The girl replied, “O Lord, nothing at all.”
“It was not nothing at all. Tell me,” the King said a second time.
Then the girl replied, “O Lord, I am much afraid to say it. He is asking for that golden Kaekiri.”
The King said, “I will give the golden Kaekiri if thou wilt give me thy elder sister.”
The child said, “Elder sister and I, both of us, will come.”
So the King, having placed the girl on horseback, went to his city with the child, and married the girl.
After many days had passed, when the King was about to go to a war the girl was near her confinement. So the King said, “If it be a girl, shake an iron chain. If it be a boy, shake a silver chain.” Afterwards the girl bore a boy, and shook a silver chain.
Before the King came back, the girl’s father and Loku-Ammā (step-mother), having collected cobras’ eggs, polangās’[4] eggs, and the like, the eggs of all kinds of snakes, and having cooked cakes made of them, came to the place where the girl was.
The girl’s Loku-Ammā told her to eat some of the cakes. When she did not eat them, that woman, taking some in her hand, came to her and rubbed some on her mouth. At that very moment the girl became a female cobra, and dropped down into a hole in an ant-hill. Her father and Loku-Ammā went home again. The infant was crying on the bed.
Afterwards, when the girl’s younger brother was saying to the golden Kaekiri:—