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The Fan Prince
by
One day the prince said to her, “I should like to marry you. Will you marry me?” “Yes,” she answered. Then she wrote a letter to her father and mother and six sisters, in which she said, “Come to my wedding. I am going to marry Prince Sabr.” They all came. Her father was very glad that she married Prince Sabr, and said, “I see it is true that God loves my youngest daughter.”
The day of the wedding her six sisters said to her, “To-day we will not let the servants make your bed. We will make it ourselves for you.” “I have plenty of servants to make it,” she said; “but you can do so if you like.” Her sisters went to make the bed. They took a glass bottle and ground it into a powder, and they spread the powder all over the side where Prince Sabr was to lie. This they did because they were angry at their youngest sister being married, while they, who were older, were not married, and they thought, being her elders, they should have married first, especially as they had lived in their father’s palace, and been cared for, while she was cast out in the jungle.
When the wedding was over, and Prince Sabr and his wife had gone to bed, the prince became very ill, from the glass powder going into his flesh. “Turn your fan the wrong way and fan yourself quickly, that I may go home to my father’s country,” he said to her, “for I am very ill, and dare not remain here.” So she fanned herself at once with the fan turned the wrong way. Then he went home to his father, and was very ill for a long while. The poor princess knew nothing of the glass powder.
Her father and mother and sisters went home after the wedding, and left the princess alone in her palace. Every day she turned her fan the right side outwards and fanned and fanned herself; but Prince Sabr never came. He was far too ill. One day she cried a great deal, and was very, very sad. “Why does my prince not come to me?” she said. “I don’t know where he is, or what has become of him.” That night she had a dream, and in her dream she saw Prince Sabr lying very ill on his bed.
When she got up in the morning she thought she must go and try to find her prince. So she took off all her beautiful clothes and jewels, and put on a yogí’s dress. Then she mounted a horse and set out in the jungle. No one knew she was a woman, or that she was a king’s daughter; every one thought she was a man.
She rode on till night, and then she had come to another jungle. Here she got off her horse, and took it under a tree. She lay down under the tree and went to sleep. At midnight she was awakened by the chattering of a parrot and a mainá, who came and sat on the tree knowing she was lying underneath.
The mainá said to the parrot, “Parrot, tell me something.” The parrot said, “Prince Sabr is very, very ill in his own country. The day he was married, the bride’s six sisters took a glass bottle and ground it to powder. Then they spread the powder all over the prince’s bed, so that when he lay down it got into his flesh. The glass powder has made him very ill.” “What will make him well?” said the mainá; “what will cure him?” “No doctors can cure him,” said the parrot; “no medicine will do him any good: but if any one slept under this tree, and took some of the earth from under it, and mixed it with cold water, and rubbed it all over Prince Sabr, he would get well.”