Šāh-nāmah - The Šahnama of Firdausi, Volume 6

>genealogy<

>graphic<

á as in “water.”

í as in “pique.”

ú as in “rude.”

a as in “servant.”

i as in “sin.”

u as in “foot.”

ai as in “time.”

au as ou in “cloud.”

g is always hard as in “give.”

kh as ch in the German “buch.”

zh as z in “azure.”

Dáráb establishes himself upon the throne, defeats the Arabs and the Rúmans, and marries the daughter of Failakús, the Cæsar. Conceiving, however, a dislike for his spouse, he sends her back to her father, at whose court her child is born, named Sikandar, for the reason given in the story, and brought up by Failakús as his own son and heir. Dáráb meanwhile marries again, has another son—Dárá—falls into ill-health, appoints Dárá his successor, and dies.

At this point in the Sháhnáma, in as much as this and the two following reigns deal almost entirely with the subject of Alexander the Great, who is known to Orientals under the name of Iskandar or Sikandar, there is an important change in the provenance and character of the subject-matter. We have had an instance already in which it seemed probable that recourse was being had indirectly to Greek writers,¹¹

but in the present case the debt to them is indisputable. The basis of the whole account is Greek, and so in a great measure is the superstructure, but the latter to some extent has been pulled down and rebuilt, modified in detail, and added to, by Egyptian, Arabic, and Persian hands. As a general introduction to the three following reigns, therefore, it will be well to set before the reader in outline such facts as are necessary for the proper understanding of the accounts given in the reigns in question.

Alexander the Great, in his expedition to the East, was accompanied by a literary and scientific staff, in order that the results achieved might be handed down to posterity in a way worthy of so great an occasion. Thus Eumenes kept the royal diary,¹²

Bæton and Diognetus recorded the distances traversed,^12a

Aristobulus was interested in matters geographical, ethnological, and botanical,^12b

while Callisthenes and others drew up general histories. Some of Alexander's commanders too, such as Ptolemy, son of Lagus, who became King of Egypt, Nearchus, the admiral, and Onesi-critus, the pilot, of Alexander's fleet, also left accounts, as did others who were contemporaries but took no part in the expedition. The result was a large assortment of kindred works, not one of which is extant in its original form, though later writers have preserved a good deal of the substance, and in some cases fragments, of the originals. Thus Arrian, our best authority on the whole subject, based his Anabasis on Ptolemy and Aristo-bulus, ^12c

and in his Indica made much use of Nearchus.^12d

Arrian, however, tells us that even Ptolemy and Aristobulus were not always in agreement,^12e

and further, that though Alexander's expedition served to explode many fables, it at the same time led to the fabrication of fresh ones.^12f

Onesicritus, for instance, who, though only the pilot, claimed in his account to have been the admiral,^12g

of Alexander's fleet, heard tell of two dragons, or serpents, measuring 80 and 140 cubits in length respectively,^12h

and speaks of whales off the coast of Balúchistán as being half a stade, i.e. over 100 yards, long, and broad in proportion.¹²ⁱ

Bæton relieved the prosaic details of mensuration with the account of a sylvan folk—natives of Mount Imaus—who had backward-pointing feet.^12j

Again, the question as to whether or no the Amazons visited Alexander split the early authorities into two separate camps.^12k

We may conclude, therefore, that the seeds of the Romance that grew up in later times round the personality of Alexander the Great were sown in his lifetime. The growth thus started not merely increased in bulk by a natural process of evolution in succeeding centuries, but also absorbed materials that originally had no connexion at all with him and his undertakings. Thus, for example, when the historic facts of his career had grown somewhat dim in the popular mind, the expedition in B.C. 332 of his uncle Alexander I. of Epirus to Italy became part of his legend,¹³

and he was credited later on with having visited Candace, the Ethiopian queen, at Meroe. We may assume, too, that the experiences of the rank and file of his time-expired veterans, military and naval, lost nothing in the telling. Speaking generally too, the travellers' tales, often based on misunderstood metaphor or misinterpreted natural phenomena —tales such as in after-times were told by the friar Odorico and Sir John Maundeville—would add their quota to the romance of the subject. The reader will find examples of such fables in the reign of Sikandar. Long before his time, however, they had made their way from India to Greece. Homer knew something of them, so did Herodotus, so did Hecatæus probably, and so beyond doubt did Ctesias. Moreover, no form was too monstrous or abnormal for the Indian imagination to conceive with respect to god or demon or beings, like the Rákshasas, who were a blend of demon and of man. The companions of Alexander merely heard over again what earlier adventurers had heard, but their association with Alexander brought about a special association of such tales with him.

It should be noted further that the Greeks, like ourselves, had two Indies—an Eastern and a Western—and consequently the fables derived from and respecting the Indians or, as they were called, Ethiopians, were held to apply to the West as well as to the East.^13a

It was in Egypt—the land which he had delivered from the hated Persians and where Ptolemy and his successors had maintained the Alexandrian tradition and had ruled with so much glory—and it was at Alexandria, which the great conqueror had founded and where he was buried, that the Greek Romance of Alexander, so far as we are aware, first received literary form and expression. The author is unknown, but appears to have written about the third century of the Christian era. The authorship is attributed in one of the extant MSS. of the work to the historian Callisthenes, the relative of Aristotle through whose influence it came about that he accompanied Alexander to the East. His rough comments, however, on Alexander's adoption of Persian customs were not well received by the conqueror; he was imprisoned and died in captivity. The title of “The Pseudo-Callisthenes,” by which the Romance now is known, is said to have been bestowed upon it in the first instance by Isaac Casaubon.^13b

The work no longer is extant in what we may call its primitive form, but this, branching in three directions, gave rise to a numerous progeny of MSS., of which some twenty still survive. Three of them, known as A, B, and C respectively, are preserved in the National Library in Paris, and to one or other of these three the rest of the MSS. are said to conform in character.¹⁴

The MS. known as A, a very early Latin version of the Romance supposed to have been made by one Julius Valerius early in the fifth century A.D., and an Armenian version of about the same date,^14a

are looked upon as representing collectively the nearest approximation that we possess to the original work. The MS. known as B is the only one of the three that attributes the authorship to Callisthenes.^14b

During the seventh century A.D. some Greek text of the Romance, conforming generally to the A type, was translated into middle Persian, or Pahlaví, as it is called, and this Pahlaví version was retranslated shortly afterwards into Syriac. No trace of the Pahlaví version remains, and there is no scrap of historical evidence to indicate that such a work ever existed, but the Syriac version is still extant, and has been edited with an English translation by Budge. We call it BHA, and shall have occasion frequently to refer to it in the ensuing pages.

It was the publication of this Syriac version that led Professor Nöldeke to infer, and satisfactorily to prove, that a Pahlaví version of the Pseudo-Callisthenes once must have existed. Such proofs naturally are very technical, but one example may be given by way of illustration. It concerns the transliteration of proper names unknown to the Syriac translator. Nöldeke found that in the Syriac version the letter l was substituted for the letter r in such words as Osiris, Abdera, Kraterus, Parmenion, and others, while, on the other hand, r was substituted for l in Platæa, Eumelus, Candaules, &c. Now, there is nothing in the form of these two letters, as they are written in Greek, Arabic, or in Syriae itself to account for such substitutions and interchanges, but it so happens that in Pahlaví the same sign stands for both l and r, and the conclusion follows that the Syriac version was made not from the Greek or Arabic, but from the Pahlaví.^14c

Appended to all the MSS. of the Syriac version, distinct from it, but, ??ke it, based upon the Pseudo-Callisthenes, there is extant a Syriac Christian Legend of Alexander which claims to be taken from the manuscripts in the house of the archives of the kings of Alexandria.¹⁵

This Legend was composed about the years A.D. 514 or 515, and seems to have been suggested by an incursion of the Huns through the Caucasus, which took place at that time. The author writes as one horror-stricken at the uncouth aspect and savagery of the invaders, and at the ruin caused by them. Shortly after its composition, it was turned into verse, with some additions by the Syriac poet, Jacob of Sarúg, who died in A.D. 521. The legend, and the additions thus made to it, derive respectively from branches B and C of the Pseudo-Callisthenes, and their subject-matter became known to Muhammad, who made use of it in the Kurán, where Alexander is referred to under the title of “Zú-'l-karnain,” or “The Two-horned,” that name having been suggested by the Legend, where we read: “The Lord said to him (Alexander), ‘Behold I have magnified thee above all kingdoms, and I have made horns of iron to grow on thy head, that thou mayest thrust down the kingdoms of the earth with them.”^15a

Naturally, Zú-'l-karnain became an interesting personality to the followers of Muhammad. The passage in the Kurán referring to him was much commented on, and the Syriac accounts of him were translated into Arabic. Now it was to the interest of learned Persians, living under Arab rule in the centuries succeeding the Muhammadan conquest of Írán, to impress their masters with the sense of the past greatness of the empire that they had subdued, and for this purpose the legends of the vanquished race were translated into Arabic. It obviously was desirable that so great a hero as Alexander, and one so interesting to the followers of the Prophet, should be utilised, and in order to effect this the whole Persian traditional view of Alexander was altered. As we have seen alroady,^15b

he was held in hate and horror in Sásánian times as the arch-persecutor and would-be exterminator of Zoroastrianism; he was one of a trinity of ill, of which the other two were Zahhák and Afrásiyáb. Persians, however, that had been converted to, or had been brought up in, the Muhammadan Faith soon came to regard Alexander from another standpoint. To them he was no longer an evil being who had striven to uproot the true religion, but the hero commissioned by God to overthrow a false one, in fact another Asfandiyár with other and better aims, for had not his credentials been countersigned by the Prophet himself? This change of view robbed such memories as still survived of Alexander's triumph over Darius Codomanus of much of their bitterness, and it only remained to abate it altogether by legitimating the conqueror's position. This was easily managed, for the author of the Pseudo-Callisthenes had suggested a way. Concerned for the honour of his country by birth or adoption, he had made Alexander out to be the son of the last native king of Egypt—Nectanebus II.—who had succeeded, it was said, in passing himself off to Olympias, the wife of Philip II. of Macedon, during the latter's absence at the wars, as no less a person than Amen-Ra, the two-horned god of Egypt. The Egyptians were old hands at this sort of falsification. Hero-dotus tells us¹⁶

that Cambyses, after his conquest of Egypt, was made out by the Egyptians to be the son of Nitetis, a daughter of Apries. What Egyptians had done the Persians could do, the necessary story was substituted for that of Nectanebus, as we shall read in this reign, Sikandar became the eldest son of Sháh Dáráb, and the oppressor of Írán one of its national heroes.

At what precise period Alexander assumed his station in the long line of the Sháhs is not known, and probably never will be. In the Pahlaví version, made, it would seem, by some one who was neither an orthodox Zoroastrian nor an orthodox Muhammadan, he was still, as we see from its Syriac representative, the son of Nectanebus; in Firdausí he is the son of Dáráb. Between the two accounts there is a space of some three centuries or more. We may reduce the interval somewhat by assuming, as we may, that the metamorphosis had been completed in the days when Firdausí was growing up, and a new edition of the Bástán-náma in modern Persian was being compiled in the middle of the tenth century by order of Abú Mansúr.^16a

This, we may assume, contained a version of the Pseudo-Callisthenes as it existed after centuries of adaptation by Persian and Arabic hands. The ascription of a Persian paternity to Alexander can be traced further back. It was known to Tabarí who died in A.D. 922, and to Dínawarí who died in A.D. 896.^16b

Neither of them endorses the story, but merely gives it a place among the other accounts that, in accord to the method of Arabic historians, they give of the same event. As these accounts consist of the statements of older authorities, we may consider that the story was current early in the ninth century A.D. Most unfortunately the work that, more than all others, would have thrown light upon that and many another point, and taken us back to the middle of the eighth century, is no longer extant. This was the Arabic translation of the Bástán-náma made by Ibn Mukaffa. He was a Zoroastrian who became a Muhammadan late in life, thereby, as was said of him, merely exchanging one corner of hell for another, as his orthodoxy was more than suspect. He was learned both in the Pahlaví and in the Arabic, and was put to death about A.D. 760. It is not unlikely that he was responsible for the inclusion of Alexander among the legitimate Sháhs. By all accounts he was just the right man in the right place for such an undertaking.

It is hoped that the above sketch may be sufficient to indicate the provenance of the Romance of Alexander the Great and how it came about that it was incorporated into Íránian national legend. It will be seen that it reached Firdausí in a mingled stream. The basis is Greek, and the Pseudo-Callisthenes itself is based on history. The broad facts are there. It tells us that Alexander was a Grecian king, that he conquered Egypt, invaded and subdued Írán, penetrated into India, defeated Porus, returned, died at Babylon, and was buried at Alexandria. Its author introduced Egyptian elements and additions, and it underwent further adaptations at Persian and Arab hands. These will be noted and dealt with as they occur in this and the two following reigns. The vogue of the Pseudo-Callisthenes, however, is not to be circumscribed within such limits as these. For many centuries it superseded the more historic accounts of Alexander that still are extant; and versions, in addition to those already mentioned, have appeared in Latin, Hebrew, Turkish, Ethiopic,¹⁷

Coptic, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Norwegian, Swedish, Dutch, Slavonic, Malay, and Siamese.^17a

Dáráb, the last of the mythical Sháhs, does not appear in the Zandavasta, with which at this point we part company. In order to connect him with the Kaiánian dynasty he was made the hero of a foundling legend, as we saw in the previous volume.^17b

His name was suggested by that of his successor Dárá—the historical Darius Codomanus—who was remembered in connexion with the invasion of Persia by Alexander the Great, and his inclusion among the Sháhs was due to the necessity of providing his successor with a father. Later on he was called upon again to act in that capacity to his successor's conqueror.

§ 1. Dárábgird, now Dáráb, is in Párs, some fifty miles south of the salt lake Niris, which also is referred to.

§ 2. Border wars between the Íránians and the northern Arabs were of frequent occurrence.^17c

For Shu'íb cf. NT, p. 57, note.

§§ 3-4. The account here given of the incidents that led up to the birth of Sikandar is a Persian substitution for the Egyptian story told in the Pseudo-Callisthenes,¹⁸

and in the Syriac version.^18a

The oft-told tale is briefly as follows. Nectanebus^18b

was king of Egypt and a great magician. By his magic arts he had triumphed on all occasions over his enemies. At length the time came when he perceived that his spells no longer would avail to protect his country from invaders, so, disguising himself, he fled to Macedonia, where he set up as a soothsayer. His fame soon reached the ears of Olympias, the wife of Philip of Macedon, who then was absent on a campaign. She had heard a rumour that he intended to divorce her and take another spouse. Accordingly she made up her mind to consult Nectanebus, and summoned him. He came, and at once was smitten with her beauty. She sought his advice on the matter of the divorce, and he told her that the rumour was not false, but that he could help her. He then went on to inform her that she would have a son by the two-horned god of Egypt—Amen. With the aid of dreams sent by his magic arts he reconciled first her and then Philip to the situation, personated the god himself, and thus became the father of Alexander the Great, taking good care that the birth of the child should occur at the most auspicious astrological moment.

The foal, stated in the text to have heen born at the same time as Alexander, is of course the famous steed Bucephalus, which accompanied him in his campaigns as far as the river Hydaspes, the modern Jhílam, and either was killed by the son of Porus when Alexander was forcing the passage of that river or died shortly afterwards of toil and decrepitude at the age of thirty years. Alexander founded two cities by the river in memory of his charger and of his victory over Porus, and named them respectively Bucephala (Jalálpúr?) and Nicæa (Mong?).^18c

It is only in the Persian and Ethiopic versions of the Pseudo-Callisthenes that the births of Alexander and Bucephalus are made to synchronise, which shows that both accounts come from an Arabic source, for as the Syriac version represents a no longer extant Pahlaví version, so the Ethiopic derives from a lost Arabic one. In the Ethiopic version Bucephalus is a mare.^18d

§ 3. We have here a reference to Russia if the reading is correct. P reads “Sús.” The word “Rús” (Byzantine ◌) dates from the ninth century A.D., when Northmen (Scandinavians) founded the Russian Empire. It may be a corruption of rothsmen, “rowers.”^18e

The Russians were in evidence in Firdausí's days.^18f

§ 4. In the Pseudo-Callisthenes, Bk. i. c. 13, and in the Syriac version loc. cit., Philip is said to have chosen the name Alexander in memory of a dead son, so called, whom he had had by a former wife. According to one of the accounts in Tabarí, the mother of Alexander was the daughter of the king of the Rúmans and named Halái (Olympias?). The Sháh, her husband, finding that she was troubled by an unpleasant odour, gave orders that means should be found to remedy this. The doctors agreed to exhibit the wood of a tree called in Persian sandar. They boiled it and washed her with the extract. This, to a great extent, did away with the smell, but not entirely, and, as the cure was not complete, the Sháh sent her back to her father. She was already with child, however, and when her son was born she composed his name by putting her own and that of the tree together, and called him Halái-Sandarús, that is the primitive form of Al Iskandarús.^18g

Sandar appears to be a shortened form of sandarús, the Arar tree, Callitris quadrivalvis, a native of north-west Africa, which produces the resin known as “gum juniper” or “sandarach,” the latter a word often used in the Sháhnáma.^18h

Firdausí takes a different view of the meaning of Iskandar. He makes that word equivalent to Iskandarús, but he attributes to it apparently its proper meaning. It is derived either from the Greek ◌, garlic; or the Latin ascalonium, shallot. In any case the treatment that the lady underwent appears to have been more or less homœopathic in character.

and chiefs
Whose counsels prospered, told about Dáráb,
And of the rede and usance of Humái?
Now when Dáráb^20a

sat on the Kaian throne
He girded up his loins, oped wide his hand,
And thus harangued the archmages and the chiefs,
The magnates and the prudent-hearted sages:—
“I did not woo the world by toil and justice;
God set the crown upon my head, and none

It came to pass that five score thousand Arabs,
Brave, spear-armed cavaliers, marched forth. Shu'íb—
A chief sprung from Katíb—commanded them.

Dáráb marched from the desert of the spearmen
Rúm-ward to war against that prosperous land.
Now Failakús was monarch of the realm;
He and the king of Rús were close allies.
They wrote to say: “The offspring of Humái
Hath led forth countless troops.”

On hearing this

The prince of Rúm bethought him of old feuds,
And levied soldiers in 'Ammúriya,²³

All men renowned upon the day of battle.

And told before them every circumstance.
“What say ye,” said he, “touching this appeal,
Since Failakús is fain to save his face?”
The chiefs all called down blessings on the Sháh,
And said: “O Sháh, shrewd-hearted, pure of Faith!
The king of kings is greatest of the great,
Let him determine what is best to do.
That famous monarch hath an only daughter
Of cypress-height and spring-like cheek. In Chín

And settest on a golden throne. Send her,
Together with the tribute due from Rúm,
If thou wouldst dwell untroubled in that land.”
The envoy heard and, coming like the wind,
Reported this to Cæsar. Failakús,
And all the army, were rejoiced thereat,
Because the Sháh would be his son-in-law.
The question of the tribute was discussed,
As to how much the king of Rúm could pay,
And they agreed that in the month of Mihr
In every year the Sháh should take from Cæsar
A hundred thousand eggs of solid gold,
And with each egg a royal gem, each egg
To be two score miskáls^23c

in weight, each gem
Of highest excellence. First, Failakús
Rewarded all his frontier-chiefs that dwelt
Within the peopled parts of Rúm, and then
Commanded the philosophers, and all
That had an interest in those parts, to give
Their whole attention to prepare a road.
The nobles that escorted the princess
Brought every one his present. They made ready
A golden litter, slaves, and crown of gold,
Ten camels laden with brocade of Rúm
With jewelled patterns on a golden ground,
Three hundred camel-loads of carpetings,
With other presents for the Sháh. Within

One night that Moon was sleeping with the Sháh,
All gems and colour, scent and loveliness,
But verily her breathing was not sweet,
And grew disgustful to the king of kings,
Who shrank and turned his head away from her
Upon the couch because her breath was foul.
The monarch of Írán was grieved thereat,
His mind was troubled and his soul all care.
They summoned skilful leeches to Náhíd,
And one of them, a shrewd and prudent man,
Examined till he found a remedy—
A herb whereby the gullet is inflamed,
Called in the Rúman tongue “iskandar.” This
He rubbed upon the palate of the queen,
And caused her eyes²⁶

to water lustily.
The fetor fled away, her palate burned,
Her face shone like brocade; but though the Fair
Was sweet as musk Dáráb had ceased to love her,
The monarch's heart turned coldly from his bride,
And so he sent her back to Failakús.
She was with child but told not any one.

since he was so tall, well favoured,
And sweet of breath, for she esteemed the name
Of what had sweetened her own palate lucky,
While Cæsar told each chief: “There hath appeared
A Cæsar of my seed.”

