The Poisoned Food.--This is a third instance of food or fruit
being poisoned by serpents, and it occurs very frequently in Eastern
stories. The oldest form of this tale is found in a Sanskrit collection
entitled "Twenty-five Tales of a Vampyre" (Vetalapanchavimsati),
which is probably of Buddhist extraction, and which also exists in
many of the vernacular languages of India. The wife of a man named
Harisvamin having been stolen from him one night by a Vidyadhara
Prince, he gave away all his wealth to the Brahmans, and resolved to
visit the sacred waters to wash away his sins, after which he hoped
to recover his beloved wife; and the story thus proceeds:--Then
he left the country, with his Brahman birth as his only fortune,
and began to go round to all the sacred bathing-places in order to
recover his beloved. And as he was roaming about there came upon him
the terrible lion of the hot season, with the blazing sun for mouth
and with a mane composed of his fiery rays. And the winds blew with
excessive heat, as if warmed by the breath of sighs furnaced forth by
travellers grieved at being separated from their wives. And the tanks,
with their supply of water diminished by the heat and their drying
white mud, appeared to be showing their broken hearts. And the trees
by the roadside seemed to lament on account of the departure of the
glory of spring, making their wailing heard in the shrill moaning of
their bark, with leaves, as it were, lips, parched with heat.
At that season Harisvamin, wearied out with the heat of the sun,
with bereavement, hunger and thirst, and continual travelling,
emaciated and dirty, and pining for food, reached in the course of his
wanderings a certain village, and found in it the house of a Brahman
named Padmanabha, who was engaged in a sacrifice. And, seeing that
many Brahmans were eating in his house, he stood leaning against the
door-post, silent and motionless. And the good wife of that Brahman
named Padmanabha, seeing him in this position, felt pity for him,
and reflected:--
"Alas! mighty is hunger! Whom will it not bring down? For here stands
a man at the door, who appears to be a householder, desiring food,
with downcast countenance; evidently come from a long journey, and
with all his faculties impaired by hunger. So is not he a man to whom
food ought to be given?" Having gone through these reflections, that
kind woman took up in her hand a vessel full of rice boiled in milk,
with ghi and sugar, and brought it, and courteously presented it to
him, and said:--
"Go and eat this somewhere on the bank of the lake, for this place
is unfit to eat in, as it is filled with feasting Brahmans." He said
"I will do so," and took the vessel of rice and placed it at no great
distance under a banyan-tree on the edge of the lake; and he washed
his hands and feet in the lake, and rinsed his mouth, and then came
back in high spirits to eat the rice. But while he was thus engaged
a kite, holding a black cobra with its beak and claws, came and sat
on that tree. And it so happened that poisonous saliva issued from
the mouth of that dead snake, which the bird had captured and was
carrying along. The saliva fell into the dish of rice which was placed
under the tree, and Harisvamin, without observing it, came and ate up
that rice. As soon as in his hunger he had devoured all that food, he
began to suffer terrible agonies, caused by the poison. He exclaimed:--
"When fate has turned against a man, everything in this world turns
also; accordingly this rice has become poison to me." Thus speaking,
Harisvamin, tortured with the poison, tottered to the house of that
Brahman who was engaged in a sacrifice, and said to his wife:--
"The rice which you gave me has poisoned me; so fetch me quickly a
charmer who can counteract the operation of poison; otherwise you
will be guilty of the death of a Brahman." When Harisvamin had said
this to the good woman, who was beside herself to think what it could
all mean, his eyes closed and he died.
Then the Brahman who was engaged in a sacrifice drove his wife out
of the house, though she was innocent and hospitable, being enraged
with her for the supposed murder of her guest. The good woman, for
her part, having incurred groundless blame from her charitable deed,
and so become burdened with infamy, went to a holy bathing-place, to
perform penance. Then there was a discussion before the superintendent
of religion as to which of the four parties, the kite, the snake,
and the couple who gave rice, was guilty of the murder of a Brahman;
but the question was not decided.
It will be seen that our story differs very considerably from the
foregoing, which we must regard as the original. The same story occurs
in all the Eastern versions of the Book of Sindibad, but in most of
these it is not a traveller who is thus poisoned, but a wealthy man and
his guests; having sent a domestic to the market to buy sour curds,
which she carried back in an open vessel, poison from a serpent in
a stork's mouth dropped into the curds, of which the master of the
house and his guests partook and died. The story is probably more
than 2,000 years old.
"Eating up the Protector." Akin to this, but with a very different
conclusion, is the well-known story of the traveller who released a
tiger from a trap into which he had fallen. The Brahman's fidelity
to his pact with the serpent reminds one of the Arabian story of
the Merchant and the Genie. In a Tamil tale, a cow having given
herself up to a tiger to redeem her owner (it is to be understood,
of course, that both animals are human beings re-born in those forms)
she obtains leave to go and suckle her calf, after which she returns
when the tiger, moved by her fidelity, lets her go free.
The serpent's emitting gems recalls Shakespeare's allusion to the
popular notion of the "toad, ugly and venomous, which bears a precious
jewel in its head." It is a very ancient and widespread belief that
serpents are the guardians of hidden treasures. Preller, in his work
on Grecian mythology, refers to a Servian story in which a shepherd,
as in our tale, saves the life of a snake in a forest fire, and,
in return for this service, the snake's father gives him endless
treasures and teaches him the language of birds. There is a very
similar story in Dozon's "Contes Albanais."
