Arjuna had spent his whole life learning to measure things.

A good archer must measure everything. How far the target stands. How hard the wind pushes. How heavy the arrow, how tight the string. As a boy he had practised until he could judge a distance with one glance and almost never miss. He was proud of that careful, measuring eye.

But now, sitting in the chariot between the two great armies, he found something he could not measure at all.

Krishna had just spoken of being the source of the gods themselves — of coming before the sages, before the worlds, before time. Arjuna tried to picture it, the way he pictured a flight of arrows curving toward a mark. Where did Krishna begin? He reached for an edge, a starting point, a far wall he could aim at. There was none. His mind went out and out and found no end, the way a thrown stone, dropped into a still well at night, falls and falls and never seems to strike the bottom.

He thought of the great sea near Dwaraka, where he had once stood as a young man. He had waded in to his knees and tried to guess how deep it went further out. A fisherman beside him had laughed kindly. "Boy," the old man said, "no one standing on the shore knows the deep. Only the sea knows the sea."

Now Arjuna understood that saying in a new way.

He looked at his friend — the dark, calm face, the steady hands on the reins, the small smile. This was the same Krishna who had eaten at his table, who had teased him, who had wept with him. And yet inside that ordinary friend was something with no shore and no floor, something only Krishna himself could see all the way down.

Arjuna pressed his palms together. "You alone know Yourself, by Yourself," he said softly. "Supreme Person. Source of all beings. Lord of all that lives. God of gods. Ruler of the world."

He was not measuring any more. For the first time in his life, the careful archer set down his measuring eye and simply bowed his head before something larger than all measuring.