None named Dáráb,

Sikandar was the son and Cæsar sire,
For Cæsar shamed to say to any one:—
“Dáráb hath put away my child.”

What time

Sikandar's holy mother brought him forth,
And one went to his grandsire with the tidings,
There was within the stable a brown mare,
In body lusty, swift and tall, and she
That very night produced a foal all white,
Short-shanked, and breasted like a lion. Cæsar
Exulted o'er that mare because he deemed
That birth would prove a lucky sign for him.
He used at dawn to have the infant fetched,
Would have the trappings put upon the mare,
And then caress the foal on eyes and mane
Because it was coeval with Sikandar.
The sky revolved awhile with matters thus,
And years of varied fortune passed away,
Sikandar came to have a monarch's heart,
The utterance of heroes. Cæsar held him
More dearly than a son and used to place
The due adornments on his martial breast.
He gained in wisdom, aptitude, good sense,
Weight, and intelligence. He was acknowledged
Successor on the throne to Failakús,
Who held him in regard in weal and woe.
He learned from tutors kings' accomplishments,
And thou hadst said that he was made to judge,
To found an empire, and to fill the throne.
Now when Náhíd had gone back to her sire
Dáráb took unto him another wife,

This he said,

And heaved a sigh. The colour of his cheek
Turned from pomegranate-bloom to fenugreek.

After the death of Dáráb, his son Dárá ascends the throne and administers the realm. Meanwhile Failakús dies, and Sikandar succeeds him in Rúm. Dárá sends to demand tribute of Rúm, and Sikandar replies by invading Írán. He visits the camp of Dárá as his own ambassador, and is recognised, but escapes. Three great battles are fought, in which Dárá is defeated, and subsequently murdered by his own ministers. Sikandar finds Dárá mortally wounded, promises to carry out his last wishes, executes his murderers, and universally is recognised as Sháh.

With Dárá we enter upon the historic period of the Sháhnáma.²⁹

In the last reign he was represented as being the younger son of Dáráb, with Sikandar for his elder brother. Historically, Dárá's prospect of ever becoming Sháh had been remote in the extreme. Artaxerxes Ochus, who had put Nectanebus to flight and conquered Egypt, was murdered in B.C. 338, with all his sons, by the eunuch Bagoas, with the exception of the youngest, Arses, whom Bagoas made Sháh. Two years later Bagoas murdered him also, and all his family, and raised a distant collateral of the royal house to the throne, who is the Dárá of the Sháhnáma and the Darius Codomanus of Greek writers. Him too in his turn Bagoas tried to do away with, but was put to death himself instead. Historically, Dárá reigned six years, not fourteen.

§ 2. When Alexander was fourteen years old, his father Philip sent for Aristotle to become his son's tutor.

For the tribute due from Rúm see p. 24. In the Pseudo-Callisthenes and the Syriac and Ethiopic versions the ambassadors come in Philip's lifetime and are interviewed by Alexander.³⁰

The golden eggs are mentioned in the Syriac, which, with the Greek, also says that the ambassadors employed a painter to take Alexander's portrait, which they presented to Darius. The Syriac makes the further addition that Darius ordered the picture to be carried to his daughter Roxana, and their several heights to be compared, after which he flung it away in scorn, but Roxana secured it, honoured it greatly, and from that time fell in love with the original.^30a

Sikandar in the text is represented as beginning his expedition to the East by the invasion of Misr (Egypt), but a good deal happened first both in history and romance. Historically, he spent the first eighteen months of his reign in Greece, and crossed into Asia Minor in the spring of B.C. 334, where, having won the battle of the Granicus, he established his power sufficiently to allow him to advance through the passes into Syria. Having encountered and defeated Darius at Issus in the autumn of B.C. 333, he proceeded to make himself master of the coasts of Syria and Palestine, the sieges of Tyre and Gaza together taking about nine months, after which he invaded Egypt. Romantically, after the Granicus and Asia Minor, Alexander sails to Sicily and Italy, where he is well received by the Romans, who present him with a jewelled crown, thence voyages to Africa, where he interviews the Carthaginians, and proceeds by way of the oasis of Ammon to Egypt.^30b

§ 3. This corresponds with the Greek Pseudo-Callisthenes^30c

and with the Syriac version^30d

in general, but these texts add the picturesque incidents that, after Alexander's flight from the feast, the efligy of King Xerxes, which Darius loved, fell from the wall or ceiling of the banquet-hall, and that Alexander in his flight had to cross a frozen river, on which the ice gave way as he reached the other side, his horse being carried off by the current and drowned, while the pursuing Persians were unable to follow him across.

§§ 4-6. The Syriac version only mentions one battle between Alexander and Darius, at which both were present.^30e

In the Sháhnáma there are three, of which the first corresponds with the one in the Syriac. According to Tabarí, who quotes Hisham bin Muhammad, the two kings fought for a year in Mesopotamia.^30f

Firdausí places the scene of at least two of the battles of which he speaks to the west of the Euphrates. He was drawing probably from Arabic sources of information. The three battles cannot be regarded as in any way intended for those of the Granicus, of Issus, and of Gaugamela. The number is perhaps a tribute to the importance of the occasion.^30g

In the Sháhnáma Dárá, after his final defeat, goes to Kirmán. According to the Pseudo-Callisthenes^30h

and the Syriac version,³⁰ⁱ

he withdrew to his palace, and next is heard of locally in connexion with Ekbatana and the Caspian Gates.^30j

This is more accurate historically. Arrian says that Darius, after his defeat at Gauga-mela (October 1st, B.C. 331), fled towards Media, rightly supposing that Alexander would march upon Susa and Babylon.^30k

§ 7. In the Pseudo-Callisthenes Darius, in his letter, asks for the return of his wife and family, offering land and treasures in exchange;^30l

in the Syriac version he is ready to surrender everything if he may have mercy shown to him.^30m

Alexander's reply is softened in the Persian. In the Greek and Syriac he takes the view that he is only recovering his own, Darius having been the aggressor, and in the latter makes no reply to him. Alexander's honourable treatment of Darius' family, whom he had taken at Issus, is a matter of history,³⁰ⁿ

and the same sentiment toward them is preserved in the Pseudo-Callisthenes.

§§ 8-9. In the Greek and Syriac versions the letter to Porus is given at somewhat greater length. Darius invites Porus to meet him with an army at the Caspian Gates, and promises him half the spoil and Alexander's horse Bucephalus.^30o

Porus, of which the Arabic form Fúr is used in the Sháhnáma, is a dynastic or family name, and represents the Pauravas who are mentioned in the Mahábhárata as reigning in the neighbourhood of Kashmír.^30p

The Porus of Alexander's time ruled between the Hydaspes (Jhílam) and the Akesines (Chináb), and was allied to the king of Kashmír.

With regard to the death of Darius at the hands of two of his satraps,^30q

the historical account is that, after Gaugamela, he went, accompanied by remnants of his broken army, to Ekbatana (Hamadán), where he endeavoured to raise fresh forces. Alexander, in the meantime, had made himself master of Babylon and Per-sepolis, and, hearing of Darius' doings, advanced northward against him in the spring of B.C. 330. Darius did not wait for Alexander's arrival, but left Ekbatana, intending to take refuge with his cousin Bessus, the satrap of Bactria. Darius went, of course, by the well-known route that connects western with eastern Irán.³²

He had considerable forces with him, but his counsels were distracted, and his troops gradually deserted him. Alexander reached Rai by forced marches from Ekbatana, but, hearing that Darius was far ahead, abandoned the pursuit, and rested for five days. He then resumed his march, and halted in the neighbourhood of Girduni Sirdarra, which appears to be the Caspian Gates of Arrian, passed through them the second day and heard, when encamped beyond them, that Darius was a prisoner in the hands of Bessus, the satrap of Bactria, of Bar-saentes, the satrap of Arachosia and Drangiana (Sístán), and of Nabarzanes, the commander of Darius' cavalry. On this Alexander resumed the pursuit, and, four or five days later, came up with the fugitives, whereupon Nabarzanes and Barsaentes mortally wounded Darius and abandoned him. He was dead before Alexander reached him.^32a

This was in July B.C. 330. Nabarzanes soon after surrendered to Alexander, and was pardoned.^32b

Bessus and Barsaentes escaped to their own satrapies, where the former assumed royal state and the name of Artaxerxes. Ultimately both were captured and executed.^32c

Their resistance to Alexander seems to have been a more serious crime than their removal of his chief opponent. An Arabic account^32d

affirms that the death of Darius was brought about with the connivance of Alexander, and although Firdausí's version naturally omits this feature, it in other respects follows the Arabic very closely with regard to the scene between the two kings. The names of the two assassins are in the Pseudo-Callisthenes Bessus and Ariobarzanes,^32e

in the Syriac version Bágíz and Ánábdéh, and in the Ethiopic Háshísh and Arsalás. The names in Firdausí seem to be of his own invention. The arrangement made between the two kings that Alexander should marry Roxana or Rúshanak appears in all the versions, and is not historical. She was not the daughter of Darius, but of Oxyartes, a Bactrian chief, whose stronghold Alexander escaladed. He fell in love with her at sight, and married her,^32f

B.C. 328. Subsequently, on his return from his Indian expedition, he did marry a daughter of Darius—Barsine or Stateira—at Susa in B.C. 324. Rúshanak, the Persian form of Roxana, is a diminutive from the adjective “rúshan,” bright.

For the feast of Sada see Vol. i. p. 123. Naurúz, New Year's Day, was also the name of a feast then held. Cf. id. 74. For Mihr see id. 175 and note.

The corpse of Darius was sent to Párs.³³

In the Romance the punishment of his assassins follows quickly. In the Greek, Syriac, and Ethiopic versions of it, Alexander announces his intention of “exalting” the doers of the deed, and so induces the culprits to declare themselves, who thereupon are “exalted” on the gibbet, set up over the grave of Darius.^33a

Firdausí's version relieves Sikandar from all imputation of sharp practice. In the Arabic account mentioned above, Alexander gives the murderers all that they bargained for, but they had forgotten to include their lives in the compact, and are put to death.

§ 10. Sikandar's proclamation to the Persians and his correspondence with the women-folk of Dárá appear in the other versions,^33b

but the correspondence is reserved for the next reign. Here we have a message only. The passage about the handmaids in Firdausí's version of the proclamation runs in the Syriac: “And we command that damsels … shall enter into the temple of the god whom my mother Olympias worships, for the space of one year for the service of the gods; and when they have arrived at the age for marriage, they shall go forth from the ministry, and shall receive a dowry of five thousand dínárs from the treasury of the god, and shall marry.” Expressions in Firdausí's version show that it came to him, in part at least, through the Arabic.

Wherever
Reigned independent kings the Sháh commanded
To send a letter trenchant as a sword:—

In those days was the death of Failakús—
A cause of trouble for a while in Rúm;
Then sat Sikandar on his grandsire's throne,
Sought virtue, and restrained the hands of evil,
For in those days there lived one known to fame
In Rúm, a joy to all that land and hight
The erudite Arastálís³⁵

—a man
Of wisdom, vigilance, and influence.
That sage adviser came before Sikandar,
And, as he took his place, held forth, and said:—
“O ruler happy in thy full desire!
By acting as thou dost thou wilt abate
Thy fame because the royal throne hath looked
On many such as thee but will not rest

Now when Sikandar heard: “The host hath come,”
He marched to meet it, and when two leagues' space
Was left between he called to him the magnates,
Who spake with him at large about Dárá
Until, outworn by his advisers' words,
He said: “There is one way and only one—
That I should go as an ambassador
To him and weigh his state.”

He bade to fetch

A girdle decked with jewels fit for kings,
And royal robe embroidered. They brought forth
A led horse all betrapped with gold. A sword
Hung from its saddle in a golden scabbard.
Sikandar chose ten Rúman cavaliers,
Men good at parleying, and left the host
At dawn with those ten famed interpreters.
As soon as he approached the exalted Sháh
He lighted from his steed and did obeisance.
Dárá, the world-lord, called him, greeted him,
And seated him below the throne. The courtiers,
Amazed, invoked the Maker of the world,
Such were Sikandar's aspect, Grace, and prudence,
His stature, limbs, and dignity! He took
His seat but rose forthwith, delivered well
Sikandar's message, blessing first the king,
And said: “For ever may the crowned head live.
Thus said Sikandar: ‘O illustrious,
Whose will prevaileth everywhere on earth!
I have no wish to fight against the Sháh,
Or sojourn in Írán. Mine aim is this—

Now when Dárá

Observed his counsel, courage, eloquence,
His Grace and bearing, so that thou hadst said:—
“It is Dárá³⁹

upon the ivory throne
With armlets, torque, with Grace and crown,” he
asked:—
“What is thy name and stock because thy Grace
And limbs denote a king? Thou art no subject.
Methinketh that thou art thyself Sikandar.
Thee with thy Grace and stature, speech and face,
Heaven peradventure nurtured for a throne.”
Sikandar answered: “None hath acted thus
In peace or war, and men of eloquence—
The crown of all the sages of the world—
Are not so lacking at Sikandar's portal
That he should take a message from himself,^39a

And he so great a king, the people's head?
Sikandar's wit is not of such a sort
That he should pass from his forefathers' ways.
This was the message that my master gave me,
And I have told the Sháh his words.”

They lodged him

In fitting state. The monarch of Írán,
As soon as they had spread the board, commanded
The chamberlain: “Invite the ambassador.”
Forthwith they summoned him and gave to him
The envoys' seat. They eat and then prepared
To revel, calling out for wine and harp

Said the server: “Kingly man!

Why keep these golden cups upon thy lap?”
Sikandar made him this reply: “These cups,
Are, my good sir, the envoy's perquisite.
If such be not the usage in Írán
Restore them to the royal treasury.”
The monarch smiled to hear of such a custom,
And bade to set within the envoy's hand
A goblet filled with jewels fit for kings,
And lay a ruby on the top thereof.
Just at that moment those that went to make
Demand for tribute from the land of Rúm
Came from outside within the banquet-hall,
Advancing toward the Sháh with measured tread.
He that was envoy recognised Sikandar,
Went to the Sháh, and did obeisance, saying:—
“This is Sikandar—Cæsar's self—who hath
The throne, the mace, and diadem! What time
The Sháh commanded us to go and ask
For tribute he was wroth, entreated us
With scorn, and spake of war with thee, while we
Had to escape by night and urge our steeds.
We saw not any like to him in Rúm.
Now boldly hath he come within thy borders
To weigh thy host, thy treasure, throne, and crown.”
The Sháh, on hearing what his envoy said,
Gazed at Sikandar yet more earnestly,
Who apprehended what it was they spake
In secret to the monarch of the world,

Said Sikandar:—

“Hail and exult in this our glorious omen,
For this cup is the triumph of my life;
The stars themselves are subject to me now.
I have obtained the number of the foe;
Their horsemen are much fewer than we heard.
Draw, all of you, your falchions for the fray,
Advance and quit the desert and the plain.
If in this fight ye give yourselves to toil,
The toil shall both enrich you and content you.
The Maker of the world is mine ally,
And fortune's head is lying on my breast.”
The mighty men called blessings down on him,
And said: “May all the earth rejoice in Cæsar,
And may our souls and bodies be thy ransom;
To that we pledge ourselves for evermore,

Now when the sun rose o'er the Raven's back,
And earth grew as it were a lamp aflame,
Dárá, the world-lord, led his army forth;
The world drew o'er its head a veil of pitch.
He marched his army on from the Farát,
And men were more than grass-blades on the plain.
Whenas Sikandar heard: “A host hath come,”
He beat the kettledrums and marched to fight.
What with the jupons and the Indian swords,
The steeds and armour both for man and horse,
The baggage and the warriors on both sides,
Earth seemed a sea, and dust rose mountain-high.
Both hosts drew up for battle, and the falchions
Flashed in the sun. They led the elephants
Before the army, and the world became
As 'twere the river Nile. The cavaliers
Were in the rear, the elephants in front,
And all men ceased to set their hearts on life.
Thou wouldst have said: “Air is blood-clamouring,
And earth is rocking underneath the cry!”
So loudly sounded horn and Indian bell
That all men's hearts were moved and therewithal,
What with the neighing of the steeds, the shouts
Of captains, and crash of massive maces,
Thou wouldst have said: “Earth is a mount of war,
And heaven with flying dust an Ethiop's face!”
For one whole week those valiant warriors
Confronted. On the eighth day rose a murk
Of dust such that the sun turned azure-dim,
And veiled the Íránians' eyes, who saw but dust
Upon the battlefield. Dárá, the world-lord,
Turned with his noble host of warriors.

Whenas Dárá had fled before Sikandar
He sent off cavaliers on every side
In haste and called the chieftains of Írán
And of Túrán. He gave out pay, he summoned
The commissaries and, by next new moon,
Reorganised the troops and filled with bluster
The chieftains' heads. Again he crossed the river
And ranged his army on the spacious plain.
Sikandar, hearing this, marched forth; he went
To meet Dárá and left behind his baggage.
When those two hosts encountered, earth and time
Contended too. They battled for three days
Till all the field was straitened by the slain.
Vast numbers of the Íránians perished there,
The day was lost to the aspiring Sháh,
Who turned in anguish from the battlefield
When sun and moon alike refused him aid.
Sikandar followed swift as flying dust,
Invoking much the Maker of the world.
A proclamation went forth to the troops:—
“Ye subjects who are wandering astray!
There is no fear that I shall injure you,
And ye are no concernment to my troops.

He spake in anguish,

And wept awhile, then added: “Better die
To-day with fame than live while Rúmans triumph.
Of old our ancestors and Sháhs took tribute
Each year from them; Rúm was submiss in all
To us; but now the Persians' fortune loureth,
Sikandar hath possessed him of all kingship,
Become world-lord, hath compassed throne and crown,

He spake in tears with anguish in his heart;
His lips were livid and his cheeks were wan.
The prudent nobles rose to make reply;
A mournful wail ascended from the court:—
“We would not have the world without the Sháh.
We all will face the conflict, make the world
Strait to our foes, and bind our skirts together⁴⁶

For conquest or the grave.”

Of all that coast

He paid and armed the leaders and the host.

Sikandar, ware of what Dárá was doing,
And how he had become upon the throne
The moon's own diadem, led from 'Irák
His powers while all invoked on him God's blessing.
His army had no middle and no end;
Dárá's good fortune was not young withal,
But still the Sháh prepared to meet his foe,
And led so vast an army from Istakhr

Dárá,

On hearing this, announced his own intent—
One in accord to royal precedent.

The Sháh then called a veteran scribe who brought
His paper and musk-scented ink. The Sháh,
In pain and grief, with livid cheeks and eyes
Fulfilled with tears of blood, wrote from Dárá,
Son of Dáráb, son of Bahman, a letter
To lion-capturing Sikandar Cæsar.
He first gave praises to the Omnipotent,
The Author of his good and evil fortune,
Then said: “Assuredly the sage himself
Will not escape the process of the sky
Whereby we are made joyful and appalled,
At whiles exalted and at whiles abased.
The battles of our hosts turned not on valour,
But on the processes of sun and moon.
What was to be hath been. Our heart is sore:
What hath yon azure vault in store for us?
If, heart-repentant now for having sought
The fray, thou wilt consent to terms, the treasures
Both of Gushtásp and of Asfandiyár,
The earrings and the armlets and the torques,
With all that we ourselves have gained, will I
Dispatch now from our treasury to thine.
Moreover I will aid thee in thy wars,
And when thou shalt be instant will not lag.
As for my wives and children, now thy captives,
I should not deem their restoration strange.
They who would rule the world must not be vengeful,

He sent

Like wind a cameleer who came to Fúr,
The scion of the race of Fúrs.

Sikandar,

On hearing what Dárá, son of Dáráb,
Had done, bade blow the trumpet. There arose
The din of kettledrum and Indian bell.
Sikandar from Istakhr led forth such powers
That Sol was lost in heaven. Dárá too marched

Both of them,

One minister, the other treasurer,
Went with the Sháh; Jánúsiyár, the chief,
Upon the left hand, Máhiyár to right.
Night gloomed, a storm arose, Jánúsiyár
Laid hand upon a dagger, stabbed the king
Upon the breast, that famed head reached its fall,
And then the troops deserted, one and all.

The ministers came to Sikandar, saying:—
“O Sháh victorious and endowed with knowledge!

Sikandar made reply:—

“O monarch of kind heart and honest speech!
I do accept thy rede and last requests,
And I will tarry in thy borders only
To compass these good matters, and herein
Take wisdom for my guide.”

The world-lord grasped

Sikandar's hand, began to wail, then pressed
The palm upon his mouth, and said: “Be God
Thy refuge. I resign my place to thee,
Depart to dust, and give my soul to Him.”

When he had placed

The Sháh's bier on the throne, had gone the way
Of royal precedent, left that grand charnel,
And made the lofty portals fast without,
He set a gibbet for Jánúsiyár,
With one for Máhiyár of equal size,
And hung those miscreants alive thereon—
Those regicides—head downward. From the host
Came warriors with stone in hand and slew them
Upon the gibbet all despiteously:
So perish every slayer of a king!
Now when the Íránians saw how much Sikandar
Was troubled for the Sháh—that noble man—
They all of them began to laud his worth,
And hailed him as the ruler of the earth.

One left Kirmán to go to Ispahán,
Wherein the Íránian chieftains were assembled.

distinguish from mere beggars,
And let them stand the foremost on the roll.
If any of you are unfortunates,
Afflicted by an officer of mine,
Break ye the unjust doer's heart and back,
And rase him utterly, both root and branch.
I will suspend alive that miscreant,
Who hath led fair beginnings all astray.
Enrich your hearts by alms and equity,
And make nobility your diadem,
Because your lives will pass and time account
Our every step. Whoever doth trangress
Our will shall suffer for it in the end.”
The letter having been dispatched, he went
And took serene possession of the world.
He left Kirmán and coming to Istakhr
Encrowned him with the Kaians' glorious crown.
Seek not the secrets of the world to pry,
It turneth from the seeker's scrutiny;
Make knowledge in this life thy chief pursuit,
For in the next thou wilt enjoy the fruit.

Sikandar, on ascending the throne, harangues the nobles and marries Rúshanak, the daughter of Dárá. The poet then tells of Sikandar's dealing with Kaid and Fúr (Porus) of Hind, his visit to the Kaaba, to Queen Kaidáfa (Candace), to the Brahmans, to the Western Sea, to the land of Habash and of the Narmpái, to the City of Women, to the Darkness in search of the Water of Life, and to the Angel Isráfíl. Sikandar then again turns eastward, and erects a barrier against Yájúj and Májúj (Gog and Magog), reaches the End of the World, and is warned of his own death by the Speaking Tree. The poet then tells of Sikandar's relations with Faghfúr of Chín, of his visit to Bábil, of his correspondence with Aristálís (Aristotle), and of the circumstances attending his death and burial.

The Vullers-Landauer text, from which we have translated thus far, does not extend beyond the reign of Dárá, and from this point to the end we have made our version from the text of Macan. Mohl's edition of the text—the alternative—is, apart from other reasons for our choice, too ponderous for practical purposes; the volume of it containing the reign of Sikandar, for instance, measures 18 × 13 × 2 5/8 inches and weighs 17 lbs. 2 ozs.! The principles of our translation remain the same as laid down in the Introduction,⁶⁰

but it is necessary to add that in Macan's edition there are many misprints not included in the Errata at the end of his volumes. These misprints we have corrected in our translation, but have not thought it necessary to call attention to them in footnotes. The corrections for the most part are quite obvious, and sufficiently indicated in our version to any one acquainted with the original.

§§ 2-4. These correspond generally with the Pseudo-Callisthenes, Book II. chap. 22, and with the Syriac version, Book II. chap. 14. For Roxana, see p. 32.

§§ 5-11. Alexander on his arrival in India naturally came into contact with the Fakírs—the mendicant and ascetic orders which are such a feature of that country. His pilot, Onesicritus, has left an account of an ombassy on which he was sont to them. He describes how he found fifteen men standing, sitting, or lying in various attitudes naked in the sun, and conversed with two of them, Calanus and Mandanes, of whom the latter was the older, the wiser, and the more generally amenable.⁶¹

The former, however, accompanied Alexander back to Persia, where, having fallen into bad health, he was burnt to death by his own request.^61a

Calanus is mentioned also by Alexander's admiral, Nearchus,^61b

and by Chares of Mytilene.^61c

According to Plutarch his real name was Sphinés, and Calanus was a name given him by the Greeks because in salutations he used the word kale, “hail.”^61d

The accounts in the original authorities of Calanus and Mandanes, or Dandamis—a name by which also he is known—were freely used by later writers.^61e

Palladius, who was bishop of Helenopolis at the beginning of the fifth century A.D., wrote a treatise on the peoples of India and the Brahmans in which he gives an account of Calanus and Dandamis, drawn from the older authorities. This work was interpolated into Codex A of the Pseudo-Callisthenes, where it forms chaps. 7-16 of Book III., thus bringing Calanus into the Romance. Dandamis had appeared already in chap. 6. The passage from Palladius is given in the early Latin version of the Romance by Julius Valerius, but not in the Syriae translation from the Pahlaví. The first oriental mention of the Indian sages seems to be in the little Pahlaví treatise known as the Kárnámak-i-Ardshír-i-Pápakán, which will engage our attention later on in the present volume.^61f

In that treatise, which dates back probably to the seventh century A.D., the founder of the Sásánian dynasty consults the wise Indian, Kait. It is true that Ardshír Pápakán lived five centuries after Sikandar, but in the Sháhnáma this would be no bar to the reappearance of the sage. Ya'kúbí, the Arabic historian, writing towards the end of the ninth century A.D., has an account of Sikandar's meeting with a wise Indian king named Kaihan. In Pahlaví the letter t well might be taken for the letters h and n, and these with the short vowel a interposed would make Kaihan.⁶²

The story of the Indian sage seems rapidly to have developed in oriental hands, as is evident from the account given by Mas'údí, who died in A.D. 956, of the dealings of Sikandar with the wise Indian king, Kand.^62a

Mas'údí, indeed, professes to give an abridgment only; but his version, with one exception, agrees closely with that of Firdausí. The exception is the introductory matter contained in § 5, which appears to be the poet's own contribution to the story. Kaid's dreams are a veiled presentment of Firdausí's own discontent with the circumstances of his own time, and contain a fierce arraignment of Sultan Mahmúd himself.^62b

Kait, Kaihan, Kand, and Kaid evidently represent the same personality, which is none other than that of the Mandanes or Dandamis of classic authors, while the sage whom he sends as one of his four gifts to Sikandar is the historical Calanus.^62c

Firdausí adopted the form Kaid for rhyming purposes. Kaid, we are told in § 6, dwelt at Mílád. Historically this would be Taxila, a city situated between the Indus and the Hydaspes (Jhílam) and Attock and Rawalpindi. Omphis, the king of Taxila, who was at enmity with his neighbour King Porus, was on very friendly terms with Alexander. Both Calanus and Mandanes or Dandamis were resident at Taxila. In the Sháhnáma Sikandar's dealings with Kaid are placed correctly before the war with Fúr. In the Pseudo-Callisthenes the interpolation from Palladius^62d

is inserted after the account of Alexander's interview with the naked Indian sages in Book III. chaps. 5 and 6, a passage which is an integral part of the work and will be dealt with later on, for the interview is represented both in the Pseudo-Callisthenes and in the Sháhnáma as taking place after the war with Porus (Fúr).^62e

In Mas'údí and Mírkhánd the affair with Kaid also takes place after that war.^62f

Their account of Sikandar's passage of wits with the sage agrees closely with that of Firdausí in § 11, save that when Sikandar returns the rusted mirror to the sage the latter makes a cup that will float of it; on which Sikandar sends it back filled with earth, and the sage returns it to him without alteration, earth being the last word in all matters. Such symbolism is common in the East, and the whole passage might be interpreted thus. The Sháh begins by suggesting that the sage had better get into training if his wits are to be of any use to his new master. The sage replies that they are already as sharp as needles. The Sháh retorts that, though they may be sharp they are unpolished, and the sage rejoins that on the contrary they are exceedingly bright. The Sháh then observes that he can soon take the shine out of them, and the sage retorts that he knows a trick worth two of that. At this point the Sháh, hoping to take the sage at a disadvantage, summons him and requests him to interpret what had passed between them, thinking that he may not like to put his symbolism into plain speech. The sage, however, is equal to the occasion, and on the spur of the moment gives an unexpected turn to his interpretation, and one which meets with the Sháh's approval. The true interpretation seems to be this. The Sháh by sending a bowl full of ghee indicates that already he is so charged with knowledge that he has no occasion for the sage's services. The sage, by inserting many needles into the ghee, suggests that there is room for improvement. The Sháh replies that his finer faculties have become too blunted by the cares of his station. The sage rejoins that he can amend that. The Sháh retorts that the improvement will not last, but this the sage denies. Mas'údí adds that ultimately Sikandar allowed the sage to return to his own country.⁶³

A similar story is told by Hiuen Tsiang of two great Buddhist saints who lived about the first century B.C. One visited the other to hold discussion with him. The visitor was not admitted at once. The other sent a disciple to him with a begging bowl full of water, symbolising the fulness, depth, and lucidity of the wisdom of his master. The visitor said nothing but dropped a needle into the bowl. The disciple returned and reported what had happened to his master, who at once recognised the worth of the visitor and gave orders that he should be admitted.^63a

§§ 12-15. These correspond with Book III. chap. 1-4 of the Pseudo-Callisthenes and of the Syriac version of it, and like them are quite unhistorical, as will be seen from the following summary of what really happened. On quitting Taxila, Alexander marched to the Hydaspes (Jhílam), on the opposite bank of which he found Porus with his forces prepared to dispute the passage. He deceived Porus so often by feints that after a time the latter ceased to believe that Alexander's intention of crossing the river was serious; and Alexander, in a night of storm and rain, succeeded in effecting the passage—one of his most brilliant feats of arms. Immediately after the crossing he was attacked by the son of Porus with a small force, which he defeated without much difficulty, and the son of Porus was slain. The general engagement with Porus himself followed. Alexander was again victorious, and Porus, who had behaved throughout with great gallantry and was wounded, surrendered after Alexander had sent several messengers to beg him so to do. Alexander treated Porus with every consideration, restored his kingdom to him, and enlarged it. The battle with Porus was fought in the late spring or early summer of B.C. 326. Alexander then continued his advance into India, crossed the Akesines (Chináb) and the Hydraotes (Ravi), and reached the Hyphasis (Beas). At this point his army refused to proceed further, and he acceded to their wishes, though with the greatest reluctance. In the Pseudo-Callisthenes such historical features as survive are adapted so as to contribute to the glory of its hero. Thus the protest of the army takes place before the battle with Porus and proves ineffective, because it was incumbent that Alexander should meet with no check. The difficulty of transporting horses across a river on the further bank of which a strong force of elephants was drawn up to oppose them, and the known antipathy of horses to elephants, suggested the device of the iron steeds. A tradition, resting on good authority, that Porus was very tall, “more than five cubits in height” according to Arrian,⁶⁴

suggested that Alexander should be made out to be very small. The death of the son of Porus may have suggested, or been mistaken for, that of his father, which naturally is represented as having been caused by Alexander's own hand.

The differences between the Pseudo-Callisthenes and Firdausí are not important and chiefly in matters of detail. In the former Porus begins the correspondence; he has wild beasts as well as elephants in his army. In branches B and C Alexander, disguised as a sutler, visits the city of Porus and has an interview with him. In the battle that ensues Bucephalus falls, in branch A by the hand of Porus. The battle lasts for twenty days, and so forth. In the latter the kingdom of Fúr is situated beyond Kannúj—a city on the Ganges—and it is there that the correspondence with Fúr takes place. After the correspondence comes the protest of the army against proceeding further. Sikandar appoints Sawurg king in Fúr's stead.

§ 16. This is derived, of course, not from the Pseudo-Callis-thenes, but from independent Arabic sources. It appears in Dínawarí, who died in A.D. 896.^64a

The insertion makes wild work of the geography, for it brings Sikandar back from Kannúj, according to Firdausí, to Mecca. Later on,^64b

he has to go eastward again in order to interview the Brahmans.

The neighbourhood of Mecca has been a sacred spot from time immemorial. The city stands in a sacred territory known as “Harám,” i.e. “prohibited,” and contains the still more sacred Kaaba, into the wall of which, and perhaps most sacred of all, is built the meteorite known as the “Black Stone.” The Kaaba itself, according to the Kurán, was built by Abraham and Ishmael.⁶⁵

The custody of the Harám—a position of great honour and profit —was in the hands now of one, now of another, of the Arab tribes. In Muhammad's time the Kuraish, whose ancestor was Nasr, son of Katíb, were in charge. Previously it had been in that of the Khuzá'. The fact that the change of guardianship is attributed to Sikandar is an eloquent testimony to his fame.^65a

Kahtán, according to Arab tradition, was descended from Shem, and was one of the great progenitors of the race. He was identified with Joktan.^65b

§§ 17-23. We learn from Quintus Curtius that when Alexander was besieging Mazaga, a city situated probably on the Swat River, and the inhabitants despaired of the defence, their queen Cleophis, attended by many noble ladies, came out to him, was received graciously, and confirmed in her sovereignty. Some people, however, were ill-natured enough to say that her personal charms rather than Alexander's humanity brought about this result. At all events she is said to have had a son later on whom she named Alexander.^65c

Alexander's relations with Cleophis and his visit to the Oasis of Ammon may have suggested to the author of the Pseudo-Callisthenes the episode which is the subject of the above sections. The story is, of course, unhistorical; but it is easy to see how it would suggest itself to an Egyptian, whether native or naturalised. Both before and after the Christian era Candace seems to have been the dynastic name of the queens, whether sole regnant, consort, or dowager, of that part of Nubia which is bounded by the Nile, the Blue Nile, and the Atbara, and known as the Island or as Meroe, the latter being also the name of one of its two principal cities, the other being Napata. Excavations have brought to light remains of tombs and palace, and reliefs of various queens of a pronounced negroid type. Whether Alexander was introduced into some already existing story, told originally in another connexion, of one of the old queens of Meroe, or whether the whole thing is the invention of the Egyptian author of the Pseudo-Callisthenes, it is impossible to say. Firdausí's version of the story corresponds with the Pseudo-Callisthenes, Bk. III. chaps. 18-24, and with the Syriac version of it, Bk. III. chaps. 8-14. The three are closely in accord in most points, but there are differences in matters of detail and in the names of the characters in the story. The Kandake (Candace) of the Pseudo-Callisthenes and of the Syriac version becomes Kaidáfa in Firdausí, which shows that his account came to him through the Arabic, in which the name, in the absence of diacritical points, could be read either way. Similarly the Kandaules of the Greek, the Kandáros of the Syriac,⁶⁶

became Kaidrúsh, the story having passed from Greek into Pahlaví, from Pahlaví into Syriac, from Syriac into Arabic, and from Arabic into Persian again (modern instead of middle) before Firdausí dealt with it. In the Pseudo-Callisthenes and the Syriac version Ptolemy takes Alexander's place when Kaidrúsh is brought into court, and Alexander assumes the name of Antigonus. In Firdausí the latter becomes the name of Sikandar's chief minister (Naitkún), and the two exchange their respective positions. In the Greek and the Syriac the wife of Kandaules is taken prisoner by a hostile king, while Kandaules himself escapes to the camp of Alexander, who regains his wife for him. In Firdausí the pair are taken prisoners by Sikandar while celebrating their wedding-feast in the city of king Faryán, the father of the bride. This version is more considerate of the lady, who does not get off so easily in the Greek and Syriac. In the Greek too the scene of the action is laid in the kingdom of Semiramis, whose descendant^66a

Kaidáfa is stated to be. In the Syriac the name Semiramis is corrupted into that of a people. In the Sháhnáma the scene is laid in Andalús, i.e. in Spain, which was conquered by the Arabs early in the eighth century A.D. In the Greek, Candace's other son, who had married a daughter of Porus, is unnamed, but is called Charogos in the early Latin version of Julius Valerius. In the Syriac he appears as Kerátór, and in the Sháhnáma as Tainúsh, who is represented there as being the eldest son, as in the Ethiopic, where he is called Kanír.^66b

The Ethiopic too alone coincides with the Sháhnáma in giving the dramatic conclusion of the story—the discovery by Tainúsh (Kanír) that the ambassador to his mother was Alexander himself—from which we might conclude that both versions derived the incident from a common Arabic source. Another view, however, may be suggested. The hand of a poet is visible in Firdausí's presentment of the whole story. He enlists our sympathy by making Kaidrúsh and his wife a newly married couple, which is found in no other version, suppresses the worst of the lady's misfortunes, which is expressed or implied in the other versions, and makes two other consequential alterations. Tainúsh is described as being the elder instead of the younger son, because Firdausí represents him as having been longer married; and Faryán, who stands for the abductor of the lady in the other versions, becomes her own father. Further, the Ethiopic version appears to have been a late production which came into being some time between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries,⁶⁷

when the Sháhnáma itself had become a great authority, and it seems not unlikely that the dramatic conclusion in the Ethiopic version was derived through the Arabic from Firdausí's own handiwork.

§ 24. This corresponds with Bk. III., chaps. 5-6, of the Pseudo-Callisthenes and of the Syriac version, in both of which the order of events is the war with Porus, the interview with the Brahmans, the affair with Candace. In Firdausí the order of the last two is transposed. This is due to the interpolation from Arabic sources of Sikandar's expedition to the Kaaba, in § 16, immediately after the war with Fúr. Consequently he has to make a second expedition eastward. His interview with the Brahmans may be regarded as a literary invention based partly on the account of Onesicritus^67a

and partly on some other source, which is responsible for his questions and their answers. These appear in Plutarch's Life of Alexander, ch. 64. That historian makes the interview take place in the course of Alexander's voyage down the Indus to the sea. The questions and answers vary in the different accounts. The question as to whether the living or the dead are the most numerous is found in Plutarch, where the answer is, the living, in the Pseudo-Callisthenes, in Julius Valerius, and in the Syriac and Ethiopic versions.

The question whether there is most land or water occurs in the Pseudo-Callisthenes and Julius Valerius. In the Syriac version the question is as to whether the land or the water is the older. In Plutarch the question is whether the earth or sea produces the largest beast. In both cases the answer is, the earth.

The question as to who are the sinners, or the most sinful, is found in the Pseudo-Callisthenes, in Julius Valerius where it occurs in the form, which is the most cunning of beasts? in the Syriac and in the Ethiopic.

Alexander's question as to what the Brahmans would have of him is found in the Pseudo-Callisthenes, in Julius Valerius, and in the Syriac and Ethiopic versions.

Several of the questions occurring in other versions do not appear in the Sháhnáma, such, for instance, as those in the Syriac as to whether death or life is the mightier; which existed first, day or night; and whether the limbs on the left side of the body or on the right side are the better, and so forth.

§§ 25-27. At this point the adventures of Sikandar become more romantic. In codex A of the Pseudo-Callisthenes, and in the Latin version of Julius Valerius, they form the subject of a letter, purporting to be written by Alexander to Aristotle, and come between the visit to the Brahmans and that to Candace. The letter is a long one, and is lengthier still in the Syriac version, which contains incidents no longer extant in the Greek but found in the Sháhnáma. In the Greek the letter forms ch. 17 and in the Syriac ch. 7 of Bk. III.

It may be well to quote here a short passage from M'Crindle's Ancient India as described by Magasthenés and Arrian, which is very apposite in the present connexion. Speaking of the ancient Greeks' conception of India, he says:—“They imagined it to be an Eastern Ethiopia which stretched away to the uttermost verge of the world, and which, like the Ethiopia of the West, was inhabited by a race of men whose visages were scorched black by the fierce rays of the sun. See Homer, Od. i. 23-24, where we read

(The Ethiopians, who are divided into two, and live at the world's end—one part of them towards the setting sun, the other towards the rising.) Herodotus in several passages mentions the Eastern Ethiopians, but distinguishes them from the Indians (see particularly Bk. vii. 70). Ktêsias, however, who wrote somewhat later than Herodotus, frequently calls the Indians by the name of Ethiopians, and the final discrimination between the two races was not made till the Makedonian invasion gave the Western world more correct views of India. Alexander himself, as we learn from Strabo, on first reaching the Indus mistook it for the Nile. Much lies in a name, and the error made by the Greeks in thus calling India Ethiopia led them into the further error of considering as pertinent to both these countries narrations, whether of fact or fiction, which concerned but one of them exclusively. This explains why we find in Greek literature mention of peculiar or fabulous races, both of men and other animals, which existed apparently in duplicate, being represented sometimes as located in India, and sometimes in Ethiopia or the countries thereto adjacent.”⁶⁸

Bearing this passage in mind, it is easy to understand that the original author of the Romance of Alexander, whose idea was to make his hero traverse the whole world, and the later redactors of the Romance, found it easy to provide a crop of marvels, of which the Persián version in the Sháhnáma furnishes a by no means exhaustive account. The Macedonian invasion may have given the Western world more correct ideas of India, but it did not prevent the Pseudo-Callis-thenes from coming into being some five centuries later and flourishing exceedingly. The return of Alexander from India to Persia by sea and land along the desolate shores of Makrán (Gedrosia) naturally gave rise to a crop of marvels not all without foundation.

