When the old Persian king, Kai-Khosrou, abdicated in favor of his successor, he gave to Rustem the dominions of Zabūl, and Kabūl and Nimruz, and in course of time Gushtāsp,[258] the Constantine of the Fire-worshippers, came to the throne of Persia. This monarch had two sons. One of them was Bashūtān, and the other was Isfendiyār, a knight whose valor was only second to that of Rustem. He had led his father’s armies in many a long campaign—had invaded Hindūstān and Arabia, and several other countries, and had, to a greater or less extent, established the religion of the Fire-worshippers in them all. But Arjasp, a demon king, had invaded the Persian empire, and carried captive two daughters of Gushtāsp. The fair prisoners were confined in a brazen fortress on the top of an almost inaccessible mountain, which was also the palace home of Arjasp, and he required the most servile labor from the Persian maidens. THE HEFT-KHĀN, OR SEVEN LABORS OF ISFENDIYĀR, were therefore undertaken in order to conquer Arjasp, and restore the sisters of the warrior. Like Rustem, he chose the shortest and most perilous passage to the stronghold of the enemy, and in the first stage of his journey he slew two monstrous wolves who disputed his advance. In the second stage he conquered an immense lion and his ferocious mate. In the third he slew a dragon, whose roar made the very mountains tremble with fear, while the poisonous foam dropped from his hideous jaws. Upon the fourth day he withstood the wiles of a beauteous woman, who appealed to him most piteously to rescue her from the power of a demon, whom she claimed had stolen her from her home and friends. She expressed the strongest admiration for Isfendiyār, and pleaded with him “To free me from his loathed embrace, And bear me to a fitter place, Where in thy circling arms more softly pressed, I may at last be truly loved and blest.” Isfendiyār called the beautiful tempter to him, and she came beaming with smiles, and dropping words of sweetest flattery from her crimson lips. Then he threw his noose around her, and writhing in the bonds she could not break, the enchantress became first a cat, then a wolf, and at last appeared in her true character of a black demon, with flames issuing from her mouth, whereupon she was slain by Isfendiyār. On the fifth day he had the misfortune to offend a Sīmūrgh, who attacked him intending to bear him away to her mountain nest, but he succeeded in slaying the angry bird with his trenchant sword. The sixth labor consisted in bringing his troops safely through a furious storm of wind and snow, when all the earth was covered with whiteness, while “keenly blew the blast and pinching was the cold.” But the seventh trial of his fortitude was found in the passage of a desert waste, of which it was said