There is a great tract of land assigned to Br�hmans in the
country of Anga, called Vrikshaghata. In it there lived a rich
sacrificing Br�hman named Vishnusv�min. 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 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 Br�hman who was
fastidious about eating along of the company did not eat, but sat
there with his face puckered up with disgust. The king himself
asked the Br�hman 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 Br�hman 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
gh�t 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
Br�hmans 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
Br�hman, 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 Br�hman. 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 Br�hman, 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.[FN#499]
And the next morning the king gave three hundred thousand gold
pieces to those 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.[FN#500]
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 Vet�la story, as above, refers also to
the decisions of Hamlet in Saxo Grammaticus, 1839, p. 138, in
Simrock's "Quellen des Shakespeare," I, 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 "M�lusine"[FN#501] for 5 Nov. 1885, M. Ren� 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 Radloff's "Proben der Volksliteratur der t�rkischen St�mme
S�d-Sibiriens," as follows: