दंष्ट्राकरालानि च ते मुखानि दृष्ट्वैव कालानलसन्निभानि।दिशो न जाने न लभे च शर्म प्रसीद देवेश जगन्निवास॥
danṣṭrā-karālāni ca te mukhānidṛṣṭvaiva kālānala-sannibhānidiśo na jāne na labhe ca śarmaprasīda deveśa jagan-nivāsa
Word by word
The verse says
Seeing your mouths with their terrible teeth, like the fire at the end of time, I do not know the directions and I find no shelter. Have mercy, lord of gods, home of the worlds.
In plain words
Diśo na jāne — I do not know which way is which.
Not frightened of something in front of him. Disoriented, which is a different and worse thing.
And then the first direct plea of the chapter: prasīda — be gracious. Please.
Where you've felt this · in study
You come out of an unfamiliar railway station in heavy fog and every direction looks the same. You are not in danger and the town is perfectly ordinary. But you cannot pick a way to walk, and standing still starts to feel like the only safe thing to do.
Going deeper
Losing the directions is a precise description of what the vision has done, and it is worse than fear of a specific thing.
Fear with an object leaves you something to do. You can face it, avoid it, run. What Arjuna reports is the loss of the frame inside which doing anything would make sense — no directions, no shelter, nowhere that is not this. There is no action available because there is no orientation to act from.
That is the state he was in at the start of the book, in a different form. Chapter 1 ended with him sitting down in the chariot because he could not see a direction that was not ruinous.
The difference is what he does about it. Then, he collapsed and went silent. Here, he asks. One word — be gracious — addressed to somebody he is terrified of, which is the first move of the recovery even though nothing has changed yet.