The Mountain He Carried

Ravana's son Indrajit fought from inside a cloud, where nobody could see him, and at dusk he loosed the weapon of Brahma on Rama's army. Rama and Lakshmana fell. All round them the monkeys and bears lay on the field in heaps, and the night came down on them.

Vibhishana went among the bodies with a torch, looking for anyone alive, and Hanuman went with him. They found the old bear Jambavan lying with arrows all over him, too weak to open his eyes.

"Can you hear me?" said Vibhishana.

"I know your voice," said Jambavan. "Tell me one thing. Is Hanuman alive?"

Vibhishana was surprised. "Why ask about him first?" he said. "Why not about Rama, or Lakshmana?"

"Because if Hanuman lives," said Jambavan, "then all of us live, even the ones who are dead."

Hanuman knelt beside him, and Jambavan told him what to do. Far to the north, beyond the snows, between the mountains Rishabha and Kailasa, there was a mountain covered in herbs. Four of them would save the army: one that brings the dead back, one that draws out arrows, one that heals wounds and one that gives back the colour of life.

"Go," said Jambavan, "and come back before the sun."

Hanuman went up from the battlefield, over the sea, over the whole length of the land, and came down on the mountain of herbs in the dark. The herbs knew what he had come for, and hid. He could not tell one plant from another.

He did not waste time looking. He took hold of the peak, tore it off with its trees and its animals and its springs, and flew back south carrying it, shining with the herbs, like a second sun coming up over Lanka.

The wind off the herbs went across the battlefield. Rama and Lakshmana sat up. The monkeys and bears got up, healed, as if they had been asleep. Hanuman flew the mountain back where it belonged, and came back to fight.

Later in the war Ravana himself struck Lakshmana down with a spear. Rama pulled it out of his brother's chest with his own hands, broke it, and sat down by him on the field and wept, and said he had no wish to win a war that cost him Lakshmana.

The monkey physician Sushena felt the wounded man's face and said he was not dead yet. He sent Hanuman for the herbs once more. Again Hanuman brought the mountain, and Sushena crushed a herb from it and held it under Lakshmana's nose, and Lakshmana woke.

"What happened?" he said.

In Tulsidas's telling it is Lakshmana alone who falls, struck by Indrajit's spear, and Rama sits with his brother's head in his lap and weeps all night.

Hanuman fetches the physician Sushena from Lanka, house and all, and Sushena names the herb. As Hanuman flies north Ravana sends the demon Kalanemi ahead of him, disguised as a holy man by a pond, to delay him with talk. A crocodile in the pond, a nymph under a curse, warns Hanuman, and he kills the false sage and goes on.

Coming back over Ayodhya at night with the mountain in his hand, he is seen by Bharata, who thinks he is a demon and shoots him down with a blunt arrow. Hanuman falls crying Rama's name.

"Who are you?" says Bharata, horrified.

When he hears, he offers to send Hanuman to Lanka on his own arrow, faster than flying. Hanuman thanks him and flies.

In the camp Rama has been talking to his unconscious brother all night, the way people do.

"If I had known," he says, "that I would lose my brother in the forest, I would not have obeyed my father. Wives can be found again, and wealth, and kingdoms. A brother like you cannot. What will I say to your mother?"

Hanuman comes down out of the dark with the mountain before the sun is up. Sushena gives Lakshmana the herb and he sits up, and Rama holds him, and the whole camp shouts. Then Hanuman carries Sushena home to Lanka, house and all, before anyone there has noticed he was gone.