A third work of the same kind is the Çuka-saptati, or "Seventy Stories of a Parrot." Here a wife, whose husband is travelling abroad, and who is inclined to run after other men, turns to her husband's clever parrot for advice. The bird, while seeming to approve of her plans, warns her of the risks she runs, and makes her promise not to go and meet any paramour unless she can extricate herself from difficulties as So-and-so did. Requested to tell the story, he does so, but only as far as the dilemma, when he asks the woman what course the person concerned should take. As she cannot guess, the parrot promises to tell her if she stays at home that night. Seventy days pass in the same way, till the husband returns. These three collections of fairy tales are all written in prose and are comparatively short. There is, however, another of special importance, which is composed in verse and is of very considerable length. For it contains no less than 22,000 çlokas, equal to nearly one-fourth of the Mahabharata, or to almost twice as much as the Iliad and Odyssey put together. This is the Katha-sarit-sagara, or "Ocean of Rivers of Stories." It is divided into 124 chapters, called tarangas, or "waves," to be in keeping with the title of the work. Independent of these is another division into eighteen books called lambakas. The author was Somadeva, a Kashmirian poet, who composed his work about 1070 A.D. Though he himself was a Brahman, his work contains not only many traces of the Buddhistic character of his sources, but even direct allusions to Buddhist Birth Stories. He states the real basis of his work to have been the Brihat-katha, or "Great Narration," which Bana mentions, by the poet Gunadhya, who is quoted by Dandin. This original must, in the opinion of Bühler, go back to the first or second century A.D. A somewhat earlier recast of this work was made about A.D. 1037 by a contemporary of Somadeva's named Kshemendra Vyasadasa. It is entitled Brihat-katha-manjari, and is only about one-third as long as the Katha-sarit-sagara. Kshemendra and Somadeva worked independently of each other, and both state that the original from which they translated was written in the paiçachi bhasha or "Goblin language," a term applied to a number of Low Prakrit dialects spoken by the most ignorant and degraded classes. The Katha-sarit-sagara also contains (Tarangas 60-64) a recast of the first three books of the Panchatantra, which books, it is interesting to find, had the same form in Somadeva's time as when they were translated into Pehlevi (about 570 A.D.).