Page:Sagas from the Far East; or, Kalmouk and Mongolian traditionary tales.djvu/258

234 sovereign of Malâva. His son Vikramâditja was the more celebrated hero, and according to another MS. (quoted in W. Taylor's Examination of the Mackenzie MSS.) the former of these two was not called Vikramâditja at all, but Govinda.

Feeling an interior conviction of his great destiny, Vikramâditja (the son) determined on obtaining supernatural aid in fulfilling it; and, with this view, he devoted himself to prayer and retirement, until he had obtained an apparition of the goddess Kali, the chosen wife of Shiva, who gave him the solemn promise that he should be invulnerable to all enemies with the exception of one who should be supernaturally born; and that he should rejoice in a happy reign of a thousand years. By the shrewd advice of his half-brother Bhatti, whom he made his minister, he contrived to obtain out of this promise double the length of years actually named, for he arranged to reign for only six months at a time, spending six months in contemplation in the jungle, so that it took two thousand years to make up a thousand years' reign. In another account, he is made to reign 949 years; and, on the other hand, in another only a hundred and six years.

It might have been expected that a people who raised themselves at so remote a period to a comparatively high degree of civilization, and in other departments of mental exertion distinguished themselves in so marked a manner, should of all things