In the charming tale of "Nala and Damayanti," which occurs in the third
part ("Vana Parva") of the grand Indian epic "Mahabharata," the exiled
king perceives a snake with a ray of jewels in its crest, writhing
in a jungle fire, and lifting it out, carries it some distance, and
is about to set it down, when the snake says to him, "Carry me ten
steps farther, and count them aloud as you go." So Nala proceeds,
counting the steps--one, two, three--and when he said "ten" (dasa,
which means "ten" and also "bite") the snake took him at his word, and
bit the king in the forehead, upon which he became black and deformed.
An abstract of a considerably modified form of our romance orally
current among the people of Bengal may be given in conclusion: A king
appoints his three sons to patrol in turn the streets of his capital
during the night. It happens that the youngest Prince in going his
rounds one night sees a beautiful woman issuing from the royal palace,
and accosting her, asks her business at such an hour. She replies:--
"I am the guardian deity of this palace; the king will be killed this
night, therefore I am going away."
The Prince persuades the goddess to return into the palace and await
the event. As in our story, he enters his father's sleeping chamber
and discovers a huge cobra near the royal couch. He cuts the serpent
into many pieces, which he puts inside a brass vessel that is in the
room. Then seeing that some drops of the serpent's blood had fallen on
his step-mother's breast, he wraps a piece of cloth round his tongue to
protect it from the poison, and licks off the blood. The lady awakes,
and recognises him as he is leaving the room. She accuses him to the
king of having used an unpardonable freedom with her. In the morning
the king sends for his eldest son, and asks him: "If a trusted servant
should prove faithless how should he be punished?"
Quoth the Prince: "Surely his head should be parted from his body;
but before doing so you should ascertain whether the man is actually
guilty."
And then he proceeds to relate the following story:--"Once upon a
time there was a goldsmith who had a grown-up son, whose wife was
acquainted with the language of animals, but she kept secret from her
husband and all others the fact of her being endowed with such a rare
gift. It happened one night she heard a jackal exclaim: 'There is a
dead body floating on the river; would that some one might give me
that body to eat, and for his pains take the diamond ring from the
finger of the dead man.'
"The woman arose from her bed and went to the bank of the river, and
her husband, who was not asleep, followed her unobserved. She went
into the water, drew the corpse to land, and unable to loosen the
ring from the dead man's finger, which had swelled, she bit off the
finger, and leaving the corpse on the bank, returned home, whither
she had been preceded by her husband. Almost petrified with fear,
the young goldsmith concluded from what he had seen that his wife was
not a human being, but a ghoul (rakshasi), and early in the morning
he hastened to his father and related the whole affair to him--how
the woman had got up during the night and gone to the river, out of
which she dragged a dead body to the land, and was busy devouring it
when he ran home in horror.
"The old man was greatly shocked, and advised his son to take his wife
on some pretext into the forest and leave her there to be destroyed by
wild beasts. So the husband caused the woman to get herself ready to go
on a visit to her father, and after a hasty breakfast they set out. In
going through a dense jungle, where the goldsmith proposed abandoning
his wife, she heard a serpent cry, 'O, passenger, I pray thee to seize
and give me that croaking frog, and take for thy reward the gold and
precious stones concealed in yonder hole.' The woman at once seized
the frog and threw it towards the serpent, and then began digging into
the ground with a stick. Her husband quaked with fear, thinking that
his ghoul-wife was about to kill him, but she called to him, saying,
'My dear husband, gather up all this gold and precious gems.'
"Approaching the spot with hesitation he was surprised to perceive an
immense treasure laid bare by his wife, who then explained to him how
she had learned of it from the snake that lay coiled up near them,
whose language she understood. Then he said to his wife--'It is now
so late that we cannot reach your father's house before dark, and
we might be slain by wild beasts. Let us therefore return home.' So
they retraced their steps, and approaching the house the goldsmith
said to his wife--'Do, you, my dear, go in by the back door, while
I enter by the front and show my father all this treasure.'
The woman went in by the back door and was met by her father-in-law,
who, on seeing her, concluded that she had killed and devoured his
son, and striking her on the head with a hammer which he happened to
have in his hand, she instantly expired. Just then the son came into
the room, but it was too late."
"I have told your Majesty this story," adds the eldest Prince, "in
order that before putting the man to death you should make sure that
he is guilty."
The king next calls his second son and asks him the same question,
to which he replies by relating a story to caution his father against
rash actions.
"A king, separated from his attendants while engaged in the chase, saw
what he conceived to be rain-water dropping from the top of a tree,
and, being very thirst, held his drinking cup under it until it was
nearly filled, and, just as he was about to put it to his lips, his
horse purposely moved so as to cause the contents to be spilled on the
ground, upon which the king in a rage drew his sword and killed the
faithful animal; but afterwards discovering that what he had taken
for rain-water was poison that dropped from a cobra in the tree,
his grief knew no bounds."
Calling lastly his third son, the king asks him what should be done
to the man who proved false to his trust. The Prince tells the story
of the wonderful tree, the fruit of which bestowed on him who ate of
it perennial youth, with unimportant variations from the version in
our romance.
Then the Prince explained the occasion of his presence in the Royal
bedchamber, and how he had saved the king and his consort from the
cobra's deadly bite. And the king, overjoyed and full of gratitude,
strained his faithful son to his heart, and ever after cherished and
loved him with all a father's love.