§ 25. The people encountered by Sikandar after leaving the Brahmans were known to Arrian as the Oritæ. They dwelt in the neighbourhood of the Pur-Ali River. He describes them as wearing a dress and using arms similar to those of the Indians, but as differing in language and customs.⁶⁹

The shore-dwelling Oritæ are responsible for one of the etymologies suggested for the name of their country—Makrán—i.e. “Máhí-khúrán,” “Fish-eaters,” “Ichthyophagi,” which, even if it be not correct, is at least appropriate. Two extracts from Arrian's Indica, based on the account of Nearchus, Alexander's admiral, and others from modern sources, will serve to show that the habits of the shore-dwellers in that region have not altered materially during a period of over two thousand years, if we except the employment of the skeletons of whales for house-building—a custom that would be mentioned by modern travellers in those parts if it still obtained. The dwellings now consist of mats held together by poles or else take the form of mud huts.^69a

“The Ichthyophagi live on fish, whence their name. Few of them indeed fish, few indeed have boats for the purpose, or know the art of fishing, but catch most at the ebb of the tide. Some even have made nets to do this, most of such a size that they stretch two stades.^69b

These they make of palm-bass, which they twist like flax. When indeed the sea recedes, deserts the land, and leaves it dry, it is generally void of fish, but when the land retains the water in some deeper indentation, then they find a great abundance. Of these most are small, others large. These they encircle with their nets and take. The finer sorts they eat raw as they draw them from the water; the larger and coarser they dry in the sun, and, as soon as they are baked through, reduce them to flour by grinding and convert them into bread. Some make it into a paste. They even give their beasts fish-flour instead of fodder. All the region, in the absence of meadows, produces no herbage. They take withal in these parts a great quantity of crabs, oysters, and shell-fish. The region also naturally produces salt, from which they make (an equivalent or substitute for?) oil. Those of them indeed that inhabit the desert parts, and a region productive of neither trees nor fruit, live on fish only: a few sow a little ground, and eat bread as a relish with their fish, for fish are their corn. They build their houses thus. The wealthiest of them take whatever bones of the whale the sea throws up, and use them in the place of timber, making the largest into doors. The indigent majority make their houses of fish bones.”⁷⁰

In the following chapter Arrian enters more into detail:—“Some of the whales are driven ashore occasionally in various places, and are stranded when the tide recedes; others are cast on to the land by violent storms, and perish of putrefaction; their flesh dropping off leaves their bones for men to employ in house-building. Their greater ribs are selected for the beams, the smaller for the planks; the jaw-bones are taken for doors.”^70a

A modern account says:—“Nearchus … names the whole of this coast, from the river Indus to Charbar, the country of the Ichthyophagi or fish-eaters, and the inhabitants still live entirely on fish, the cattle having much the same diet as their masters, for the country is wholly destitute and barren, and yields no sort of grass. Vast stores of oysters, crabs, and all kind of shell-fish are found on the coast, of which Nearchus's description is generally very accurate. In many places, both here and in Arabia, the cattle are fed entirely on dried fish and dates mixed together, on account of the great scarcity of grass in these sun-burnt and sandy regions.”^70b

A later account says:—“Fish, to this day, is the staple article of food for those of the inhabitants living on the sea-board, and in this respect they fully bear out the name of ichthyophagi given to their ancestors by ancient writers.”^70c

And again:—“Nearchus … coasted along the shores of Balochistan, and his account of the natives he met with, and the difficulty he found in obtaining supplies, is as credible as if the voyage had been carried on under similar circumstances at the present day.”^70d

There is further mention of the Ichthyophagi in § 34.

The story of Sikandar's adventure with a basking whale which was mistaken for an island, with disastrous consequences to those that visited it, has not been lost sight of by the romancers and poets of later ages. In the first voyage of Sindbad the sailor, in the Arabian Nights, he lands upon an island “like a garth of the gardens of Paradise,” but which proves to be a great fish, and sinks when fires are lighted on it for cooking purposes.^70e

For the poets the reader may be referred to the passage in Paradise Lost, Bk. i. line 200 seq., Aldine ed.^70f

The reeds mentioned are of course bamboos, of which one of the many uses is for house-building.

§ 26. Here we are introduced to the true Ethiops, who, according to Greek notions, occupied the extremities of the world both in the East and West.^70g

§ 27. The above remark applies equally to the Narmpái.^70h

The story of the dragon is not extant in the Pseudo-Callisthenes or in the Latin version of Julius Valerius. It is found, however, in the Syriac version and in the Ethiopic,⁷⁰ⁱ

which represent the monster as being regarded as a god by the natives. In the Syriac it is described as killing its victims by drawing in its breath, and so sucking them down its throat.^70j

The temple that Sikandar visits is that of Dionysus, and the corresponding passage in the Pseudo-Callisthenes is Bk. III. ch. 28. There is a doublet of the visit in § 31.

§ 28. Modern historical research, which is restoring to us the knowledge of the great Hittite empire once dominant in Asia Minor and northern Syria, appears incidentally to have thrown light on the origin of the legend of the Amazons. The period of the historical importance of the Hittites dates approximately from B.C. 2000 to B.C. 700; and it appears that their great goddess Ma—the prototype of Cybele, the Great Mother—was served by women “who in later centuries, on the decline of the Hittite power, at the coming maybe of the Phrygians, at first for the defence of their religion, and later separating in independent action, developed into armed priestesses.”^70k

In the Introductory Note to the work here quoted Professor Sayce says:—“The Amazons of Greek legend prove to have been the warrior-priestesses of the great Hittite goddess.”⁷²

The seat of the Amazons, which legend places on the river Thermodon, is quite in concord with the above identification, and their legend itself extends from Homer^72a

through Herodotus and many other writers to Sir John Maunde-ville. ^72b

As to the origin of the legend that brought Alexander into connexion with the Amazons we are told by Arrian that when that king was in Sughdiana he received a visit from Pharas-manes, king of the Kharazmians, who stated that his dominions marched with those of the Colchians and Amazons, and that if Alexander desired to proceed to those regions and subjugate the races in the neighbourhood of the Euxine he would act himself as guide and furnish necessaries for the troops.^72c

The land of Kharazm is now represented by the modern Khiva, and the whole breadth of the Caspian Sea intervened between Pharasmanes and his nearest neighbours to the west; but the mere suggestion seems to have taken root, and soon it was affirmed by some of the more romantic, or less scrupulous, historians of Alexander that the queen of the Amazons had visited him in person—the view adopted by Quintus Curtius, who tells us how their queen Thalestris arrived with her suite of three hundred women from the vicinity of the river Thermodon, and spent about a fortnight with the king.^72d

In the Pseudo-Callisthenes it is Alexander who visits the Amazons, and the visit takes place immediately after that to Candace, queen of Ethiopia, in which the ground is laid for it by representing her son and daughter-in-law as being on their way to perform religious rites in the land of the Amazons when the lady was abducted. Firdausí, who omits the passage about the abduction, naturally leaves out the reference to the Amazons and gives his account of them in another connexion.^72e

His version corresponds with that of the Pseudo-Callisthenes, Bk. III. ch. 25-27, and with the Syriac version, Bk. III. ch. 15-17. In these versions and in the Sháhnáma the Amazons are represented as living on an island, and the account of their marriage-customs in the Pseudo-Callisthenes and in the poem may owe something to the stories of the Male and Female Islands that no doubt were current in Egypt in connexion with the country —southern Arabia—whence it obtained its supplies of frankincense. It seems to have been the custom of the incense-gatherers, who were always men, to leave their wives and children at home, which in this case would mean, among other localities, the Kuria Muria Islands, while they themselves crossed over to the mainland for the purposes of their trade. Sons, when grown up, would accompany their fathers, while the daughters would remain with the mothers. The seven Kuria Muria Islands thus became known collectively as “The Female Island,” while the mainland represented “The Male Island.”⁷³

There appears to be a reference to the same custom in Hiuen Tsiang:—“To the south-west of Fo-lin, in an island of the sea, is the kingdom of the western women: here there are only women, with no men; they possess a large quantity of gems and precious stones, which they exchange in Fo-lin. Therefore the king of Fo-lin sends certain men to live with them for a time. If they should have male children, they are not allowed to bring them up.”^73a

By the black race encountered by Sikandar on his way to the city of the Amazons the negroes seem to be intended, and the description is quite in the style of one in the Arabian Nights:— “Then sprang with a drop-leap from one of the trees a big slobbering blackamoor with rolling eyes which showed the whites, a truly hideous sight.”^73b

The bringing of frost and snow would be a great marvel in their hot country. Similarly Sarv, king of Yaman, tries to overcome the three sons of Farídún.^73c

It does not seem possible to identify the fair-haired race that Sikandar met after leaving Harúm. The type is too common and his wanderings are too vague. There is the Berber race in North Africa among which the blond type with blue eyes is not uncommon, and in northern Europe the Scandinavian. Herodotus too speaks of the Budini, whom he places north of the Palus Mæotis, as having blue eyes and red hair;^73d

and Tacitus describes in similar terms the peoples of Germany.^73e

Moreover, tribes with red beards and blue eyes are mentioned in Chinese annals as living in Central Asia.^73f

The notion of “The Gloom,” about which Sikandar makes inquiries, seems to have been the outcome of two distinct conceptions. One was that as the sun set in the West, and thereupon night ensued, there was a Land of Darkness in that quarter. This notion is as old as Homer, who opposes the East to the West by describing the former as being ◌, “towards the dawn and the sun,” and the latter as being ◌, “towards the gloom.”^73g

The other was based on the accounts that filtered through to the sunnier South of the darkness of the North—the long sunless winters of the Arctic Circle. Attached to each conception was the idea of an earthly paradise— in the West the garden of the Hesperides, and in the North the elysium of the Hyperboreans, who had their counterpart, or original, in Indian legend which told that “towards the North, beyond the Himâlaya, dwelt the Uttarakuri, a people who enjoyed a long and happy life, to whom disease and care were unknown, and who revelled in every delight in a land all paradise.”⁷⁴

Hesiod knew of the Hyperboreans.^74a

There is an interesting chapter on “The Land of Darkness” in Marco Polo.^74b

§ 29. At the close of § 28 we have the beginning of the story of Sikandar's famous expedition into the Land of Darkness and to the Fount of Life. This does not appear in branch A of the Pseudo-Callisthenes, in the early Latin version of Julius Valerius, or in the Syriac version. It is given at large, however, in branch C, which has Christian leanings, and it is found also in the Ethiopic version. It is obvious that Firdausí's account had passed through the Arabic. The Arabic in its turn came from the Syriac, and the existence of the account in the Syriac is due to the fact that Jacob of Sarúg^74c

inserted it in his metrical version of the Syriac Christian Legend of Alexander already referred to.^74d

The basis of the whole is branch C of the Pseudo-Callisthenes, where the account runs as follows:—“Thence Alexander set forth again with his host, retiring to a level place in the midst whereof was a ravine. Having thrown a bridge across he wrote thereon in Greek, Persian, and Egyptian, and the writings signified: ‘Alexander, arriving hither, built this arch, and crossed it with his whole host, being desirous of possessing the ends of the earth, God willing.’ And in three days he came to regions where the sun did not shine. The name thereof is ‘The Country of the Blest.’ And Alexander, having left the baggage and the infantry with the old men and the women, was minded to take chosen youths with him to investigate and see these regions. His friend Callisthenes advised him to make his entry with forty friends, one hundred youths, and twelve hundred soldiers. King Alexander set forth, instructing them to take no old man with them. An inquisitive elder, however, who had two sons—noble and trusty soldiers—said to them: ‘Children, hearken to your father and take me with you, and I shall be found not empty on the journey, for I wot that in time of difficulty the old will be sought after, and you therefore, as having me with you, will be honoured much by your king. Lest, being found to transgress his ordinance, ye be deprived of life, now, bestirring yourselves, crop my head and beard; thus altering hair and appearance I will go with you and prove of great use to you in the time of need.’ So doing their father's bidding, they took the old man with them. Thus they fared with Alexander and reached a murky spot. Being unable to advance further, owing to the impassable nature of the place, they removed thence their tents. Next day, Alexander, taking with him a thousand soldiers, went to ascertain if the end of the earth were there. Going leftward he saw a part that was lighter, and fared over places waste and precipitous for half the day. This he knew not from the sun but by taking measurement of the way geometrically. Afterwards he turned back in alarm because the route was impracticable. Emerging, he was minded to go to the right because the plain was level, albeit dark and gloomy. But being in difficulties because none of the youths were willing for him to enter that dark place in that, the horses being wearied out by the glooms of that dark road, they would be unable to return, Alexander said to them:—‘O noble soldiers! ye all know now that in wars nothing is done nobly without counsel and advice, for in good sooth an old man coming with us would direct us how we ought to enter this dark region. If now there be some noble man among you let him go and bring into our camp for me an elder, and he shall have much gold of me.’ Howbeit none of them was found to do this thing by reason of the length of the way and of the lightless air. Then, presenting themselves, the sons of the old man said to Alexander:—‘If thou wilt hear us with forbearance, O king! we will tell thee somewhat.’ King Alexander said:—‘Say what ye will, for I swear by divine Providence not to wrong you.’ Forthwith they told him about their sire, and ran and brought the old man to him. Alexander, on seeing, embraced him and asked him to counsel them. The old man said: ‘It is fit, O king Alexander! for you to know this, that if horses enter you will see the light never more. Choose therefore mares with foals, and leave the foals there, going yourselves with the mares; they will lead us thither.’⁷⁵

Alexander therefore made search among all those with him, but only found a hundred mares with foals. Taking these and another hundred selected ones, as well as many others to carry their provand, he entered according to the counsel of the old man, leaving the foals without. The old man instructed his sons that whatever they should find lying on the ground as they went they were to collect and place in their pouches. There entered with Alexander three hundred and sixty soldiers, and thus advancing along the dark road for fifteen schœni,⁷⁶

they saw a certain place wherein was a bright fountain whereof the water flashed like lightning; the air was fragrant and most sweet. Now Alexander, the king, becoming hungry, wished to eat bread, and calling his cook, who was named Andreas, told him to prepare a meal. Taking a dried fish he went to the shining water of the fountain to wash the meat. On being wetted in the water it came to life forthwith and escaped from the hand of the cook, who told nobody of what had happened, but took himself some of the same water in a silver vessel and safe-guarded it; the whole place indeed gushed with waters whereof all drank and partook of food. Alexander, after he had eaten, again journeyed on for thirty schœni, and further saw a light without sun, moon, or stars, and he beheld three birds flying, but having the aspect of men, and crying to him from aloft in the Grecian tongue: ‘The land whereon thou treadest, Alexander! is that of God alone. Return, thou wretch! thou art not able to tread the Country of the Blest. Go back then, O man! and tread the earth bestowed upon thee, and prepare not troubles for thyself.’ Being affrighted, Alexander gave instant heed to the words spoken to him by the birds, one of which cried to him again:—‘The East calleth thee, Alexander! and the realm of Porus shall become subject to thee by conquest.’ Thus saying the bird flew off. Alexander, having resigned himself to Providence, bade Antiochus to signify to the troops:—‘Let each that wisheth take of what is here, be it stone or earth or wood.’ To some it seemed good so to do, while to others Alexander's words appeared madness. Now as they went he said to Philon:—‘Dismount and take up whatever chanceth.’ Philon, dismounting, found a stone that seemed to him one of the worthless sort, and taking this he fared with Alexander. Many of the troops too took what each found from the material lying in that place, and the sons of the old man in particular, according to the bidding of their father, filled their wallets till they could walk no longer. Alexander, having guides, sent on the asses in front, marched by the Wain, and in some days arrived within hearing of the neighing of the mares, and in this manner issued from the land of night. So they came to the light where were the rest of the troops, and, looking on one another, found pearls and stones of price. When they saw this those that had taken none repented, while all those that had taken them blessed the old man and Alexander for their good counsel. Philon brought his stone to Alexander, and it was all gold. Then the cook told how the meat had come to life. Alexander, enraged, ordered him a terrible scourging. He said however to Alexander:—‘What boots it, Alexander! to repent a past matter?’ He did not say that he had drunk of the water or that he had kept some of it. This the cook refrained from confessing save as to the dried fish coming to life. Then that wicked cook going to Kalé, the daughter of Alexander and of the concubine Uné, seduced her, promising to give her to drink of the Water of the Fount of Immortality, which he did. Alexander, hearing of this, envied their immortality. He called his daughter and said to her:—‘Take thy clothes and depart, for behold thou hast become a goddess, being immortal, and thou shalt be called Nerois as having immortality from water, and therein shalt thou dwell.’ Weeping and mourning she departed from him, and consorted in waste places with the spirits. As for the cook, Alexander gave orders for a stone to be fastened to his neck, and that he should be flung into the sea. Being cast away thus he became a god and dwelt in a part of the sea that on this account was called Andreanticus. So much for the cook and the daughter of Alexander, who took these things to signify that the end of the earth was in those parts. When they came to the arch that Alexander had built, he engraved thereon again to this effect:— ‘Let those that wish to enter the Land of the Blest fare to the right.’”⁷⁷

This legend through the Syriac became known to Muhammad, who gives his version of it in the chapter of the Kurán known as “The Cave.” Of part of the story he makes Moses the hero and of the rest Zú-'l-karnain, i.e. The Two-horned (Alexander the Great). In the Kurán the part of the legend concerned with the salt fish is told in connexion with Moses and, being somewhat obscure and fragmentary, has given a fine opportunity to the commentators. To elucidate the passage in the Kurán it was explained that on one occasion when Moses had made an eloquent address to his followers they were so impressed that they asked him if he knew of any one wiser than himself, and he replied that he did not. The Almighty reproached him for his vanity and told him that if he would go to a certain rock, where two seas met, he would find his master in wisdom. He was to take with him a fish in a basket and, when he missed the fish, would know that he had reached the right place. Accordingly Moses and Joshua set forth, arrived at the rock, forgot all about the fish, and fared onward. At length Moses became hungry, bethought him of the fish, and told Joshua to bring it. Joshua had to admit that he had forgotten all about it. The fish in the meantime had made its way to the sea in some marvellous manner, as Muhammad says. Moses and Joshua therefore returned to the rock, where they met one of God's servants who by his proceedings proved his superiority in understanding. He is identified by Muhammadans with the prophet Al Khidr, known from the hue of his raiment as “The Green Prophet,” and the friend of the Faithful in their distress. He is familiar to readers of the Arabian Nights, and is a curious development of the reprobate cook, Andreas, of the Pseudo-Callisthenes. ⁷⁸

The angel Isráfíl, whose introduction into Firdausí's account is another sign of his indebtedness to Arabic sources, is one of the four archangels and the sounder of the Trump of Doom which will slay all creatures, himself included, after which the general Resurrection will ensue.^78a

§ 30. The legend of the iron gates built by Alexander in the Caucasus to exclude from the civilized world the savage tribes of the North is absent in branch A of the Pseudo-Callisthenes, in the Latin version of Julius Valerius, and in the Syriac version. It is found, however, in branches B and C.^78b

Thence the account passed into the Christian Legend of Alexander and thence into the poem of Jacob of Sarúg and the Kurán.^78c

In the latter the passage is as follows:—“Then followed he (i.e. Zú-'l-karnain) a route until he came between the two mountains, beneath which he found a people who scarce understood a language. They said:— ‘O Dhoulkarnain! verily, Gog and Magog waste this land; shall we then pay thee tribute, so thou build a rampart between us and them?’ He said, ‘Better than your tribute is the might wherewith my Lord hath strengthened me; but help me strenuously, and I will set a barrier between you and them. Bring me blocks of iron’—until when it filled the space between the mountain sides—‘Ply,’ said lie, ‘your bellows’—until when he had made it red with heat (fire) he said,—‘Bring me molten brass that I may pour upon it.’ And Gog and Magog were not able to scale it, neither were they able to dig through it.”^78d

Naturally this account appealed to the commentators on the Kurán and to Arabic historians, and as embellished by them provided the material for Firdausí's picturesque version. Tabarí, for instance, compares the promiscuity of the excluded races to that of beasts, speaks of their sleeping on one ear and covering themselves with the other, and as having a thousand children each⁷⁹—

traits found in the Sháhnáma.^79a

The word used in that poem for the monsters whereon Yájúj and Májúj are said to batten is “tinnín”—the same as that variously translated in the Old Testament R.V., as sea-monster,^79b

dragon,^79c

and serpent.^79d

It is a question as to which of the passes through the Caucasus^79e

Sikandar's barrier is to be referred. The most probable, because the most exposed, is the one between the range and the Caspian, but the description in the text, and still more in the older authorities, which describe the wall as being built from mountain to mountain, seems to favour the pass of Dariel, where the road runs through vertical walls of rock nearly 6000 feet high.

