, marching to break a fortress that had never been breached and to bring down a king who had never been conquered, and the sight and sound of it filled the lands it passed through with awe.

And Rāma led them, and the tellers pause on the change that had come over him, for the grieving husband of the forest was now a commander marching to war, and the two were held together in him. He had not ceased to be the man who wept over Sītā’s jewel; but that grief had been forged now into purpose, into the cold steady resolve of one who knows exactly what he must do and is going to do it.

He led the host with the calm authority of a great captain, ordering the march, heartening the warriors, planning the campaign with Sugrīva and Lakshmaṇa and the vānara chiefs, and beneath all the calm command there burned the single unwavering purpose that had carried him from the empty cottage to this: to reach Sītā, to destroy the power that held her, to take her back with honour. The grief had become an army on the march, and the love had become a war.

They came at last to the shore of the southern sea, and there the great host halted, for before them lay the barrier that had stopped the searchers: the ocean, vast, deep, a hundred leagues of open water, and beyond it, invisible over the curve of the world, the golden city of Lankā.

The army that had marched so mightily across the land now stood at the water’s edge and could go no further, for an army cannot leap as Hanumān had leapt; the whole host, for all its numbers and its strength, was stopped dead by the sea, exactly as the searchers had been stopped, and the same despair that had touched the search party now brushed the army, for how was such a host to cross such a sea?

The ocean lay before them, immense and impassable, a silent grey barrier between the army and its goal, and the whole enterprise, which had marched so confidently to the shore, now faced the question that the shore had always posed: how to cross. Hanumān alone had leapt it; but Hanumān was one, and here was a host of countless thousands, with no wings, no ships, no bridge, and a hundred leagues of open water between them and the enemy they had come so far to fight.

The army made its camp along the shore, and Rāma and his captains looked out over the vast water toward the unseen city, and pondered the crossing, and the great question of how the ocean was to be passed hung over the whole host as it settled by the sea.

But the halting at the sea, though it posed a hard question, was also the completion of a great stage, and the tellers mark it as such. The alliance had been made; the search had succeeded; the army had been gathered and marched to the very edge of the enemy’s domain. Everything that could be done on the near side of the ocean had been done. What remained was the crossing, and then the war, and both of these were now close at hand, waiting only on the solving of the sea.

And while Rāma’s host camped on the shore and pondered how to cross, on the far side of that same sea, in the golden city that had already once been entered and burned, a very different mood was gathering, for Lankā had seen a single servant of Rāma wreck its garden and slay its prince and burn its streets, and now word was coming that the master of that servant was marching to the sea with an army beyond counting, and the golden city that had never known fear was beginning, at last, to be afraid.