Supplemental Nights to the Book of the Thousand and One Nights — Volume 2 (of 6)
General
Supplemental Nights to the Book of the Thousand and One Nights — Volume 2 (of 6)
Fairy tales; Tales -- Arab countries
with sobs and tears of woe, she lamented the loss of her husband and her
two children.
She meets with one of her father’s domestics, who informs her that her
parents and their servants had all been destroyed by a hurricane, and
that “he only had escaped” to tell her the sad tidings. After this she
is married to a weaver, who ill-uses her, and she escapes from him one
night. She attaches herself to some travellers returning from a trading
expedition in the north, and the leader of the caravan takes her for his
wife. The party are attacked by robbers and the leader is killed. She
then becomes the wife of the chief of the robbers, who in his turn finds
death at the hands of the king of that country, and she is placed in his
zenana.
The king died, and she was buried alive in his tomb, after having had
great honour shown to her by the women, the princes, the ministers, and
a vast concourse of people. Some men from the north who were wont to rob
graves broke into this one also. The dust they raised entered into Krisa
Gautami’s nostrils, and made her sneeze. The grave-robbers were
terrified, thinking that she was a demon (_vetála_), and they fled; but
Krisa Gautami escaped from the grave through the opening which they had
made. Conscious of all her troubles, and affected by the want of food,
just as a violent storm arose, she went out of her mind. Covered with
merely her underclothing, her hands and feet foul and rough, with long
locks and pallid complexion, she wandered about until she reached
Sravastí. There, at the sight of Bhagavant, she recovered her intellect.
Bhagavant ordered Ananda to give her an over-robe, and he taught her the
doctrine, and admitted her into the ecclesiastical body, and he
appointed her the chief of the Bhikshunís who had embraced
discipline.[521]
This remarkable story is one of those which reached Europe long anterior
to the Crusades. It is found in the Greek martyr acts, which were
probably composed in the eighth century, where it is told of Saint
Eustache, who was before his baptism a captain of Trajan, named
Placidus, and the same legend reappears, with modifications of the
details, in many mediæval collections and forms the subject of several
romances. In most versions the _motif_ is similar to that of the story
of Job. The following is the outline of the original legend, according
to the Greek martyr acts:
LEGEND OF ST. EUSTACHE.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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