Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/529

in the jungle; let me wrestle with him where there is no one else to look on." Then he asked the daughter in what direction her father had gone to get wood. She told him that he had gone towards the rising sun. Then the wrestler set out and looked for him, and saw him dragging along a cart laden with wood. The Shikàrpur wrestler, without showing himself, got behind the cart and caught hold of it and stopped it. The Dera wrestler called out, "Who are you, stopping my cart?" Then the Shikarpur wrestler said: "I am a wrestler from Shikàrpur come to wrestle with you." He replied: "Come along; let us go and wrestle in the town." But the Shikàrpur wrestler said "No; let us wrestle here." "But", said the Dera wrestler, "there is no witness here." Just then, an old woman came up, carrying a basket of bread on her head for her son, who was grazing a herd of camels hard by. The wrestlers both called out to her, "Come and be our witness; we are going to wrestle here." The old woman said: "If I stay here, my son's food will be late for him. Dig up that clod and lay it on the palm of my hand, so that you can go on wrestling on the clod, and I will be your witness." So they dug up the clod, and put it on the old woman's palm, and went on wrestling on it. A little way on the camel-herd, the old woman's son, saw them coming, and said to himself: "My mother always comes alone, but to-day there is a band of men coming with her, fighting." He was afraid that they would rob him of his herd of camels and drive them off, so he took off the blanket from his shoulders and spread it on the ground, and then picking up the camels, began putting them into the blanket. When he had put in the whole herd he tied it into a bundle, put it on his head, and ran off. But the ear of one of the young camels was sticking out of the bundle. Seeing it, a hawk overhead made a swoop and carried off the bundle. The king's daughter was sitting on the roof of her palace; she happened to glance upwards, and just then the bundle slipped out of the hawk's talons and fell into her eye.