The method of vitrifying fortifications by means of heat was known in ancient times, and was used in the new world as well as the old. The operation is said to be not difficult if the proper rocks are used for the purpose, some of the primaries fusing easily when exposed to the heat of wood-fires. There are stated to be some fifty examples of such vitrified forts in Scotland alone.^79f

§ 31. We have had already a version of the account of the corpse in the palace of jewels in § 27.

The speaking trees of the sun and moon are found in all the branches of the Pseudo-Callisthenes, in A as part of the contents of a letter from Alexander to Aristotle, and in B and C as part of the narrative.^79g

They occur also in the Syriac version^79h

and in Julius Valerius. The trees, which in the above versions are described as resembling cypresses, seem akin to those of the riddle propounded by the archimages to Zál.⁷⁹ⁱ

In fact it is not improbable that the riddle was suggested by this passage in the Romance of Alexander. Other passages in the Sháhnáma may have been suggested similarly, the wonders, for instance, seen by Kai Khusrau during his voyage in pursuit of Afrásiyáb,^79j

and the account of how Asfandiyár, whom Persian tradition may have liked to regard as forestalling Sikandar, wandered over the whole world and reached the Gloom.^79k

In the same chapter of the Syriac version as that mentioned above we have the account of another solar tree, corresponding to a passage in the Pseudo-Callisthenes:^79l—.

“From thence we set out again and came to a river (the ocean-stream?). And upon the bank of the river there was a tree, which grew and increased from dawn until the sixth hour, and from the sixth hour until evening it diminished in height until there was nothing to be seen of it. Its smell was very pleasant…” In Zál's riddle the sun only was taken into consideration. In Sikandar's case the tree has a double trunk to provide for the moon as well. The male trunk (the sun) speaks by day, the female (the moon) by night. Much has been written about these trees, but the allegory seems fairly obvious.

§ 32. Sikandar's expedition to Chín and his dealings with the Faghfúr are extant only in the Syriac version of the Pseudo-Cal-listhenes, whence it passed into the Arabic as Dínawarí's account, which follows the Syriac closely, shows.⁸⁰

Firdausí's is closer still and agrees with the Syriac in making the Faghfúr, though conscious of his power, fall in with Sikandar's wishes through sheer love of peace—a point omitted by Dínawarí.^80a

This is the third occasion on which Alexander is represented as going as his own ambassador ^80b—

a notion originating no doubt with the Egyptian author of the Pseudo-Callisthenes.

§ 33. According to Firdausí's version, this is the third time that Sikandar goes to Hind. Historically, after the defeat of Porus, Alexander had some trouble with that king's nephew, who, after having sent ambassadors to Alexander out of enmity towards his uncle, became disaffected when he found that Porus was held in such great honour by his conqueror.^80c

Part of Alexander's army, under Craterus, returned from India by way of Nímrúz.

§ 34. This has some correspondence with the Pseudo-Cal-listhenes, Bk. III. ch. 28, and with the Syriac version, Bk. III. ch. 18. In the former the priest of the sun is described as being an Ethiop, and seems to reappear in the Gúsh-bistár of the Sháhnáma. We have had Gúsh-bistárs already, in fact if not in name in Firdausí's description of the races excluded by Sikandar's barrier—

“They sleep upon one ear, And use the other as a coverlet.”^80d

In this connexion the following passage is of interest: “The Enôtokoitai are called in Sanscrit Karnaprávaramás, and are frequently referred to in the great epic poems—e.g. Mahábh. II. 1170, 1875. The opinion was universally prevalent among the Indians that barbarous tribes had large ears… “It is easy,” says Wheeler (Hist. Ind., Vol. iii. p. 179), “for any one con versant with India to point out the origin of many of the so-called fables… Men do not have ears hanging down to their feet, but both men and women will occasionally elongate their ears after a very extraordinary fashion by thrusting articles through the lobe… If there was one story more than another which excited the wrath of Strabo, it was that of a people whose ears hung down to their feet. Yet the story is still current in Hindustán. Bábu Johari Dás says:—‘An old woman once told me that her husband, a sepoy in the British army, had seen a people who slept on one ear, and covered themselves with the other.’ (Domestic Manners and Customs of the Hindus, Banáras, 1860.) The story may be referred to the Himálayas. Fitch, who travelled in India about 1585, says that a people in Bhután had ears a span long.”⁸¹

For the Ichthyophagi see p. 69 seq.

§ 35. The correspondence with Aristotle with regard to the succession is of course an Oriental addition which came to Firdausí through the Arabic. Dínawarí has it to the same effect, the chief difference being that he makes the matter the subject of an interview between Alexander and Aristotle at Jerusalem where, according to him, the former died.^81a

The device was intended to account for the long interval—five centuries and a half—that separated the last of the Kaiánians (Sikandar) from the first of the Sásánians (Ardshír Pápakán). The Persians made it out to be much shorter.^81b

The prodigious birth that occurred on Sikandar's arrival at Babylon is described in the Pseudo-Callisthenes, Bk. III. ch. 30, in the Latin Version of Julius Valerius, and in the Syriac, Bk. III. ch. 19.

§ 36. The version of Alexander's will in the Pseudo-Callisthenes, Bk. III. ch. 33, is longest in codex A, which unfortunately is much mutilated. The corresponding passage in the Syriac version is Bk. III. ch. 22, and this agrees with Firdausí's in the following points—the request to his mother not to grieve, the instruction to the chiefs to honour her, the gift of the kingdom of Macedonia (of Rúm in Firdausí) to the son of Rúshanak, if she shall have one, and the direction that his (Sikandar's) body shall be laid in a golden coffin filled with honey, and conveyed for interment to Egypt. Most of the provisions of the will as given in the Greek and Syriac would have little or no interest for later Persian or Arabic writers, or for Firdausí himself, and naturally are lacking in the Sháhnáma.

§ 37. This corresponds with the Pseudo-Callisthenes, Bk. III. ch. 32, 34, and with the Syriac version, Bk. III. ch. 21, but the latter omits the dispute of the Greeks and Persians over the disposal of Alexander's body. According to the Greek version the oracle of the Babylonian Zeus was consulted, by whose direction the corpse was conveyed to Memphis whence, at the instigation of the high priest of that city, it was taken to Alexandria and there buried. According to Firdausí the oracle was consulted at a place called Khurm, a word which means “vapour” or “exhalation.” Similar emanations are said to have existed at Delphi.

Alexander died at Babylon on June 13th B.C. 323. His death was no doubt a natural one, the result of a fever, but it gave rise to a legend, referred to by Arrian only to be rejected,⁸²

that poison was employed for the purpose by Antipater who, fearing that his position as regent in Macedonia had been undermined by the intrigues of Olympias, sent his son Cassander to bring about the death of his master. Cassander found a willing instrument in Iollas, Alexander's cup-bearer, who had injuries of his own to avenge, and the fatal draught was administered at a banquet. The Pseudo-Callisthenes repeats the story,^82a

and it appears in the Syriac and Ethiopic versions,^82b

but not in the Sháhnáma.

§ 38. The sentences of the sages over the corpse of Sikandar are not in the Pseudo-Callisthenes or in the Syriac version of it. They are an Oriental addition, and Mas'údí gives another version of them.^82c

§ 39. Alexander's burial at Alexandria of course is historical. His mother, according to Mas'údí, removed the corpse from its golden coffin, lest the cupidity of future kings should be aroused and the tomb desecrated. Mas'údí, who spent some of his last years in Egypt, and died about A.D. 956, states that a pedestal of white and other coloured marbles, and known as the tomb of Alexander, was to be seen at Alexandria in A.D. 943-944.^82d

S. Chrysostom, however, says that the tomb was destroyed in his time (A.D. 345-407), and the annual observance at Alexandria of the day of Alexander's death abolished.^82e

Perhaps there may have been some restoration of the tomb by the Arabs, to whom the personality of Alexander was of interest,^82f

after their conquest of the city in the middle of the seventh century A.D.

Firdausí says that Sikandar built ten cities. In the Pseudo-Callisthenes the number is twelve or thirteen,⁸³

thirteen in the Syriac version,^83a

and twelve in the Ethiopic.^83b

One at least of them has not become a brake of thorns, and the Romance of Alexander, which there first took literary form, has done more to extend his fame and make his name a household word than all the sober histories of him ever written.

To conclude then, in the three reigns of Dáráb, Dárá, and Sikandar, taken collectively, we have the Persian version of the Pseudo-Callisthenes which, if it does not possess a complete historical skeleton, has at least a historical backbone, some of the vertebræ of which reappear in the Sháhnáma—e.g. Sikandar's invasion of Írán, the defeat and death of Darius, Sikandar's accession to the throne of Irán, his marriage with an Oriental princess, his invasion of India, his defeat of Porus and intercourse with Indian sages, his return to Írán, his death at Babylon, and interment at Alexandria. Of the elements introduced into the Pseudo-Callisthenes by its Egyptian author the Persian version reproduces two—the device of Sikandar going as his own ambassador, and the story of Kaidáfa. Of Persian and Arabic substitutions and additions, not appearing in versions of the Pseudo-Callisthenes other than the Persian, the most important are the account of the birth of Sikandar, his address to the chiefs on his accession to the Iránian throne, and his correspondence with Aristotle as to the succession. The purely Arabic are the story of Kaid, the pilgrimage to the Kaaba, the interview with the angel Isráfíl, and the sentences of the sages at Sikandar's interment.

The appended diagram may help to show the provenance of the Persian version of the Pseudo-Callisthenes.

>genealogy<

At these his gracious words,

And at this union of his heart with justice,
There went up a thanksgiving from Írán
To that just-dealing monarch of the earth,
And then the assembly scattered, but the king
Sat on with his advisers, counselling.

Sikandar ordered that a scribe should come,
And called for reed of Rúm and silk of Chín.
The scribe, when he had made the kex a pen
Indited this epistle to the mother
Of Rúshanak: “The guerdon of the good
God grant to thee and mind-peace after pain.

thine own as in the past,
Send out intelligencers everywhere,
And keep in office those just, modest men
Appointed by Dárá, son of Dáráb.
If ye would live not there choose where ye will,
The cities of Írán are all before you;
But be ye reconciled to me in heart,
And give me in the world the name Dárá.”
He wrote a letter too to Rúshanak,
And made the pen's point eloquent. He first
Gave praise to God, the Ruler of the world,
The Wise, the All-sustainer; then he said:—
“The stock of kings begetteth but men pious,
Attractive, well-advised, refined, and modest,
Men eloquent of speech and soft of voice.
Thy father gave thee to me; then he died,
And bare away with him a goodly name.
When thou arrivest hither, and beholdest
My bower and palace, thou shalt be my queen,
Chief consort, the adornment of my throne,
The lustre of my Grace, my name, and fortune.
A letter have we written to thy mother
To bid her send thee hither in a fashion
Befitting issue of the king of kings,
And with an archimage of Ispahán
Preceding thee, with servants of the crown,
With elephants and litters, and with her
Who gave thee milk and honey. Dwell within
Our house with joy—chief lady of the bower.
Now be high heaven circling to thy will,
Thy person far from foe and far from harm.”
Came, swift as flying dust-cloud, one well versed
In wisdom, and the world's king's words rehearsed.

Told her upon her coming what Dárá
Had said, and added: “Go to Dilárái,
And enter into gracious intercourse
With her, see Rúshanak within the bower,
And, having seen her, greet her on my part,
Take her a bracelet, earrings, torque, and crown
Of royal gems, a hundred mules with loads
Of tapestries and furthermore ten camels
With gold brocade of Rúm, and place withal
In purses thirty thousand in dínárs
Out of the treasury by way of largess,
And take with thee three hundred Rúman damsels,
Or more if more are needed. Give each one
A goblet worthy of a queen's fair handmaid;
Take servants to escort thee and forgo
No circumstance of royal etiquette.”
The mother of the Sháh, as he commanded,
Made ready and set off upon her journey,
With her interpreters escorting her—
Ten of the honey-tongued philosophers.
Now as she drew anigh to Ispahán
A crowd of nobles went to give her welcome,
While Dilárái came forward from the palace,
She and the magnates, as their custom was,
And gave such largess in the court that treasure
And money grew misprized. They held a conclave
Of counsellors within the palace; all
The chiefs attended: Dilárái the while
Prepared such wedding-gear that the bázárs
Looked busy everywhere, and league-long files
Of camels carried stuffs for clothes and carpets,
For hangings and for tapestries inwoven
With gold and silver thread, and diverse-hued.
There were such Arab steeds with golden bridles,
Such Indian scimitars with golden scabbards,
Surtouts and morions and bards withal,
With golden sparths and maces ponderous,
With stuffs for raiment cut or in the piece,
That no one in the world e'er looked on more;
Such aloe-wood, gris-amber, and pure musk,
As gave to enemies good cause to writhe.
They requisitioned servants from the palace,
And made them ready forty golden litters.
In one of them with parasol and slaves
Sat Rúshanak rejoicing. From the halls

A speaker of the tongue of days of old
A tale that thou wilt muse to hear thus told:—
There was in Hind a monarch, Kaid by name,
Whose sole pursuit was knowledge and advice;
He had a sage's heart, a prince's brain,
King's bearing and the Grace of archimages.
He dreamed a dream ten nights successively—
A portent: mark it well. The men of learning
In Hindústán, the mighty both in word
And lore, the sages and the counsellors,
Met at his bidding, and he told his dreams
At large without reserve; but every heart
Was full of deep concern, each visage wan,
For there was none that could interpret them.
Then said a sage to Kaid: “O sovereign,
Memorial of the great and man of wisdom!
There is a famous one by name Mihrán,
Who hath attained his fill of earthly lore.
He will not sleep or rest him in a city,
And liveth but with cattle of the field,
Subsisting on the herbs upon the mountains,
And not accounting us as fellow-men;
His home is with the onager and deer,
Apart from habitation and mankind;

To the sage

Thus said king Kaid: “One must not overlook
This virtuous man.”

Moved by Mihrán's renown

He mounted then and there upon his steed,
While, lest he should grow downcast, men of lore
Escorted him. The monarch reached Mihrán,
Saluted courteously the sage, and said:—
“Thou devotee who with the mountain-sheep
Inhabitest the heights! hear thou with care,
And then interpret wisely, these my dreams:
Know that one night, O wise and holy man!
I slept in peace, unfrighted, undismayed,
No care at heart, no impulse in my head,
And in my chamber there was none with me.
Night's noon had passed, but dawn was not. I saw
A habitation like a vasty palace;
Therein a huge, fierce elephant. The dwelling
Showed doorless, but had one strait aperture
Wherethrough that savage elephant would pass
Uninjured by the straitness; its black bulk
Would pass therethrough, but leave its trunk behind.
Next night I saw the throne devoid of lord
Fair-fortuned, but upon the ivory seat
Sat one who donned the heart-delighting crown.
The third night came; I made me haste to sleep,
And dreamed that I beheld a goodly kerchief
Whereat four men tugged till their cheeks turned blue
With pulling, yet the kerchief was not rent,
Nor were the men fordone. Upon the fourth night
I saw, illustrious sage! a man athirst
Beside a stream. O'er him a fish kept pouring
The water, yet his droughty head was dry
Although the water followed as he moved!
How read'st thou this, good friend? Upon the fifth night
My mind dreamed of a city by the water.
The citizens though blind seemed none the worse,
For thou hadst said: ‘The whole place is afire
With liberality and trafficking!’
Upon the sixth night, honoured lord! I saw
A city, all whose citizens were sick,
And went to question those in health, who first,
Preventing them, inquired: ‘How came ye thus
With body aching and with heart o'ercharged?’

Another one
Is that of Moses, which thou call'st the Jew's,
Who saith: ‘None other should be praised’; another
That of Yúnán,^95a

a good Faith making just
The great king's^95b

heart; and, fourth, the Arabian,
Pure and exalting from the dust the prudent.
Four parties thus assuming to be guardians
Tug at the kerchief in their several ways,
And, as they pull against each other thus,
Antagonize for their religion's sake.
Then, fourthly, for the droughty man who shunned
Sweet water which a fish threw after him:
A time will come when holy men will be,
Just like that fish, despised as having drunk
Of wisdom's stream; but evil-doers' heads
Will be exalted to the Pleiades.
When one shall call the thirsty to the water
None wisely will respond, but all will shun
The wisdom-seeker and combine to curse him.
In thy fifth. dream thou sawest a busy city.
The burghers spent their lives in feasting, largess,
And trafficking, but ‘Fortune,’ thou hadst said,
‘Had sewn their eyes up so that none could see

A time is coming when the world will have
A king that is devoid of understanding,
A king whose dark soul will be full of dudgeon,
The whole world gloom beneath his tyranny,
And never good be found among his treasures.

Methinketh not that he will ask for more,
But, when thou dost content him, pass thee by,
For he is diligent to learn and wise.”
Kaid, having heard the matter from Mihrán,
Regained the vigour of his former years,
Came, kissed the sage's head and eyes, and went
His ways triumphant, happy, and content.

Now when Sikandar had surveyed Írán,
And knew that crown and throne were his, he led
His host toward Kaid of Hind and, road or none,
Pursued his march, while as he went along
The people of the cities on his way
Unbarred their gates to him. In all that coast
He found none worthy to be called a man,
And raised his helm o'er Venus. On approaching
The mighty city, named by valiant Kaid
Mílád, they called a scribe and seated him
Before Sikandar who, like lion lusting
For quarry, wrote to Kaid: “This from Sikandar
The mighty and victorious, the lord
Of scimitar, of crown, and belt.”

The letter

Began with praises of the man that laveth
His heart with knowledge, “for in his desire
To eat the fruitage of his toils he chooseth
The easiest course, adoreth holy God,
And trusteth, feareth, reverenceth Him,
While knowing that we top the throne and are
The Shadow of the all-conquering Lord. Now I
Have written thee a letter to enlighten
Thy darkling mind; so when thy scribe shall read it
Lay it not out before thee and consider,
But, if it come by night, wait not for day,
And do my will forthwith. If thou shalt slight
My words so will not I, but trample down
Beneath my feet thy throne and head and crown.”

The envoy came as swiftly as the wind,
Told all that he had heard, and gave the letter.
Sikandar said to him: “Go to, return
To that famed man, and say: ‘What things are these
That none e'er had in public or in private,
For we ourselves have seen whatever is,
And heaven will not create afresh?’”

The envoy

Went from the presence, journeyed swift as fire,

When he heard,

Kaid cleared the court and sat with his advisers
In council, set the envoy in his presence,
And courteously entreated him, then said:—
“I have within my bower a daughter such
That if the sun on high should gaze on her
'Twould gloom contrasted with my darling's face.
Her locks are lassos of one hue with pitch,
Milk savoureth on her lips, a cypress-stem
Is crooked to her, she scattereth pearls in speech,
Her looks and countenance make wisdom fly,
Yet 'tis the food of her discourse. When silent
She is the soul of modesty, and none
Hath seen her peer in this age. Sprung from chiefs,
And pious, she is chaste of heart and modest.
I have a cup which thou mayst fill with wine,
Or pour therein cold water, and although
Thou sat'st with boon-companions for ten years
The wine would fail not; whether wine or water
The cup affordeth thee, the marvel is:
No drinking draineth it. My third possession
Is this: a youthful leech who diagnoseth
Disease by making a uroscopy.
So long as he is at the court the Sháh
Will never ail; and, fourthly, I possess,
Though privily, a sage who will foretell
The Sháh all that will chance from circling sun
And shining moon.”

The noble messenger

Withdrew, made wind his mate, came and informed
Sikandar, and the heart of the world-king
Bloomed like a rose. He said: “If what is spoken
Be true could this world purchase all the four?
Kaid will illume my dark soul if he send them.
His country 'neath my feet I will not tread,
But with this good will hie me home instead.”

The Sháh made choice of Rúmans learnèd, wise,
And well disposed, then wrote a letter all
Excuse and perfume, colour and device:—

Mílád
They sent in haste a horseman to Sikandar,

Now when those sages heard their Sháh's reply,
Brought by the toilful cavalier, they went
Forth from their palace and approached king Kaid,
And his famed court. The king of Hindústán,
When he had read the answer to his letter—
The message of the imperious world-aspirant—
Joyed to be free from trouble with Sikandar,
And chose withal a hundred men of Hind
Of honied tongue and eloquent, unlocked
Hoards not by him amassed, and chose therefrom
Crown, throne, and armlet, and of gems withal,
And raiment in the piece, all that was best.
They brought three hundred camel-loads of raiment,
And royal jewelry; ten of dínárs,
And five score all of drachms; there was withal
A splendid litter of green aloe-wood,
Inlaid with gold and gems. Kaid placed gold thrones
Upon ten elephants and on another,
More splendidly caparisoned, the Beauty,
Who was escorted by the sage and leech,
And showered tears of blood. A magnate bare
The cup, whose wine made all the chiefs bemused.
When that Moon reached the royal women's house
There was a crown of black musk on her head;
She had let fall her tresses o'er her cheeks,
Like mail o'er cercis-blossom, and appeared
A slender cypress 'neath the full orbed moon.

The matter of the Cypress-tree¹⁰⁴

achieved,
And an abode fit for her rank prepared,
The Sháh was free to find out how the sage
Would come off in a strife of wits, and so
He sent a large bowl all abrim with ghee
To that redoubtable philosopher,
And said: “Anoint thy limbs herewith, loins, waist,
Breast, back, and neck withal, repose thyself
Till thou hast shaken off thy weariness,
Then fill for me my mind and brain with knowledge.”
The sage, when he beheld the ghee, observed:—
“This should not prove a mystery to me!”
He placed a thousand needles in the bowl,
And then returned it to the sovereign,
Who, when he saw them, summoned privily
A smith and bade him melt them to an ingot,
And fashion out of it a disk. Sikandar
Dispatched this to the sage who furbished it,
And sent back in the place of that dull iron
A mirror free from rust and luminous.
They took this to Sikandar in the night,
Who, saying naught, exposed it to the wet
Till it grew dark and dull; then he returned it,
And thus prolonged the riddle of the iron.
The sage refurbished it to brilliancy,
And sent it back forthwith, but first applied
That which would prove preservative from damp.
Sikandar, seeing, called to him the sage
And, greetings done, assigned to him a seat
Below the throne, then spake about the bowl
Of ghee to further test that famed man's wit,

His goodly words

Found favour with the Sháh whose heart grew keener
By dint of the procedure of the sage.
He ordered that the treasurer should bring
A robe, gold, silver, and a vase of gems.
These they presented to the sage who said:—
“I have a privy jewel of mine own,
Which is both brighter and immune from foes,
And not, like wealth, the mate of Áhriman.
I need not hire a watchman for the night,
And when I go abroad I fear no thieves,
Since in the night-time knowledge is my warden,
And wisdom my soul's crown when it is waking,¹⁰⁶

For wisdom, knowledge, right, are necessaries
Since error knocketh at the door of loss.
The Sháh will see that I have food and raiment
Enough for public and for private uses;
Why should I joy in superfluities,
And have to safeguard all this wealth? Command
To carry back these havings, and may wisdom
Direct thy soul.”

Sikandar mused at him,

And turned the matter o'er, then said: “The Lord
Of sun and moon will find me not in fault
In future since I have thy counsel, rede,
And useful talk.”

He bade the leech approach

That judged diseases by uroscopy,
And asked: “Who is the greatest sufferer
Whose pangs compel our tears?”

The leech replied:—

“The glutton, one without restraint at table.
Excessive food conduceth not to health,
And great is he who maketh health his aim.
Now will I gather herbs from every side,
And will exhibit unto thee a medicine,

Sikandar got prepared

A robe of honour and fair gifts for him,
And made him chief among the learned physicians.
That suasive leech departed to the mountains
Without attendants. With his ample knowledge
He could distinguish bane and antidote,
And, having gathered many mountain-herbs,
And put the worthless by, chose such as were
Medicinal, and out of these compounded
The needed potion. With these mountain-simples
He purged the Sháh and kept him sound and whole,
So that for nights he slept not but enjoyed
Society, affected much the Fair,
And sought their soft embraces till he ailed,
Because he tendered not himself, and so
One day the leech came, by uroscopy
Detected signs of decadence, and told him:—
“Youths surely age by intercourse with women:
Methinketh that for three nights thou hast slept not;
Speak unto me and give me a reply.”
Howbeit Sikandar answered: “I am well:
None of the ills of life is troubling me.”
Yet still the approven leech of Hindústán
Would not admit the matter to be so,
But sought that night among his books, and mixed
A medicine against that decadence.
That night Sikandar had no lovely mate.
The leech, when morning came, found him alone,
And, having ended the uroscopy,
Flung down the potion, sat in high delight,
And, taking in his hand a goblet, bade
The board be spread and wine and minstrels ordered.

Sikandar smiled,

Delighted with the leech, to whom he said:—
“Ne'er may this world lack Hind, for thou wouldst say
That all the leeches and astrologers
Flock thither.”

Calling for a purse of gold,

And for a sable steed whose reins were hung
With golden balls, he gave that skilled leech both,
And said: “Be honest rede thy tongue's companion.”
Then bade he, and they brought the golden goblet
Brimmed with cold water. All folk drank thereof
From morn till bed-time as in revelry,
But all the drinking did not minish it.
Then to the sage the Sháh said: “Kaid hath not
His equal in the world, and from this time
No longer shall we speak of Hindústán,
But Jádústán,¹⁰⁹

as being Kaid's abode.
The people are no more than other folk
In looks but wonderful in tricks and magic!”
Then said the Sháh to that philosopher:—
“This knowledge must not be concealed from us:
How is the water in the cup renewed?
Is it the stars or Indian jugglery?”
“Despise not, sire! the cup,” the sage replied,
“For they were many years in making it,
And labours underwent in that behoof.
From all the provinces the astrologers,
Where'er there was a master known to fame,
Assisted Kaid, when fashioning the cup,
Both day and night, and passed full many a day
In noting all the aspects of the stars.
Take thou the loadstone, that wherewith a man
Attracteth iron, as an illustration.
This cup by innate force attracteth water,
Receiving fresh additions from the sky.
It catcheth water to replace the waste
Too quickly for man's eyes to follow it.”
The Sháh, on hearing that wise man's discourse,
Approved thereof; he thought the words of profit.
Thus said he to the elders of Mílád:—
“I will observe the compact made with Kaid
In honour while I live, for he is one
Before whose presence other folk should stand.
Since I have gotten from him four such things
We will not ask for more.”

Now afterward

Sikandar set the goods that he possessed,
With all the treasures that he had amassed,

Sikandar swift as wind marched from Mílád,
Abandoning his treasures, reached Kannúj
And, having led his army near to Fúr,
Bade write to him a harsh and hostile letter
As from Sikandar, king of kings, the son
Of Failakús, the illuminer of knowledge,
Of weal and woe, to Fúr, the king of Hind,
High-starred, and chief of Sind.

First praised he God,

Who hath been and will be for ever. Then:—
“With one whom He hath made victorious
Realm, crown, and throne will last, whom He despiseth
Will be still wretched, and the sun on high
Will shine not on him. Surely thou hast heard
What in this darksome earth all holy God
Hath given to us of victory and fortune,
Grace, diadem, and throne of king of kings,
But not for long: our day will pass; another
Will come and be partaker of these fruits,
And so I strive to leave an honoured name
In this small circle compassed by the Moon.
When they deliver this possess thy soul,
Thine unenlightened soul, with what is right,
Exchange thy throne of greatness for thy steed,
Advise not with the priests, thy counsellors,
But ask immunity from us, and practise
No craft because the crafty labour long.
If, in thy pride and thine audacity,
Thou wilt not do my bidding thou shalt rue
Thy dallying when with my cavaliers
I come to fight with thee.”

When thus these words

Had been indited, and the scribe had done,
They sealed the letter with Sikandar's signet,
And for the journey chose a prudent envoy,
Who reached the court of Fúr and held discourse
At whiles of strife, at whiles of feast and revel.
They summoned to the king that man discreet,
And by the throne appointed him a seat.

When Fúr heard:—

“A host hath come” he picked his battle-field,
And all his troops assembled on the plain;
The earth was mountain-like with elephants.
The army stretched four miles with troops behind
And elephants in front.

Now spies arrived

From Hind before the world-lord and informed him
At large of how the elephant contendeth
In warfare: “It will rout two miles of horse.
No cavalier will dare to face that beast,
Or, if he did so, ever come again,
Because its trunk is higher than the air,
And Saturn is its helper in the sky.”
They drew a picture of an elephant,
And showed it to Sikandar who commanded
That the philosophers of Rúm should model
One out of wax for him, and then inquired:—
“Who can propound a scheme to cope with such?”
The sages held a session and devised
A plan in all its details. Then the Sháh

Now when Sikandar was approaching Fúr,
And from afar one host beheld the other,
On both sides rose the shout and dust of battle,
And eager for the fray the warriors
Advanced. They lit the naphtha in the steeds:
Fúr's troops were in dismay. The naphtha blazed:
Fúr's troops recoiled because those steeds were iron,
Whereat the elephants, when their own trunks
Were scorched, fled likewise, and their drivers marvelled.
Thus all the Indian host and all those huge,
High-crested elephants were put to flight.
Sikandar like a raging blast pursued
The foe until the air turned indigo,
And opportunity for fight was over.
The monarch with the Rúmans in full force
Dismounted 'twixt two mountains and sent scouts
On all the roads to guard his host from foes.
Now when the ingot of the sun's crown showed,
And all the world became as 'twere white crystal,
There rose a blare of trumpets and the sound
Of fife, of cornpipe, and of kettledrum.
Both hosts made ready for the fray and raised
Their spear-heads to the clouds. Sikandar came

Thence he mounted

With mingled feelings to the throne of Fúr.
So is it with this Hostel by the way!
It never is content to let thee stay.
Enjoy, leave naught for other folks to take;
Why shouldst thou labour for another's sake?
For two months Cæsar filled the throne and lavished
Fúr's whole wealth on his troops. There was a man
Of parts, Sawurg by name, a mighty chief
Of Hindústán; to him Sikandar gave
The throne of kingship. “Never hoard dínárs,”
He said. “Give and enjoy whate'er thou gettest,
Not glorying in the fleeting crown and throne,
For whiles it is Sikandar and whiles Fúr,
Whiles pain and wrath, whiles feast and banqueting.”
Bestowing as a present on his host
Drachms and dínárs he ordered all that coast.

Now in a little while, when all the troops
Were satiate of wealth, a sudden impulse
Came on Sikandar, and he greatly longed
To journey to the Kaaba. So at dawn
The drum-roll rose,¹¹⁹

the air grew like the eye
Of chanticleer, while all the mass of spears,
And silken pennons, formed a canopy
Of yellow, red, and violet.^119a

Sikandar

Nasr said: “O world-lord!

Khuzá' is master here. When Ismá'íl
Had passed away Kahtán, the monarch, came
With mighty hosts of swordsmen from the waste,
And seized the country of Yaman unjustly.
Of our race many guiltless folk were slain,
So that the day was over for our tribe.
Now this displeased the Maker of the world;
High Heaven frowned upon Kahtán: but when
He was reduced to dust Khuzá' appeared,
Unjust, audacious, and tyrannical;
All from Harám¹²⁰

up to Yaman is his,
His angle is within the sea of Misr.
He hath transgressed from justice and the way,
And hath no thought of goodness in his heart,
The world is in his clutch, the hearts of all
The race of Ismá'íl are full.”

On hearing,

Sikandar slew such scions of Khuzá'
As he could find and scalped them, sparing none
Of friend or foe, delivering Hajáz,
And therewithal Yaman, from the oppressor
By policy and by his warrior-swordsmen,

He led his army thence with all dispatch,
And came to Judda. He abode not long,
But bade the soldiers build abundant ships
And transports, and departed with his host
For Misr. The monarch there was named Kabtún;
His troops exceeded all imagining.
On hearing that a conquering king had come
Forth from Harám vaingloriously, he went
To meet him with a numerous retinue,
Slaves, purses, crown, and throne. At sight of him
Sikandar joyed, and all his foemen's words
Proved wind. The Sháh abode a year in Misr
To rest himself and troops.

There was a lady,

The queen of Andalús, and she was wise,
Ambitious, bounteous, with a countless host,
Famed and victorious through her own deserts,
And named Kaidáfa. From her warriors
She chose a cavalier, a clever draughtsman,
And said; “Go to Sikandar, naming not
This country and ourselves, mark everything
Minutely—his appearance, stature, court;
Then make a full length picture of him, showing
His favour, face, and bearing.”

When he heard

He mounted, girt him to perform her bidding,
And went in courier-wise from Andalús
To Misr to eminent Sikandar Cæsar,
Observed him both upon the throne and saddle,
Brought paper out and implements of Chín,
And, having limned him to the life, returned
With all dispatch. Kaidáfa, when she saw
Sikandar's likeness, grieved, concealed her feelings,
Sighed, and thus said: “By war and policy
This man will trample on the world, and brief

“O king!”

He made reply, “she is unique. None knoweth
The number of her troops without at least
Much searching of the muster-roll. In treasure,
In matters courteous and of obligation,
In counsel and benevolence of speech,
Thou wilt behold not in the world her equal.
She hath a city that is built of stone;
A leopard could not wrest it from her grasp.
The ground it covereth is four leagues long,
And four leagues wide withal. If thou inquirest
About her treasure 'tis past measuring:
Her doings in the world are no new thing.”

Sikandar, having heard that mindful man,
Bade come a scribe. They wrote on silk a letter:—
“This from Sikandar, who o'erthroweth lions
And taketh cities, unto wise Kaidáfa,
Whose name is eminent in majesty.
First, praise be to the Master of the sun,
Who lighteth up the moon and turning sphere,
The Lord that meteth justice out aright,
And granteth more than any one can ask. …
We have not sought thy throne by violence,
But have respected thine exalted state.
When they deliver unto thee this letter,
And light is thrown upon thy darkened counsels,
Thou wilt dispatch what we impose as tribute,
As knowing that thou canst not strive with us.
To act thus will be wise and provident;
It will be strength in thee and true religion;
Oppose and thou wilt see but change of fortune.
Draw thy conclusions from Dárá and Fúr;
Thou needest go no further for instruction.”
Whenas the wind had dried the superscription
They sealed the letter with a seal of musk.
A cameleer sped to that famous queen,
Who marvelled at the letter as she read.
In answer, first, she poured her praises forth
“To that just Judge, the Maker of the earth,
Who raised the turning sky and set therein
The seat of good and ill. He made thee victor

Sikandar, having read the queen's reply,
Let blow the brazen trumpets and set forth.
When he had been one month upon the road
He reached the marches of Kaidáfa's realm,
Where reigned a monarch who was named Faryán,
Possessed of treasure, troops, and puissance.
He had a city well supplied with arms;
No crane had seen the summit of its walls.
He gathered troops and garrisoned that hold,
And cavaliers patrolled the ramparts round.
Sikandar bade the bishops¹²⁴

bring their wains
And catapults, and in a sennight took
That lofty hold; his noble army entered,
As did Sikandar who forbade all bloodshed.
One of Kaidáfa's sons, the son-in-law
Of king Faryán who had much joy in him,
Was there within. To him Faryán had given
A favourite daughter, and his crown had been
Exalted by the queen. The son-in-law
Was named Kaidrúsh and he was all in all
To king Faryán for whom the sky decreed
Death in the fight; his daughter and her spouse
Were taken by the hands of one Shahrgír.
Sikandar, knowing who the spouse was, thought:—
“What cure is there for this contingency?”
Bade his wazír to come and gave to him
Authority and crown and throne. This sage

When the sun

Had drawn its sword at dawn, and gloomy night
Had vanished in dismay, Naitkún assumed
The throne, but ill at ease, ashamed, and sorry;
Sikandar stood before the presence girded.
They shut the door and oped the path of guile.
Now when Shahrgír brought in Kaidáfa's son,
A captive weeping with his wife beside him,
And clinging to his hand in all her charms,
Naitkún spake hastily: “What man is this
Whose pains enforce such tears?”

“Be calm,” replied

The youth, “because I am Kaidáfa's son,
Kaidrúsh. Save for this daughter of Faryán's
I have no spouse concealed behind my curtains.
I went to bring her home to cherish her
As mine own life, but now the lion-taker
Hath ta'en me prisoner. The stars have smitten
My soul, and shafts my body.”

When Naitkún

Heard what the young man said he was distressed,
His heart grew full; howbeit he showed anger,
And then addressed the deathsman: “Earth must hide
them.
Behead them with thine Indian scimitar—
The husband and his consort in their bonds.”
Then came Sikandar, kissed the ground, and said:—
“O Sháh of Cæsar's race! if thou wilt spare
The blood of this young couple for my sake
My head will be exalted o'er the people.
Why in thy wrath behead the innocent,
For God will not approve thee?”

Shrewd Naitkún

Replied: “Thou hast preserved the blood of both.”
Then added quickly: “Thou hast saved thy head,
Kaidrúsh! when thou hadst lost it! Now will I
Send him with thee to tell thy mother all.
If she shall send me tribute, it is well,
And none shall burst his skin on that account.
Tend well my worthy minister, for he
Will proffer unto her a fight or feast
With me. Repay him for his kindliness,
For good men's hearts are moved by gratitude,
And, when he hath the answer of the queen,
Dismiss him kindly on his homeward way.”
Kaidrúsh replied: “My heart and eyes and ears
Are his. Oh! how shall I express myself?
I tender him as dearly as my life
Because I owe him that and world and wife.”

Sikandar chose ten Rúmans, men of name,
All confidants who would respect his secret,
And said to them: “While we are on our way
Call me Naitkún.”

Kaidrúsh led on; Sikandar,

Put trust in him. The chieftains spurred like fire,
And reached a mountain where the rocks were crystal.
Upon it there were fruit-trees of all sorts,
And on the top they noticed grass in plenty.
They left this mountain and kept speeding on
Toward the country where Kaidáfa dwelt,
Who cagerly heard tidings of Kaidrúsh,
And went to meet him with a mighty host,
All men of name and favoured by the stars.
He, when he saw his mother, lighted down,
And did obeisance, but she bade him mount.
They rode, hand clasped in hand. Kaidrúsh described
All that he had gone through and paled in telling
His troubles in the city of Faryán,
Where he had lost crown, army, throne, and treasure.
The man that cometh with me,” he proceeded,
“Preserved me and my consort from Sikandar,
Who else had given orders to behead me,
And burn my corpse in fire. Do what he wisheth
With right good will and thwart not his request.”

All arabesqued with gold, he stood astound,
Oft times invoking to himself God's name.
To Cæsar, gazing on that court, Írán
And Rúm seemed even as nothing, and he kissed
The ground like other courtiers in her presence.
Kaidáfa gazed on him, received him well,
Much questioned him, and made him sit. Now when
Bright Sol set, and the audience-time for strangers
Had passed, she gave command to deck the palace
And call attendants, and for harp and wine.
They ranged in one hall tables made of teak
With gold stars and designs in ivory,
Meats were provided past all reckoning,
Wine was brought forth and, when the eating ceased,
And gold and silver cups were handed round,
The company drank first Kaidáfa's health.
That noble queen gazed often at Sikandar
Amid the revel till at length she bade
The keeper of her treasures: “Bring to me
The lustrous silk with that delightful portrait,
Just as it is, and handle it with care.”
He brought it to the queen, who scanned it much
And, having scrutinised Sikandar's face,
Found the presentment just, so that she knew:—
“'Tis Cæsar, chief of yon famed army! He
Hath made himself his own ambassador,
And boldly reached this court. Imperious sir!”
She said to him, “come give Sikandar's message.”

Kaidáfa

Was wroth thereat but saw no salve but silence,
And said to him: “Return to thine abode,
And for the present rest there with thy friends.
To-morrow when thou comest we will answer,
And take fair order for thy homeward way.”
Thereat Sikandar went back to his lodging,
And thought all night how to secure himself.
Now when the bright Lamp rose above the mountains,
And plain and upland glittered like brocade,
He went to court again with smiling lips,
But heart o'ercast with care. The chamberlain
Saw, greeted him, and took him to the queen.
He saw a throng of strangers and a hall
Where was a crystal throne with patterns traced
In emeralds and cornelians, every boss
A royal gem. The dais was compact
Of sandal and lign-aloe, and the pillars
Of onyx and turquoise. The edifice,
The queen's Grace, throne, and puissance much amazed
him.
He cried: “This is indeed an audience-chamber!
God's worshippers behold not such another.”
He paced toward her, and they set a seat
For him below the throne. Kaidáfa said:—
“Why marvel at our palace thus, Naitkún?
Is Rúm indeed so other that thou needs
Must wonder at our land?”

