Page:Tales from the Arabic, Vol 1.djvu/188

164 there fell robbers upon them by the way and took all that was with them and pinioned them; after which they cast them into a pit hard by the road and went away and left them to die there, and indeed they had cast many folk into that pit and they had died.

The eunuch fell a-weeping in the pit and the youth said to him, ‘What is this weeping and what shall it profit here?’ Quoth the eunuch, ‘I weep not for fear of death, but of pity for thee and the sorriness of thy case and because of thy mother’s heart and for that which thou hast suffered of horrors and that thy death should be this abject death, after the endurance of all manner stresses.’ But the youth said, ‘That which hath betided me was forewrit to me and that which is written none hath power to efface; and if my term be advanced, none may avail to defer it.’ Then they passed that night and the following day and the next night and the next day [in the pit], till they were weak with hunger and came near upon death and could but groan feebly.

Now it befell, by the ordinance of God the Most High and His providence, that Cæsar, king of the Greeks, the husband of Melik Shah’s mother Shah Khatoun, [went forth to the chase that day]. He started a head of game, he and his company, and chased it, till they came up with it by that pit, whereupon one of them lighted down from his horse, to slaughter it, hard by the mouth of the pit. He heard a sound of low moaning from the bottom of the pit; so he arose and mounting his horse, waited till the