Page:Katha sarit sagara, vol2.djvu/300

 personal charms. And the successful king, who had conquered all his enemies, lived happily, amusing himself with all those three queens.

Once on a time, when the festival of the spring-season had arrived, he went with all those three wives to the garden to amuse himself. There he beheld the creepers weighed down with flowers, looking like Cupid's bows, with rows of bees for strings, strung for him by the Spring. And the king, who resembled the mighty Indra, hearing the notes which the cuckoos uttered on the sprays of the garden-trees, like the edict of Love, the god of enjoyment, betook himself with his wives to wine, which is the very life of that intoxication, by which Cupid lives. And he joyed in drinking the liquor first tasted by them, perfumed with their sighs, red as their bimba lips. Then, as Indulekhá was playfully pulling the hair of the king, a blue lotus leaped from her ear, and fell on her lap. Immediately a wound was produced on the front of her thigh by the blow, and the delicate princess exclaimed " Oh ! Oh !" and fainted. When the king and the attendants saw that, they were distracted with grief, but they gradually brought her round with cold water and fanning. Then the king took her to the palace, and had a bandage applied to the wound, and treated her with preparations made by the physicians. And at night, seeing that she was going on well, the king retired with the second, Tárávalí, to an apartment on the roof of the palace exposed to the rays of the moon. There the rays of the moon, entering through the lattice, fell on the body of the queen, who was sleeping by the king's side, where it was exposed by her garment blowing aside. Immediately she woke up, exclaiming, " Alas ! I am burnt," and rose up from the bed rubbing her limbs. The king woke up in a state of alarm, crying out, " What is the meaning of this?" Then he got up and saw that blisters had been produced on the queen's body. And the queen Tárávalí said to him when he questioned her, " The moon's rays falling on my exposed body have done this to me." When she said this and burst into tears, the king, being distressed, summoned her attendants, who ran there in trepidation and alarm. And he had made for her a bed of lotus-leaves, sprinkled with water, and sandal- wood lotion applied to her body.

In the meanwhile his third wife Mrigánkavatí heard of it, and left her palace to come to him. And when she had got into the open air, she heard distinctly, as the night was still, the sound of a pestle pounding rice in a distant house. The moment the gazelle-eyed one heard it, she said, " Alas I am killed," and she sat down on the path, shaking her hands in an agony of pain. Then the girl turned back, and was conducted by her attendants to her own chamber, where she fell on the bed, and groaned. And when her weeping attendants examined her, they saw that her hands