Page:Indian Fairy Tales (Stokes, 1879).djvu/75

 XIL

THE MAN WHO WENT TO SEEK HIS FATE.

ONCE there was a very poor man who had a wife and twelve children, and not a single rupee. The poo^" children used to cry with hunger, and the man and his wife did not know what to do. At last he got furious with God and said, " How wicked God is I He gives me a great many children but no money." So he set out to find his fate. In the jungle he met a camel with two heavy sacks of gold on its back. This camel belonged to a Rajd, and once it was travelling with other camels and with the Rajd's servants to another country, and carrying the sacks of gold. Every night they encamped and started again early in the morning ; but one morning the servants forgot to take this camel with them, and the camel forgot the road home, and the sacks were too tightly strapped for it to get rid of them. So it wandered about the jungle with the sacks on its back for twelve years. The camel asked the poor man where he was going. " I am going to seek my fate to ask it why I am so poor," he answered. The camel said, "Ask it, too, why for twelve years I have had to carry these two sacks of gold. All this time I have not been able to lie down, or to eat, or to drink." " Very well," said the man, and he went on.

Then he came to a river in which he saw an alligator. The alligator took him across, and when he got to the other side it asked him where he was going. The man said.