The boy said, “Aḍē! Bola, art thou saying Baṇa?[4] I have no means of stretching out my hands to descend,” he said.
“What is in thy hands?” he asked.
“In this hand I have small Lizard’s eggs; in this other hand I have large Lizard’s eggs,” he said. “A sort of Lizards as big as Talipat trunks and Coconut trunks will be coming.”
Then the Leopard, saying, “Stay thou there, boy, until I have run a little far,” bounded off and ran away.
Durayā. North-western Province.
In The Orientalist, vol. i, p. 117 ff., the latter part of this tale was given by Miss J. A. Goonetilleke, containing the fight of the animals and the incidents that follow it. The animals were a “Bloodsucker” Lizard and a “tiger,” a word often used in Ceylon where “leopard” is intended to be understood. There are no tigers in Ceylon.
An incident like that in the chena, in which the knife wounded the Leopard, is found in Old Deccan Days (Frere), p. 177. In it a barber tied a knife to a cucumber, and it wounded a Jackal who began to eat the fruit.
In Wide-Awake Stories (Steel and Temple), p. 240—Tales of the Punjab, p. 227—a woman who was being carried off by robbers while on her bed, seized a branch and climbed up a tree when they paused under a Banyan tree. The same incident is given in The Orientalist, vol. i, p. 40.
With regard to the fear of the lizard which the leopard is described in the Sinhalese story as exhibiting, I am able to state that it is not much exaggerated. Many years ago, on returning to my bungalow one day, at a tank in a wild part of the jungle, I found that a lizard of the species mentioned in this tale—a Kaṭussā or “Bloodsucker”—had entered my bedroom. I brought up a tame, full-grown leopard which I then had, and introduced it to the lizard, as a new experience for it. At first it was inclined to play with the lizard, but on pretending to seize it with its mouth it felt the spikes on the lizard’s back, and immediately showed the greatest fear of it. The attempts which it made to escape when the lizard came in its direction were quite ridiculous, and it became so terrified that I was obliged to take it away to the security of its den, a large packing-case under a tree to which it was tethered, leaving the lizard the complete master of the situation, though probably nearly equally alarmed.