There is a great tract of land assigned to Bráhmans in the country of
Anga, called Vrikshaghata. In it there lived a rich sacrificing Bráhman
named Vishnusvámin. And he had a wife equal to himself in birth. And by
her he had three sons born to him, who were distinguished for
preternatural acuteness. In course of time they grew up to be young men.
One day, when he had begun a sacrifice, he sent those three brothers to
the sea to fetch a turtle. So off they went, and when they had found a
turtle, the eldest said to his two brothers, “Let one of you take the
turtle for our father’s sacrifice; I cannot take it, as it is all
slippery with slime.” When the eldest brother said this, the two younger
ones answered him, “If you hesitate about taking it, why should not we?”
When the eldest heard that, he said, “You two must take the turtle; if
you do not, you will have obstructed your father’s sacrifice, and then
you will certainly sink down to hell.” When he told the younger brothers
this, they laughed and said to him, “If you see our duty so clearly, why
do you not see that your own is the same?” Then the eldest said, “What,
do you not know how fastidious I am? I am very fastidious about eating,
and I cannot be expected to touch what is repulsive.” The middle
brother, when he heard this speech of his, said to his brother, “Then I
am a more fastidious person than you, for I am a most fastidious
connoisseur of the fair sex.” When the middle one said this, the eldest
went on to say, “Then let the younger of you two take the turtle.” Then
the youngest brother frowned, and in his turn said to the two elder,
“You fools, I am very fastidious about beds; so I am the most fastidious
of the lot.”
So the three brothers fell to quarrelling with one another, and being
completely under the dominion of conceit, they left that turtle, and
went off immediately to the court of the king of that country, whose
name was Prasenajit, and who lived in a city named Vitankapura, in order
to have the dispute decided. There they had themselves announced by the
warder, and went in, and gave the king a circumstantial account of their
case. The king said, “Wait here, and I will put you all in turn to the
proof;” so they agreed and remained there. And at the time that the king
took his meal, he had them conducted to a seat of honour, and given
delicious food fit for a king, possessing all the six flavours. And
while all were feasting around him, the Bráhman who was fastidious about
eating alone of all the company did not eat, but sat there with his face
puckered up with disgust. The king himself asked the Bráhman why he did
not eat his food, though it was sweet and fragrant, and he slowly
answered him, “I perceive in this food an evil smell of the reek from
corpses, so I cannot bring myself to eat it, however delicious it may
be.” When he said this before the assembled multitude, they all smelled
it by the king’s orders, and said, “This food is prepared from white
rice and is good and fragrant.” But the Bráhman who was so fastidious
about eating would not touch it, but stopped his nose. Then the king
reflected, and proceeded to inquire into the matter, and found out from
his officers that the food had been made from rice which had been grown
in a field near the burning _ghát_ of a certain village. Then the king
was much astonished, and, being pleased, he said to him, “In truth you
are very particular as to what you eat; so eat of some other dish.”
And after they had finished their dinner, the king dismissed the
Bráhmans to their apartments, and sent for the loveliest lady of his
court. And in the evening he sent that fair one, all whose limbs were of
faultless beauty, splendidly adorned, to the second Bráhman, who was so
squeamish about the fair sex. And that matchless kindler of Cupid’s
flame, with a face like the full moon of midnight, went, escorted by the
king’s servants, to the chamber of the Bráhman. But when she entered,
lighting up the chamber with her brightness, that gentleman who was so
fastidious about the fair sex felt quite faint, and stopping his nose
with his left hand, said to the king’s servants, “Take her away; if you
do not, I am a dead man: a smell comes from her like that of a goat.”
When the king’s servants heard this, they took the bewildered fair one
to their sovereign, and told him what had taken place. And the king
immediately had the squeamish gentleman sent for, and said to him, “How
can this lovely woman, who has perfumed herself with sandal-wood,
camphor, black aloes, and other splendid scents, so that she diffuses
exquisite fragrance through the world, smell like a goat?” But though
the king used this argument to the squeamish gentleman he stuck to his
point; and then the king began to have his doubts on the subject, and at
last, by artfully framed questions, he elicited from the lady herself
that, having been separated in her childhood from her mother and nurse,
she had been brought up on goat’s milk.
Then the king was much astonished, and praised highly the discernment of
the man who was fastidious about the fair sex, and immediately had given
to the third Bráhman, who was fastidious about beds, in accordance with
his taste, a bed composed of seven mattresses placed upon a bedstead.
White smooth sheets and coverlets were laid upon the bed, and the
fastidious man slept upon it in a splendid room. But, before half a
watch of the night had passed, he rose up from that bed, with his hand
pressed to his side, screaming in an agony of pain. And the king’s
officers, who were there, saw a red crooked mark on his side, as if a
hair had been pressed deep into it. And they went and told the king, and
the king said to them, “Look and see if there is not something under the
mattress.” So they went and examined the bottom of the mattresses one by
one, and they found a hair in the middle of the bedstead underneath them
all. And they took it and showed it to the king, and they also brought
the man who was fastidious about beds, and when the king saw the state
of his body, he was astonished. And he spent the whole night in
wondering how a hair could make so deep an impression on his skin
through seven mattresses.[500]
And the next morning the king gave three hundred thousand gold pieces to
those three fastidious men, because they were persons of wonderful
discernment and refinement. And they remained in great comfort in the
king’s court, forgetting all about the turtle, and little did they reck
of the fact that they had incurred sin by obstructing their father’s
sacrifice.[501]
* * * * *
The story of the brothers who were so very “knowing” is common to most
countries, with occasional local modifications. It is not often we find
the knowledge of the “quintessence of things” concentrated in a single
individual, as in the case of the ex-king of our tale, but we have his
exact counterpart—and the circumstance is significant—in No. 2 of the
“Cento Novelle Antiche,” the first Italian collection of short stories,
made in the 13th century, where a prisoner informs the king of Greece
that a certain horse has been suckled by a she-ass, that a jewel
contains a flaw, and that the king himself is a baker. Mr. Tawney, in a
note on the Vetála story, as above, refers also to the decisions of
Hamlet in Saxo Grammaticus, 1839, p. 138, in Simrock’s “Quellen des
Shakespeare,” 1, 81–85; 5, 170; he lays down that some bread tastes of
blood (the corn was grown on a battlefield); that some liquor tastes of
iron (the malt was mixed with water taken from a well, in which some
rusty swords had lain); that some bacon tastes of corpses (the pig had
eaten a corpse); lastly, that the king is a servant and his wife a
serving-maid. But in most versions of the story three brothers are the
gifted heroes.
In “Mélusine”[502] for 5 Nov. 1885, M. René Basset cites an interesting
variant (in which, as is often the case, the “Lost Camel” plays a part,
but we are not concerned about it at present) from Radloft’s “Proben der
Volksliteratur der türkischen Stamme des Süd-Siberiens,” as follows: