The King having secretly come again near the palace, remained listening. Having seen it, the Queen, taking the two Princes, got into (etul-wunāya) the palace. The King having come to the palace and entered it, said, “Why did you not speak for so much time?”
Then the Queen says, “After our mother was summoned and came to our father, after I and a younger brother were born our mother died. Then they brought a step-mother. Because that mother disregards[4] younger brother and me, younger brother and I left the country, and having entered a forest jungle, when we were coming the flowers of a Kīna tree had blossomed and fallen. Taking the faded flowers I smelt them. Thereupon younger brother said, ‘Don’t smell the faded flowers; I will pluck and give [you] flowers.’ Having said [this] and gone up the tree, at the time when [after] plucking the flowers he was descending, younger brother disappeared. Owing to grief at that I remained unable to speak.”
Afterwards the King, taking axe and saw and calling people, having gone near the Kīna tree, and cut and sawn the tree, when he looked [inside it] the younger brother who was lost was [there]. Then the King, calling the younger brother, came to the city, and showed him to the elder sister. The elder sister arrived at happiness again.
North-western Province.
The story provides no explanation of the cause of the brother’s imprisonment inside the trunk of the tree. Apparently the deity—presumably a Yakā—who resided in the tree punished him in this manner for plucking the flowers, yet the King cut down the tree with impunity. At the present day, the Sinhalese villagers would not venture to injure or pluck flowers from a tree infested by a Yakā. Many years ago all refused to fell a Kum̆buk tree of this kind which it was necessary to remove from an embankment I was restoring; but some of my Tamil coolies had not the same scruples when encouraged by extra pay, to counterbalance the risk. Probably they would have been less venturesome in their own country.
The notion that a person may exist inside a tree trunk in a state of suspended animation is found in other folk-tales. In No. 47, vol. i, a Nāga Princess became a tree; in an Indian variant on p. 269, the tree was a girl imprisoned thus by Rākshasas. (See the [notes after No. 155], and also p. [245] of this volume.)