He said to her:—

“O queen! misprize not thine own dwelling-place.
Thy head is higher than the heads of kings
Because thine ocean is a mine of gems.”
Kaidáfa smiled: his speech and conduct charmed
her.
She then dismissed her court and, having seated
The envoy graciously before her, said:—

Kaidáfa said:—

“Dispute it not because thou art Sikandar,
And, when thou seest the portrait of thyself,
Cease to dissemble and display no wrath.”
She brought and showed to him the silk all limned
With that fair portrait and so vividly
That, given motion, it had been himself.
He bit his lips; day grew for him like midnight.
He said: “Let no one be without a dagger
Concealed about him!”

“If thou hadst one here

Suspended from thy shoulder,” she replied,
“No strength or trenchant scimitar would serve;
There is no room for fight or road for flight.”
Sikandar said: “The great are eager ever
To win the world by valour, and must shun not
The path of danger, for the faint of heart
Excel not. Had I but my weapons now
The whole house would become a sea of blood,
And I, confronted by mine enemy,
Would rend my liver's seat or slaughter thee!”

Kaidáfa, smiling at Sikandar's bearing,
His gallantry, and angry words, replied:—
“O monarch lion-like! become not headstrong
In valour. It was not through Grace of thine
That Fúr of Hind, Dárá son of Dáráb,
And all those warriors of Sind were slain,
But 'twas because those world-lords' day was over,
And thy star in the ascendant. Thine own valour
Hath made thee so presumptuous as to deem
Thyself the lord of time and earth, but know
That all our blessings are derived from God.
So while thou livest give the thanks to Him.

Sikandar heard

And joyed, relieved from fear and slaughter, swore
By that just Judge, who ruleth all, the Faith
Of Christ, and by the sword of war, and said:—
“So long as thy dominions, thine own sons,
And potentates allied to thee, endure
I will do naught but what is good and right;
I will not think of fraud or knavery.”
When he had sworn Kaidáfa said to him:—
“I must not fail to warn thee of one thing:
Know this then that Tainúsh my son misprizeth
My knowledge and my counsel. He is wayward,
Fúr's son-in-law, and must not hear from near
Or far that thou art one skin with Sikandar,
Or friend withal, for he would fain avenge
Fúr and in battle dash down heaven to earth.
Return now to thy house in peace and joy,
And utter naught about the world's concerns.”
Sikandar went, his heart was big within him,
For wise men think of death with seriousness.

The ceiling was of ivory and gold,
And in the gold were divers jewels set.
In front of all the musky-scented throng
Before the queen there stood two proper sons;
One was Tainúsh, the cavalier, the other
Kaidrúsh who used to hearken to her words.
The younger son spake to his mother thus:—
“O queen well favoured of the stars and just!
Take order that Naitkún glad, well content,
And with a guide, may leave thee, so that none
May harm or treat him as a foe, forwhy
He saved my life, and as bright life I hold him.”
She said: “Mine actions shall increase his great-
ness.”
Then to Sikandar spake that noble queen:—
“Now make the secret patent to us. What
Hast thou to say? What is Sikandar's purpose?
What knowest thou about the Sháh, and whom
Hath he for minister?”

Sikandar answered:—

“Great lady! I have tarried long. The Sháh
Said: ‘Go, ask tribute from her land. If thou
Delayest I will lead the army thither,
And leave her not the kingdom, crown, and throne,
Grace, queenship, might, or fortune for her own.’”

Tainúsh, when he had heard Sikandar's words,
Raged like a blast, and said: “Thou worthless fool!
No man could reckon thee a man at all!
Know'st not before whose presence thou art seated?
Assume the bond slave's pose!¹³⁵

Thy head is full
Of wrath and arrogance. Inform me who
Thy monarch is. Save for our sovereign's Grace
I would pluck off thy head as I would pluck
An orange from its bough. This very night,
Because I grieve for Fúr, will I display
Thy trunkless head in presence of the host!”
His mother called to him, for his hot head
Was growing more distraught, and said: “The words
Are not his own! Address the envoy's sender,
Whose utterance they are.”

She bade: “Conduct

Tainúsh outside the court. Thou scowling one!”
She added, “show not thy vile temper here.
He saved Kaidrúsh, thy brother, from the Sháh,
And reached our court, and yet thou railest thus
Against him and art wroth and sore displeasured!”
The son went forth fulfilled with rage and dudgeon,
With bloodshot eyes. In private to Sikandar
She said: “Tainúsh is foolish and the tool
Of dívs. In private he must not devise
Some loss or crime. Thou seekest after knowledge,
And thou art wise. Consider what to do.”
Sikandar said: “So be it then. Thy course
Is to recall Tainúsh.”

Thereat the queen

Sent for her son and set him 'neath the throne.
Sikandar said: “Imperious prince! if thou
Wouldst have thy wish command thyself, and I
Will not oppose thee. I accept each word
Of thine. Sikandar, who is Sháh and hath
The throne and crown, hath plunged me into gloom.
He sent me to the queen with this command:—
‘Ask tribute from that famous sovereign,’
So that whatever ill grow manifest
From foes toward him may come on me. Hear, prince
Rage not nor storm—another's due—at me,
For much have I been wronged by him myself,
And I have schemed to slay him. To thy hands
Will I deliver him, and then the world
Will be well quit, and I fare free, of him.
Thou know'st not yet my plan and what good thoughts
I harbour. I will go to him to-day
With my reply and will advise him finely!
If I shall grasp his hand and from his camp
Conduct him to thee, and in such a fashion
That he shall have no troops with him, and thou
Shalt look not on his scimitar, his throne,
And crown, then what wilt thou bestow upon me
Of all the realm, how recognise my service?”
Tainúsh thereat made answer: “I have heard
Thy words, and we must act thereon forthwith,
For if thou shalt achieve this, and wilt do
Thine utmost honestly, I will bestow
His treasures and his purses, steeds, and men—
Devoted lieges—and my thanks upon thee;
Thou shalt possess the world, know good, become
My loyal minister, and in this land

Sikandar rose and shook

Hands on the bargain, and Tainúsh inquired:—
“How wilt thou compass this and by what spell
Effect this sorcery?”

Sikandar said:—

“Thou must go with me, when I quit the queen,
And take a thousand horsemen of thy host,
All famed in fight. Upon my journey hither
I marked a wood where I will put in ambush
Thee and thy soldiery, and go myself
To him, will look on that malignant soul,
And say: ‘The queen hath sent so much that thou
Ne'er wilt want more. Her elder son, Tainúsh
By name, hath brought the Sháh her salutations
And messages, but saith: “I dare not face him
Amidst his host.” Now if my lord would deign
Escorted only by his priests and sages,
To meet Tainúsh then in that interview
He could receive the goods and hoarded treasures
Of all sorts, for Tainúsh would come, on seeing thee
Without thy host, or else be free to go.’
Sikandar, when he heareth my smooth words,
Will never guess my colour and design.
But seek the shade beneath those trees, requiring
From thee those crowns and thrones. Do thou sur-
round him
With thy fierce troops and make the future certain;
This will achieve my vengeance and thy wishes,
And thy fame soar by favour of the stars.
When thou hast taken him I am all thine,
And, when thou biddest, I will be thy watchman.
Then mine affairs will prosper and my market
Grow hot and brisk, for thou shalt carry off
Much wealth and slaves and steeds caparisoned.”
Tainúsh rejoiced on hearing him, appeared
A noble cypress-tree, and answered thus:—
“My hope is that his day may turn to night,
And that he may be taken unawares
Within my toils, for all the bloodshed made
By him within the world—that of Dárá,
Son of Dáráb, the warriors of Sind,
And that great man of Hind, the valiant Fúr.”
Now when Kaidáfa heard Sikandar's words,
And marked and understood his stratagem,
She smiled at his device behind her lips,
And hid those corals underneath her veil.
Sikandar left her presence in a mood
O'ershadowed by his great solicitude.

I promise that henceforth
The soil of Andalús shall not behold me,
Nor will I send a host to battle thither.
I will employ no colourable ruse,
I will entreat not ill thy stainless son
By act or hest of mine, but bind true faith
To thee upon my soul and no wise seek
Thine injury. Thy friend shall be my brother,
Thy throne as sacred to me as the Cross.”
Kaidáfa marked his oath, his singleness
Of heart, and honest pledge. She had the palace
Filled with gold seats, and set forth gauds of Chín,
Called for her nobles and the well-starred chiefs,
Set them, each one, upon a seat of gold
And, having sent for both her well-loved sons
And for her kith and kin, harangued them thus:—
‘It is not well that we be over-troubled
Within this Wayside Inn, and changeful fortune
Must make not battle and revenge my lot.
Sikandar still will be insatiate
Of treasure though he over-top the sky,
And for that reason seeketh war with us
Though all earth's treasures are not worth the toil.
I purpose that we do not fight with him;
I will not bring distress upon the realm;
But we will make a politic response,
At once exalting and exhorting him.
If after mine advice he seeketh war,
lgnoring both my Glory and my throne,
I with the host will face him so that sun

Now she possessed a throne

That was compact of seventy parts and more;
Well gifted he that could dismember it!
The pattern was of intricate design,
And every juncture fitted curiously;
The feet had terminals of dragons' heads.
None knew its jewels' worth, but it comprised
Four hundred royal gems, an equal sum
Of brilliant rubies, two whereof, in hue
Pomegranate-grain, weighed one miskál apiece,
And emeralds four hundred, several stones,
Bright as a rainbow, and uncut. She added
Of raiment more than forty camel-loads;
The lady's heart was bounteous as the sea.
There were five hundred tusks of elephants;
What tusks they were! Their total length reached
miles!
There were four hundred leopard-skins and more,
The sort brought from Barbar; of dappled deer-skins
A thousand plain or dyed, all fair to see,
Besides a hundred hounds keen in the chase,
Which sped like arrows over hill and plain.
Kaidáfa's servants then led forth before her
Two hundred buffaloes; there were withal
Four hundred seats upholstered in brocade
And silken stuffs, the frames of ebony,

They journeyed stage by stage

Until they drew anear the scene of action—
The camp of that famed Sháh, the fortune-favoured
Sikandar, who left baggage in the forest,
Where there were streams and many trees, and told
Tainúsh: “Here rest and, rested, take the cup
In hand. I will depart, make good my words,
And do all for the best.”

Sikandar reached

The encampment. All the host came forth and showed
Their gladness by their shouts, while making ready
The Kaian crown, because they had despaired
Of their aspiring lord. Who ever thought
To see his face again? With tongues all praise
The soldiers bent their faces to the ground.
Sikandar then selected from the host
A thousand of the Rúman men of name,
Who, warriors as they were intent on strife,
With ox-head maces and in coats of mail,
Set forward and begirt the wood about—
A line of men and weapons. Then he cried:—
“Rash man! art thou resolved on fight or flight?”¹⁴²

Repenting of his plots and cleverness
Tainúsh quaked and exclaimed: “High-minded Sháh!
Thou shouldst choose rather to be praised than blamed.
This was not thine agreement with my mother.
Didst thou not say: ‘I will not quit the right’?
Display, as in the instance of Kaidrúsh,
True greatness and endeavour righteousness.”
Sikandar said: “O prince! why hast thou grown
So feeble in this weighty enterprise?

Tainúsh forthwith alighted,

And kissed the ground, displaying deep abasement.
The world-lord grasped his hand and reaffirmed
The former covenant, and said withal:—
“Be of good cheer and harbour no suspicions.
I feel no hate toward thee. When thy mother
Sat on her throne of gold, and when I clasped
Thy hand in mine, I told thee: ‘I will lay
The king of earth's hand thus within thine own.’
This very day my promise is performed,
For hasty speeches come not well from Sháhs.
I am the same Sikandar that held forth
So pleasantly to thee. Kaidáfa knew
That very day that thou didst grasp his hand.”
Then Cæsar bade the attendants: “Set a throne
Beneath a blossom-scattering tree.”

He bade

To spread the board and call for wine and harpers.
They spent a while in pleasure and delights.
Now when the ruddy wine had made them glad
The Sháh gave orders for a royal gift
Of stuffs of Rúm, of Chín, and Persian make,
And gave it to Tainúsh with gold and silver
For his companions, crowns and belts withal
To those that merited, and thus enjoined him:—
“Stay not, this wood is distant, not thy home.
Say to Kaidáfa: ‘O thou prudent lady,
Thou ruler shrewd of heart and well advised!
While life endureth I will constant be,
And have possessed my soul with love for thee.’”

He marched thence to the country of the Brahmans
To make inquiry of their ancient rites
From those abstemious men. The Brahmans heard
News of the Sháh that he was marching thither,
And from the heights came down those devotees,
Assembling at the tidings. Then the sages
Wrote to Sikandar, chief of priests. The letter
Began with heart-felt blessings from the Lord
Of all upon the monarch of the world:—

He asked them of their ways of sleep and provand,
Rest and good days and fight: “What share have ye
Of this world's good? Hath Heaven no antidote
For bane save this alone?”

A sage replied:—

“O conqueror of the world! none of us talketh
Of war and strife; we need not clothes, stuffs, foods.
Man being born in mother-nakedness
Should not be dainty in his garniture,
And hence returneth naked to the dust,
Where all is fear, anxiety, and dread.
Earth coucheth and heaven clotheth us; our eyes,
Expectant of the ending, watch the way.
How much the ambitious striveth after things
Which, strife and all, are hardly worth a doit,

The Brahman answered:—

“The water is the keeper of the land.”
He asked: “Who are the awakened, who the sinners
On earth? They make a stir, and many live
Not knowing wherefore they are here at all!”
The Brahman answered: “Know thou pure in heart
And justice-seeking chief! the awakened man
Is he whom little of this world sufficeth;
The guiltiest, one whose wisdom hath been docked
By hate and greed. If thou wouldst know such well
Look first upon thyself, for all earth's face
Is thine, and one would say that restless heaven
Is kin to thee, yet still thou schem'st for more,
And to withhold thy wits from grimy dust,
For greed is thy soul's hell, and it may be
That these our words may cause thee to repent.”
The Sháh inquired: “What is our ruling passion,
And our companion everywhere for evil?”
The Brahman answered: “Greed—the sum of hate,
And soul of sin.”

“What is its nature then,”

The Sháh asked, “seeing there is cause to weep
O'er this its passion for aggrandisement?”
The Brahman made this answer: “Greed and Need
Are two dívs and long-drawn calamities.
One hath its lips dried up with poverty,
The other sleepeth not to compass more,
While both are hunted by the evil day:
How blest is he whose soul is fed on wisdom!”
Now, when Sikandar heard, his face resembled
The bloom of fenugreek, his cheeks were pale,
Tears filled his eyes, his smiling countenance
Was drawn with frowns. The imperious Sháh in-
quired:—

“Death is inexorable,”

The Sháh made answer. “How canst thou escape
That Dragon's piercing clutch? For wert thou iron
Thou wouldst not find release, while youth, if here
It tarrieth, is not exempt from eld.”
The Brahman said to him: “O mighty Sháh,
The world-lord, sage, and one whose word is law!
Thou knowest death to be remediless,
And that there is no worse calamity
Than eld. Why seek to win the world by toil,
Why in thy madness sniff the bloom of bale?
Thou wilt but leave the product of thy travail
Behind thee and bestow what thou hast toiled for,
And treasures, on the foe. To undertake
To toil for others is both ignorance
And folly. White hair is Death's messenger;
Why hope so much to live?”

The shrewd Sháh said:—

“If any of God's servants could escape
From His decree, I had escaped withal
By observation of the turning sky;
But neither man of lore nor warrior
Evadeth that decree, strive how he may.
Moreover they that perished in my wars,
Or had their days cut short by destiny,
Deserved their fate by bloodshed and ill deeds,
For no oppressor 'scapeth. They have suffered
God's chastisement for quitting wisdom's way.
'Tis not in man to limit heaven's powers,
Or shun the process of the passing hours.”

Sikandar proffered many a gift, but none
Accepted them; the Brahmans had small greed.
He did no hurt, set off upon his march,
By that same token fared toward the West,
And from the Brahmans' country reached a spot
Whence he beheld a deep and boundless sea;
The men there had their faces veiled like women,
And went arrayed, all colour and perfume.
They spake not Persian, whether old or modern,
Or Arabic, or Turkman, or Chinese;
They lived on fish alone; there was no means
Of bringing aught by road. Sikandar stood

Thence marched he quickly and invoking oft
The just World-lord. On reaching the Narmpái
He saw a countless folk who had no steeds,

When few Narmpái were left

Sikandar rested, then led on the host,
And reached what seemed a boundless city whence
All, as their wont was, went to meet him gladly,
Asked naught but brought all kinds of tapestries,
Of raiment and of provand while Sikandar
Saluted, well received, and honoured them
According to their station. Then he bade
The common folk, the chiefs, and those star-favoured
To carpet all the plain. The sands and soil
Were tricked out with brocade. Upon the waste
They pitched the Sháh's pavilion, and the brave
Took post around. All revelled, Sháh and horsemen.
Thus, as he fleeted time with feast and wine,
Or rest, the host, inured to heat and cold,
Reposed from war. Thereafter ceaselessly
He sought a lucky day whereon to march
Sought for intelligence from all, but none
Gave him auspicious counsel. He observed
A mountain with its summit midst the stars:
Thou wouldst have said: “It will arrest the sky!”
Few were the folk thereon, and none of them
Remained at night. Of these he asked: “What way
Is there, and how must I conduct the host?”
All blessed him, saying: “Famous king of earth!
“The way is o'er the mount if guide could go,
But on its farther side there is a dragon,
Whose grievous venom doth confound the wolf.
Thy troops can pass it not; its venom's fumes
Mount to the moon; flames issue from its maw,
And its two side-locks would avail to snare
An elephant. Our folk can not withstand it.
It needeth for its food five oxen nightly.

On marching with his chiefs of Rúm Sikandar
Fared toward the city that thou call'st Harúm,
Which was inhabited by women only,
Who suffered none to come within their gates.
Their left breasts were like eager warriors',
Who don the breastplate on the day of battle,
While on the right hand they resembled women's,—
Pomegranate-like on silk. The Sháh with all
His mighty men of Rúm approached Harúm,
And wrote a letter fit and fair and worthy
Of his high birth, addressed thus: “From the king
Of Rúm and of Írán to her that is
The ruler in Harúm.

The letter first

Named Him who ruleth o'er the starry heaven,
Of whom are justice, love, and bounteousness,
And then went on: “Whoe'er is wise of soul,
And walketh yet alive upon the world,
Hath heard of what we have achieved on earth,
And how we have exalted sovereignty,
While he that hath refused to do our bidding
Hath no couch save dark dust. Fain would I have
No place concealed from me throughout the world.
I roam not for addition's sake but ache
For knowledge. Be my hand withheld from gain,
And justice ever comrade of my soul.
If I approach 'tis not to fight with you;
My heart is set on peace and jollity.

He commanded

That a philosopher of Rúm should bear
The letter to the city of Harúm,
And added many honied words. The envoy
Was wise himself. When he arrived he saw
The city full of women and no men,
And all the people went forth to the plain
To see the Rúman. All the counsellors
In that assembly gathered round the letter
And, when a city-sage had read it over,
And grew possessed of what the Sháh proposed,
They sat, and wrote back: “O exalted Sháh!
Live ever. We have set thy messenger
Before us and have read thy letter through.
First as to what thou sayest touching kings,
Thy victories, and former fights: if thou
Shalt march against the city of Harúm
Thou wilt not see the ground for hoofs and feet
The districts of our city pass compute,
And in each one there are ten thousand women.
We sleep in arms and battle for addition.
We all are spouseless, modest maidens we.
Whichever way thou comest to this land
There is deep water to be ferried over.
When one among us hath a mind to wed
We none of us behold her face again,
And she must cross the water be the day
Fine, blusterous, or snowy. Having married,
If she shall have a daughter—one refined
And fond of hues and scents—that child of hers
Abideth ever in her native air;
But if she proveth masculine and proud
Her mother will dispatch her to Harúm;
While if the mother bringeth forth a son
He tarrieth, coming not to dwell with us.
Each night ten thousand maidens guard the river.
When one of us unhorseth in the fight
Some lion-man we set a golden crown
Upon her head and raise o'er Gemini
Her throne, and surely there are thirty thousand
Among us, wearing crown of gold and earrings,
By whose hands some illustrious warrior
Hath turned to dust upon the day of battle.

