After that, this Prince, having seized and beheaded the Minister who had told [the King] the stratagem for the purpose of killing him, summoned the whole of the citizens, and said to the people, “For the offence which the King committed against me I put the King into the tunnel, and killed him. From to-day the King of this city is I myself.”
[Thereafter] exercising the sovereignty, marrying the Gem Princess, and establishing that King’s Queen as a female servant, he remained there.
Siwurāla (ex-monk). North-central Province.
In Sagas from the Far East, p. 97, in a Kalmuk story a painter who was jealous of a wood-carver presented to the Khan a pretended note from his dead father, requesting that the carver might be sent to the kingdom of the Gods, and stating that the painter would show the way. The painter explained that the carver must be burnt in a pyre, with much drum beating, and rise to heaven on a horse through the clouds of smoke. The carver escaped by a tunnel which his wife excavated to the centre of the pyre, getting into it while the timber by which he was surrounded was burning. After a month he gave the Khan a letter from his father in heaven, ordering him to reward the carver richly, and to send the painter to decorate the temple which had been built. The painter was thus killed in the way he designed for the carver’s death.
There is a variant in the Sierra Leone country, given in Cunnie Rabbit, etc. (Cronise and Ward), p. 254. As advised by a messenger, a King who wished to kill his son told him that he should be King, and that in order to be crowned he must be tied in a mat, thrown into a deep pool, and left there three days. When the party halted on the way and left the bundle on the path for a time, the youth got a child to unfasten the package, and inserted a large stone which was afterwards duly thrown into the water. After three days the youth made his appearance wearing a crown and riding a horse. He was acclaimed as King, and he stated that he had been ordered to send his father’s messenger to be crowned in the same way. He was seized, tied up, and drowned.
[1] Kapi kawatakan, silly jokes. [↑]
[2] The light that he saw was caused by her brilliance. See the end of No. 204, vol. iii. In the Kathā Sarit Sāgara (Tawney), vol. i, p. 16, a beautiful girl is described as having “a face like a full moon, and eyes like a blue lotus; she had arms graceful as the stalk of a lotus, and a lovely full bosom; she had a neck marked with three lines like a shell, and magnificent coral lips; in short she was a second Lakshmī” (the Goddess of Prosperity). [↑]
[3] In these stories the yōjana may usually be taken to represent four gawu of four miles—that is, it would be sixteen miles. [↑]