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Day and night she prayed to God and read a holy book. She did nothing else.

When the prince went into her room and she saw him, she was very sad, not happy, for she thought, “He is so foolish; he knows nothing of what has happened to me.” Then she said to him, “Why did you come here? Go home again to your father’s palace.”

The prince burst out crying. “See, princess,” he said, “I knew nothing of your palace. I only found it by chance five nights ago. I have slept here in the verandah for the last five nights, and only last night did I learn what had happened to you, and how to find you.” “I know it is true,” she said, “that you knew nothing of what happened to me. But now that you have found me, what will you do?”

“I will go home to my father’s palace,” he answered, “and make everything ready for you, and then I will come and marry you and take you home.”

So it was all settled, and he ate some food, and returned to his father. He told his father and mother all that had happened to the Bél-Princess, and how her body had turned into the beautiful garden and palace that stood on the big plain; and of the little birds; and of the underground palace in which she now lived. So his father said that he and the prince’s mother, and his six brothers and their wives, would all take him in great state to the palace and marry him to the beautiful Bél-Princess; and that then they would all return to their own palace, and all live together. “But first the wicked woman must be killed,” said the King.

So he ordered his servants to take her to the jungle and kill her, and throw her body away. So they took her away at four o’clock in the afternoon and killed her.

One morning two or three days later, the prince and his father and mother, and brothers and sisters-in-law, went to the great palace on the wide plain; and there, in the evening, the king’s youngest son was married to the Bél-Princess. And when his father and mother and brothers, and his brothers’ wives, saw her, they all said, “It is quite true. She is indeed a Bél-Princess!”

After the wedding they all returned to the King’s palace, and there they lived together. But the King and his sons used often to go to the palace on the great plain to eat the air; and they used to lend it sometimes to other rájás and kings.

Told by Múniyá.

NOTES.

FAIRY TALE TRANSLATED BY MAIVE STOKES.

WITH NOTES BY MARY STOKES

THE BEL-PRINCESS.

1. Múniyá says that telling the prince he would marry a Bél-Princess was equivalent to saying he would not marry at all, for these brothers’ wives knew she lived in the fairy-country, and that it would be very difficult, if not impossible, for the prince to find her, and take her from it.

2. With the fakír’s sleep compare that of the dragon who sleeps for a year at a time in the Transylvanian story “Das Rosenmaerchen” ( Siebenbuergische Maerchen, pp. 124, 126).

3. In a Greek story, “Das Schloss des Helios” (Schmidt’s Griechische Maerchen, Sagen und Volkslieder, p. 106), the heroine is warned by a monk that as she approaches the magic castle voices like her brothers’ voices will call her; but if, consequently, she looks behind she will become stone. Her two elder brothers go to seek her, and, as they meet no monk to warn them, they become stone. The third brother meets the monk, obeys his warning, and thus, like his sister, escapes the evil fate. To save him from Helios, the sister turns him into a thimble till she has Helios’s promise to do him no harm. (Compare the Tiger and Tigress, p. 155 of this collection.) Helios gives him some water in a flask with which he sprinkles the stone brothers, whereupon they and all the other stone princes come to life. In these Indian tales the healing blood from the little finger plays the part of the waters of life and death, found in so many Russian and other European stories.