But now a great dispute arose between the three young nobles: the one who possessed the ointment affirmed that had he not found it the princess would have died, and could not, therefore, have married any one; the noble who owned the telescope declared that had he not found the wonderful telescope they would never have known that the princess was dying, and so his friend would not have brought the ointment to cure her; whilst the third noble proved to them that had he not found the wonderful carpet neither the finding of the ointment nor the telescope would have helped the princess, since they could not have travelled such a great distance in time to save her.
The king, overhearing this dispute, called the young noblemen to him, and said to them, “My lords, from what you have said, I see that I cannot, with justice, give my daughter to any of you; therefore, I pray you to give up altogether the idea of marrying her, and that you continue friends as you always were before you became rivals.”
The three young nobles saw that the king had decided justly; so they all left their native country, and went into a far-off desert to live like hermits. And the king gave the princess to another of his great nobles.
Many, many years had passed away since the marriage of the princess, when her husband was sent by her father to a distant country with which the king was waging war. The nobleman took his wife, the princess, with him, as he was uncertain how long he might be forced to remain abroad. Now it happened that a violent storm arose just as the vessel which carried the princess and her husband was approaching a strange coast; and in the height of the great tempest the ship dashed on some rocks, and went to pieces instantly. All the people on board perished in the waves, excepting only the princess, who clung very fast to a boat and was carried by the wind and the tide to the shore. There she found what seemed to be an uninhabited country, and, discovering a small cave in a rock, she lived alone in it for three years, feeding on wild herbs and fruits. She searched every day to find some way out of the forest which surrounded her cave, but could find none. One day, however, when she had wandered farther than usual from the cave where she lived, she came suddenly on another cave which, to her great astonishment, had a small door. She tried over and over again to open the door, thinking she would pass the night in the cave; but all her efforts were unavailing, it was shut so fast. At length, however, a deep voice from within the cave called out, “Who is at the door?”
At this the princess was so surprised that she could not answer for some moments; when, however, she had recovered a little, she said, “Open me the door!” Immediately the door was opened from within, and she saw, with sudden terror, an old man with a thick grey beard reaching below his waist and long white hair flowing over his shoulders.
What frightened the princess the more was her finding a man living here in the same desert where she had lived herself three years without seeing a single soul.
The hermit and the princess looked at each long and earnestly without saying a word. At length, however, the old man said, “Tell me, are you an angel or a daughter of this world?”
Then the princess answered, “Old man, let me rest a moment, and then I will tell you all about myself, and what brought me here.” So the hermit brought out some wild pears, and when the princess had taken some of them, she began to tell him who she was, and how she came in that desert. She said, “I am a king’s daughter, and once, many years ago, three young nobles of my father’s court asked the king for my hand in marriage. Now the king had such an equal affection for all these three young men that he was unwilling to give pain to any of them, so he sent them to travel into distant countries, and promised to decide between them when they returned.
“The three noblemen remained a long time away; and whilst they were still abroad somewhere, I fell dangerously ill. I was just at the point of death, when they all three returned suddenly; one of them bringing a wonderful ointment, which cured me at once; the two others brought each equally remarkable things—a carpet that would carry whoever sat on it through the air, and a telescope with which one could see everybody and everything in the world, even to the sands at the bottom of the sea.”