283
were covered with bruises, and looked like lotuses upon which black bees had settled. So they went and told the king. The king Dharmadhvaja arrived in a state of consternation, and asked his beloved what it all meant. Then the tortured queen showed him her hands, and said to him, " As soon as I heard the sound of the pestle, these became covered with bruises." Then the king, filled with surprise and despondency, had sandal-wood unguent and other remedies applied to her hands, in order to allay the pain.
He reflected, " One of my queens has been wounded by the fall of a lotus, the second has had her body burned even by the rays of the moon, and alas ! the third has got such terrible bruises produced on her hands by the mere sound of a pestle. By a dispensation of fate the excessive delicacy, which is the distinguishing excellence of my queens, has now become in them all, at one and the same time, a defect." Engaged in such reflections the king wandered round the women's apartments, and the night of three watches passed for him as tediously as if it had consisted of a hundred watches. But the next morning, the physician and surgeons took measures, which caused him soon to be comforted by the recovery of his wives.
When the Vetála had told this very wonderful story, he put this question to king Trivikramasena from his seat on his shoulder: " Tell me, king, which was the most delicate of those queens; and the curse I before mentioned will take effect, if you know and do not say."
When the king heard that, he answered, " The most delicate of all was the lady upon whose hand bruises were produced by merely hearing the sound of the pestle, without touching it. But the other two were no match for her, because the wound of the one and the blisters of the other were produced by contact with the lotus and the rays of the moon respectively."
When the king had said this, the Vetála again left his shoulder, and returned to his own place, and the persevering king again set out to fetch him.
Note.
Rohde in his Griechische Novellistik, p. 62, compares with this a story told by Timæus of a Sybarite, who saw a husbandman hoeing a field, and contracted a rupture from it. Another Sybarite, to whom he told his piteous tale, got ear-ache from hearing it. Oesterley in his German translation of the Baitál Pachisi, p. 199, refers us to Lancereau, No. 5, pp. 396-399, and Babington's Vetála Cadai, No. 11, p. 58. He points out that Grimm, in his Kindermärchen, 3, p. 238, quotes a similar incident from the travels of the three sons of Giaffar. Out of four princesses, one faints because a rose-twig is thrown into her face among some roses, a second shuts her eyes in order not to see the statue of a man, a third says " Go away, the hairs in your fur-cloak run
