The Wonderful Mango Fruit—p. [220].
Analogues of this story are found in a Canarese collection entitled Kathá Manjarí, with a magpie in place of a parrot as the bearer of the youth-renewing fruit, and in the Tútí Náma (or Parrot-Book) of Nakhshabí, a work written A.D. 1329, which has not yet been completely translated into English, and is now generally known from Káderi’s abridgment.
Fruits having the property of restoring the youth and vigour of those who ate of them figure in many Asiatic stories—there is a notable instance in the opening of the Indian collection entitled Sinhasana Dwatrinsati, or Thirty-two (Tales) of a Throne. And from the East the notion was introduced into the European mediæval romances; for example, in the Boke of Duke Huon of Burdeux, “at the bidding of an angel,” I quote from Mr. Sydney L. Lee’s notes to his edition of the work printed for the Early English Text Society, “Huon gathers three of the Apples of Youth, each of which when eaten by a man of eighty or a hundred years old transforms him to a young man of thirty. Huon bestows one of the apples on the admiral of Tauris and his white hair and beard grow yellow as he eats it, and he suddenly becomes a youth of strength and beauty. The second is eaten by the abbot of Cluny, who is 114 years old, with similar results. The third rejuvenates Thierry, emperor of Germany.”
The Poisoned Food—p. [226].
This is the third instance in the romance of food being poisoned by serpents, and it is of very common occurrence in Eastern fictions. The oldest known form of the story is found in a Sanskrit collection entitled Vetálapanchavinsati, or Twenty-five (Tales) of a Vetála, or Vampyre, which is given fully in the Appendix to my Book of Sindibád, and the story occurs in all the Eastern texts of the Sindibád cycle. This Tamil version is peculiar in representing an old man as falling a victim to the poison dropped from a snake’s mouth into food given him by a young pilgrim, and the imprisoning of the latter in the village temple of Kálí and so forth. In all other versions known to me, the poison is dropped into an open dish of milk carried by a slave-girl on her head, and her master’s guests, partaking of the milk, all perish.
The Rescued Snake—p. [231].
With an important difference, this tale resembles that of the Bráhman and the Lion, p. [254], which is a variant of the world-wide fable of the Hunter and the Serpent—the difference being that in this case the snake ultimately rewards its rescuer. In the story of Nala and Damayanti, the rájá rescues a snake from a jangal fire and carries it some distance and is about to set it down when the snake says: “Carry me ten steps farther, and count them as you go.” So Nala proceeds, counting the steps—one, two, three; and when he says “ten” (Sansk. dasa, which means “bite” as well as “ten”) the snake takes him at his word and bites the rájá on the forehead, upon which he becomes black. But this the snake does for Nala’s own benefit, that he should not be recognised in his degradation.
The Rose of Bakáwalí.
In the Introduction to the present collection will be found the few particulars which are known regarding this romance and its original Persian author. There is, I think, strong evidence of its being of Hindú extraction. In the absence of any similar work in Sanskrit or one of the vernacular languages of India, we can only suppose that the author of the Gul-i Bakáwalí drew his materials from various and more or less distinct, or separate, fictions; and this supposition seems fully borne out by the somewhat loose arrangement of the later incidents. The narrative down to the end of the sixth chapter (p. [315]), as I have divided it, is complete in itself: the Prince wins at backgammon the immense wealth of Dilbar, and her own person besides; he is married to the beauteous damsel Mahmúda; he procures the magical Rose; he has a splendid palace erected for him by the fairies, becomes reconciled to his father, and puts his false brothers to shame; and after a number of wondrous adventures is united to the fairy Bakáwalí, and “passed his time with these rosy-lipped beauties, immersed in a sea of bliss.” Surely this is the usual conclusion of a romance, and all that follows was an afterthought. It is, of course, quite in keeping with “the fitness of things” romantic that the hero should have to undergo some tribulation before becoming possessed of Bakáwalí; but that fairy’s subsequent punishment by the deity Indra; the hero’s marriage with the princess Chitrawat; the re-birth of Bakáwalí—which, as I have already remarked, is quite out of place in a Muslim work, though very proper in a Hindú story; and the love-affair of Bahrám are evidently incidents which have been taken out of different tales, albeit we should be sorry to have them omitted, for they are all very entertaining.