When this answer

Was finished an ambassadress departed
With crown and royal raiment, and with ten
Fair cavaliers. When she approached the Sháh
In state he sent some troops to welcome her.
The noble lady gave to him the letter,
And told the message of the valiant women.
Sikandar, having read that answer, chose
A man discreet and wise, sent this reply,
And said: “Be wisdom wedded to men's brains.
No kings or chiefs, exalted though they be
And favoured by the stars, are left on earth
That are not subject unto me. Black dust
And camphor-dust, and feast and battlefield,
Are one to me. I have not come with drums,
With elephants, with players on the tymbals,
And such a host that plain and mountain quake
Beneath the horses' hoofs, to fight with women.
I fain would see your city, and if ye
Will make approaches to me all is well.
When I have seen I will march hence the host,
And not abide here long. We will behold
Your policy and glory, how ye manage
Your steeds, your grace, and potence. Privily
Will I inquire as to your works and ways,
How women can exist, men absent, how
Death's ravage is repaired, and find the outcome.”
The envoy went and did his embassage
At large. The magnates met and made reply:—
“We will select two thousand women, fluent,
Learned, and discreet; each hundred have in charge
Ten crowns of gold each set with many gems,
Two hundred crowns in all, and none but kings

We will go forth to meet the Sháh when we
Are ware of his approach, for we have heard
About his knowledge and his Grace.”

The envoy

Returned and spake those words instinct with wisdom.
Sikandar marched forth from his resting-place,
And marvelled at the conduct of those women.
He went two stages, then a storm arose,
Whose snow-drifts made all level with the hills,
And many followers perished on that day
Through cold and snow. The Sháh pursued his march
Two stages farther through that grievous frost,
Then reached a burning land whence vapours rose,
And murky clouds; “The host,” thou wouldst have said,
“Was marching over fire.” The hauberks burnt
The shoulders of the Persians, and the earth
Glowed with the horse-shoes of the cavaliers,
And thus it was until they reached a land
Where they beheld all folk as black as night,
With pendent, slobbering lips; all lips and slobber
Were they, all slobber and lip! Their eyes seemed
blood;
Flames issued from their mouths! Their warriors
Brought many elephants and offerings
Before the Sháh, and said: “We caused this storm
And snow to harm you, for none e'er hath traversed
This route as we have seen your army do.”
The Sháh abode a month. When he and host
Had been refreshed he sped thence merrily,
His heart prepared, toward the women's city,
And o'er the stream two thousand women passed
With crowns and earrings on. There was a forest
Thick and well watered; all the place was glad,
And flourishing. The women brought a store
Of provand and bright, figured tapestries
Out to a mead and, when Sikandar reached
The city of Harúm, they flocked to him
Out of their settlements. Full many a crown
They proffered him, as well as raiment, gems,
And things both fair and sweet. These he accepted,
Received the women with all courtesy,
And gave them quarters in that charming spot.
When night turned day he visited the city,
And occupied himself in seeing it,
Investigating all its usages
Till all had been made clear. He questioned much,
Surveyed the river, and departed westward.
He found a mighty city of brave men

The devotee

Made answer: “Ye must ride upon young horses.”
The Sháh bade herdsmen gather to the camp
The herds at large and chose ten thousand steeds,
All four-year-olds and fit for battle-needs.

Sikandar, summoning his prudent chiefs,
Marched cheerly thence his host and reached a city
Whereto he saw no middle and no end,
And having all things needful in abundance.
'Twas full of garths, parks, halls, and palaces.
There he dismounted and at dawn next day
Went forward unattended toward the Source
Which in his story of the hero's fortunes
The rustic minstrel calleth that of Life.
He tarried there until the sun, grown pale,
Sank in that fount of lapis-lazuli.
He saw the wonder wrought by holy God—
The Bright One's disappearance from the world—
Returned to camp, and pondered much. That night

Khisr left that station and all food behind him,
And fared thus for two days and nights while none
Bestirred his lips to eat. Upon the third
Two ways showed mid the Darkness, and the Sháh
Lost trace of Khisr. What while the prophet went
Toward the Fount of Life, exalting thus
His living head to Saturn, bathed his body
And head in that bright Water, sought no guard
Save God, drank, rested, and returned apace,
More instant ever both in prayer and praise,
Sikandar reached the light and saw a mountain
Both high and bright, and on its top four columns
Of aloe-wood uplifted to the clouds.
On every column was a mighty nest,
And in each nest there sat a huge, green bird,
Which, speaking loudly in the Rúman tongue,
Hailed the victorious master of the world,
Who hurried to them when he heard. One said:—
“O votary of toil! what seekest thou
Within this Wayside Inn, for though thou raisest
Thy head to heaven above it will dismiss thee

The bird,

On hearing this reply, perched lower down,
Astonying that worshipper of God,
And asked him: “Hast thou heard within the world
The sounds of harp, of reveller, and song?”
He made this answer: “One, whose lot it is
To have no share in joy, the glad account not
Although for them he pour out heart and soul.”
From that tall column of lign-aloe-wood
The bird flew to the ground; its musky perch
Was void. The bird inquired: “Do understanding
And right prevail or do defect and guile?”
The Sháh made answer: “He that seeketh know-ledge
Is eminent in every company.”
Back from dark ground to column went the bird
And, having cleaned its talons with its beak,
Inquired of Cæsar: “Why do devotees
Dwell on the mountains?”

“The devout,” he said,

“Find not another place so good for worship.”
The bird ran up the column to its nest.
The monarch was delighted with that fowl,
Which with its talons sharpened up its bill
In full security. Then it instructed
Sikandar to ascend the topmost peak,
Afoot and unescorted, there to see
That which would cause the merriest to weep.
On hearing this he went toward the mountain
Alone to view the sight upon its summit,
And there saw Isráfíl, with trump in hand
And head uplifted, standing at his post,
Wind on his lips and moisture in his eye,
Till God shall bid him blow. On seeing Sikandar
He roared like thunder: “O thou slave of greed!
Toil not so much, because some day a Call
Will reach thine ears. Be less concerned for crown
And throne. Make ready to depart and bind
The baggage on.”

“It is my lot from fortune,”

The Sháh replied, “for save by stir and roaming
I may not look on sight and mystery.”
He then descended, wailing and imploring
The Giver of all good, and, with a guide
Preceding him, advanced along that route,
Involved in gloom, which when the army entered
A cry ascended from the darksome heights:—
“He that shall take a stone up from the road
Will grieve for what he beareth in his hand,

Two weeks he tarried and, when rested, marched.
He set forth eastward, having seen the west;
His purpose in the world was wayfaring.
Now as he went he saw a noble city;
“No wind or dust passed o'er it,” thou wouldst say.
Whenas the drums beat on the elephants
The chiefs came out two miles to welcome him.
The Sháh, on seeing them, received them well,
Exalting them o'er circling Sol, and asked:—
“What matchless marvels have ye in these parts?”
They loosed their tongues and thus bewailed their
fortune:—
“A very grievous case confronteth us,
And we will tell it to the conquering Sháh.
By reason of this cloud-capt mountain-range
Our hearts are full of anguish, toil, and grief.
Since for resistance we are powerless
Yájúj there and Májúj give us no sleep,
For when a portion of them reach our city
Our portion is all misery and travail.
Their faces all resemble those of beasts,
Their tongues are black, their eyes like blood, their
faces
Are black, their teeth are like wild boars'! Who dareth

The mothers have a thousand children each,
And who can reckon them? They herd like beasts,
They go apace and run like onagers.
In spring, when clouds roar and the green sea heaveth,
The clouds draw up great monsters from the waves,
While air is roaring like a mighty lion,
And pour them down in masses: then these folk
Come troop on troop and batten year by year
Upon these monsters and thereby grow lusty
In limbs and body. Afterward they feed
On herbage, scattering to gather it.
In winter they are pale and thin, their voices
Like doves'; but through those monsters in the spring
They are as wolves and roar right lustily.
Now if the great Sháh could devise a means
To liberate our hearts from this distress,
He will receive the praise of every one,
And will prolong his sojourn in the world.
Exert thy power and do this work for us,
For thou too needest help from holy God.”
Sikandar mused at them, grew grave, and pondered,
Then answered thus: “I will defray the cost;
Your city must provide both aid and labour.
By help of God, our Guide and Succourer,
I will reduce this way of theirs to reason.”
All cried: “May fortune's ills be far from thee,
O Sháh! We are the slaves of thy good pleasure,
Thy lifelong servitors. We will supply
All that thou need'st, for we have no concern
More urgent.”

So Sikandar came and viewed

The heights, and took with him a troop of sages.
He ordered to bring blacksmiths, copper, brass,
And heavy hammers, mortar, stone, and fire-wood
Past reckoning, bring all things requisite.
They brought him everything that he demanded
In measureless supplies. When all was ready,
And planned, the masons and the smiths, all those
Of mastery in their trade throughout the world,
Assembled to Sikandar to assist him
In that most needful work. From every province
The experts mustered, and he built two walls
Across the mountain-pass from base to crest,
One hundred royal cubits broad, one cubit

He marched one month till Sháh and troops were
weary.
At length he reached a mount where he beheld not
A man or beast. Its peak he saw to be
Of lapis-lazuli and thereupon
A palace built of topazes, with lustres
Of crystal everywhere, and in the middle
A fount of brackish water. A ruby served
For lamp and lighted palace, mount, and heights;
The light fell on the water, and the jewel
Illumed the palace like the sun. Beside
The fount was set a double golden throne
Where lay a hapless one with human body
And with a wild boar's head—a helpless corpse
On that fine throne. His couch beneath was camphor,
And o'er him spread a mantle of brocade.

Sikandar went

With cavaliers of Rúm and native chiefs
Of whom he asked: “This tree—when speaketh it
Aloud?” The interpreter replied: “One trunk
Will talk or ever day's ninth hour hath passed,
So that the auspicious Sháh will hear its voice.
When it is night the female trunk will speak;
Its foliage will savour as 'twere musk.”

“Of going further,”

The interpreter replied, “there is no question.
There is no place beyond it, and guides call it
‘The World's End.’”

Then the blest Sháh with his Rúmans

Set forward. When he reached the speaking tree
The ground was seething hot, and all its surface
Was hid by beasts' skins.

“What are these, and who

Hath torn beasts thus?” he asked of his informant,
Who said: “The tree hath many devotees,
Who, if they hunger while engaged in worship,
Feed on the flesh of beasts.”

When Sol attained

The apex of heaven's vault Sikandar heard
Aloft a cry proceeding from the leaves
Of that tall tree—an awful, boding cry.
He feared and asked of the interpreter:—
“Shrewd, trusty friend! what say the talking leaves,
Because they bathe my heart in lymph of blood?”
The guide replied: “O favourite of fortune!
The leaves upon the boughs of this tree say:—
‘Why doth Sikandar roam so o'er the world,
For he hath had his portion of good things,
And, when he shall have reigned for twice seven years,
Must quit the throne of sovereignty?”

Sikandar

Wept tears of blood; the guide's words wrung his heart.
Thenceforth he spake to no one, but remained
All sorrowful till midnight. Then the leaves
Upon the other trunk gave utterance.
Again the Sháh asked of his friendly guide:—
“What is it that the other branches say?”
Thus his informant solved the mystery:—
“The female branches say: ‘Thou travailest
In this wide world for greed and for addition.
Why torture thus thy soul? It is thy passion
To go about the world, afflicting folk
And slaying kings. Thou hast not long to live;
Do not thyself cloud and contract thy days.’”
The great king asked of the interpreter:—
“O good, discerning man! inquire if I
Shall be in Rúm when my dark day shall come,
And if my mother see me not alive
Will she at last enshroud this face of mine?”
The speaking tree said to the Sháh: “Be speedy,
And bind the baggage on. Thy mother, kindred
In Rúm, and face-veiled ladies there will look

He heard and left the tree,

Heart-stricken by the scimitar of fortune.
When he reached camp the noble native chiefs
Went home and, when they had made ready gifts,
Came hurrying to the Sháh. There were a breastplate,
Resplendent as the Nile and wide and broad
As is an elephant's hide, two elephant-tusks
Five cubits long—a toil to lift—mail-coats
And rich brocade, and, made of solid gold,
A hundred eggs, each weighing sixty mans¹⁶⁹

If weighed as drachms, and a rhinoceros
In gold and gems. Accepting these he led
His host away and tears—his heart's blood—shed.

He led his army thence toward Chín and raised
The chiefs' heads to the Pleiads. Stage by stage
He crossed the desert till in forty days
He reached the sea,¹⁷⁰

dismounted there his troops
And pitched the camp-enclosure of brocade.
He ordered then a scribe to write a letter
As from Sikandar, conqueror of cities,
Bade that the letter should comprise all kinds
Of fair and foul, and, when the scribe had finished.
Went as ambassador. He chose a Persian,
A shrewd man, one with him in heart and word,
To bid him “Do” or “Do not.” Then he gave
The captain of the host charge of the troops,
And of the Rúmans took with him five sages.
When tidings reached Faghfúr: “There is an envoy
Approaching Chín” he sent a force of troops
To meet him, and Sikandar fared in state.
He reached that spacious court. Faghfúr beheld
That chosen troop of valiant men and came,
With mind averse and anxious, from the entry
To meet Sikandar who ran up to him,
Did him obeisance, and sat long within
The hall of audience. Faghfúr gave greeting,
Received him well, and lodged him splendidly.
Now when the bright Lamp rose above the mountains
They brought a horse caparisoned with gold,

The envoy said:—

“O chief of Chín! know, none is like Sikandar
On earth. In prowess, bounty, rede, and wisdom,
He passeth man's conception. Cypress-tall
Is he, an elephant in strength, a Nile
In bounty, and in tongue a trenchant sword.
His blandness draweth eagles from the clouds.”

Went to his lodging, and prepared to leave.
The great Faghfúr unlocked his treasury;
He grudged not bounty. First he bade make ready
An ivory throne and fifty crowns inlaid
With gems, and load with gold and silver ware
A thousand camels and a thousand more
With silk and satins, with brocade of Chín,
With camphor, aloe, musk, and spicery.
He liveth at his ease who scorneth gold.
Of squirrel, ermine, and of sable pelts,
Of rugs, of horse-hides, and of weazel-skins,
The prudent treasurer brought forth and packed
Of every sort two thousand, brought withal
High-mettled steeds caparisoned with gold,
And slave-boys too, three hundred, with gold girdles.
They brought three hundred red-haired camels laden
With many a rarity of Chín. Faghfúr
Chose from among the elders one of weight,
And sugared speech, and bade him go with greeting
And message to the Sháh, and bear to him
The glad news that the chiefs would do him homage
So long as he was in the coasts of Chín.
The envoy set forth with Sikandar. Who
Would think that he was Sháh? But when the sailors
Saw him, sprang up, and lightly spread the sails,
And when the viceroy met him with the troops,
Reporting what had chanced,¹⁷⁴

while all the soldiers
Praised him and bent their faces to the ground,
The man of Chín perceived: “It is the Sháh!”
And went to him afoot protesting loudly.
Sikandar said to him: “Make no excuses,
And mention not the matter to Faghfúr.”
That night he rested and next day at dawn,
When he was set in peace upon his throne,
He gave the envoy gifts, and said: “May wisdom
Be ever thine. Go to Faghfúr and say:—
“With us thou hast great honour. Chín is thine,
If I may say so, and what more thou wilt.
I shall abide at present where I am;
One cannot hurry with so large a host.”
Back with the speed of wind the envoy hied,
And told Faghfúr what Cæsar had replied.

They fared by wilderness and longsome ways,
Stage after stage, until they reached Chaghwán,
And saw a fortified and prosperous city.
The magnates of the land, those famed and wise,
Came to Sikandar's presence while the chiefs
Set forward from Chaghwán with offerings,
And presents to his gate. At once Sikandar
Began to question them: “What sights have ye
Of marvel here?”

One said: “We know of none,

O king! worth seeing. Beggary and toil
Are here, and thou wilt take naught hence but wind.”
The Sháh, on hearing what the speaker said,
Marched from Chaghwán toward Sind whose cavaliers
Went out to meet him while from Hind came help.
All those heart-stricken on account of Fúr,
Their hands all bathed in blood, brought elephants,
And Indian bells. Arose the battlecry,
And clarion's blare. The Sindians' chief was named
Bandáwa, an illustrious cavalier,
And puissant. The armies shocked together,
And earth became all mountain-like with slain.
Night came; no Sindian stayed upon that field.
Sikandar led his army in pursuit,
And captured elephants fourscore and five,
As well as golden crowns and scimitars
And treasures. Women, children, and old men
Went weeping to the Sháh while on his way,
And said: “O prudent Sháh! restrain thyself,
Burn not our land, slay not our little ones,
For thy day too will pass, and blest is he
That walketh innocently.”

He had no ruth,

Not sparing e'en the wounded. They enslaved
A host of women, children, young, and old.
He went toward Nímrúz by way of Bust,
And purged the world of foes. Thence he proceeded,
World-conquering with his famed host, Yaman-ward,
Whose monarch, hearing, went with chiefs to meet
him,

When the morning came

Yaman's king went his way, and all that coast
Resounded with the romage of the host.

Sikandar led his troops toward Bábil;
The air was hidden by their dust. He marched,
He and his host, a month; they saw no rest-place.
At length they reached a mount whose top was
hidden.
A black cloud rested on it; thou hadst said:—
“'Twas near to Saturn.” They could find no road,
And Sháh and army halted in dismay.
They scaled laboriously the craggy height,
And even light-armed troops were overworn.
When they were all exhausted by the march
A deep sea showed upon the farther side.
The host rejoiced to view sea, plain, and road.
They marched toward that deep sea, and praised the
Maker.
The place was full of beasts; the army lived
On game. Far off a savage showed all hairy,

The Sháh asked: “What is that amid the water
Out yonder toward the rising of the sun?”
“O Sháh!” he said, “for ever live renowned.
There is a city there like Paradise,
And not, thou wouldest say, compact of earth.
Thou wilt not look on palace there or house
Whose outside is not made throughout of bones,
And, brighter than the sun, within the halls
Are limned the visage of Afrásiyáb,
And that of Kai Khusrau, the combative,
His greatness, manliness, and enterprises.
All these are painted on the bones of fish;
Thou wilt see nowhere any dust or earth;
The people live on fish and naught besides.^177a

Myself I will escort the army thither
If the famed Sháh shall bid.”

Sikandar said

To him with ears: “Go to, fetch me a native
That I may look upon a novelty.”
So Gúsh-bistar set forth at once and made
All speed to go to city and to folk,
And gave them Cæsar's message, saying: “The Sháh,
That famed one, calleth for you.”

Of that city,

When young and old and high and low heard this,
There went across the water seventy men,
Possessed of wisdom or advanced in years,
And clad in silks, and some were young, some old.
The old and famed bare each a golden cup
A-brim with pearls, the young bare each a crown.
They came to Cæsar, bowed, and reverenced him;
They held long talk with him and said: “The trea-sures
Of Kai Khusrau are in our custody,
And would befit a new Sháh like thyself.”
Thereat Sikandar hurried o'er the water
Toward their city, viewed it all—its marts,
And streets—and visited the treasure-house.
The hoard was all of crowns and thrones of gold,
With coronets and necklaces and girdles.
None knew its worth for none could reckon it.

Sikandar marched thence to Bábil; the earth
Was hidden by his host. He knew that death
Was near and that his day was overcast,
And thought to leave none of the royal race
To lead an army to make war on Rúm,
And set his foot upon that prosperous land.
When this thought gat possession of his brain
He wrote a letter to Arastálís,
And said: “It is my purpose not to leave
One of the royal seed. I have been round
The seven climes and taken many princes.
In sooth my death is nigh, so day hath darkened.”
He bade that every one of Kaian seed
Should make him ready to appear at court,
Not dreaming of foul play. Now when they bare
The letter to the sage his heart was riven.
He answered instantly and, thou hadst said,
Made of the lashes of his eye his pen-point:—¹⁷⁹

“The letter of the world's king hath arrived.
Thou must withhold thy hand from evil-doing,
Abandon this ill purpose, expiate
The thought by giving alms, restrain thyself,
Commit thyself to God and in the world
Sow only seed of good. We live for death,
For die we must past help. None hath borne off
The kingship with him, but hath gone and left
His greatness to another. So be ware,
Shed not the blood of princes else a curse
Will be upon thee till the Resurrection.
Again, when for the Íránian troops no Sháh
Shall sit upon the throne hosts will arrive
From Turkistán and Hind, Sakláb and Chín,
Arrive from all sides, and 'twill be no marvel
If they that take Írán shall war with Rúm.
Not e'en a breath must harm the Kaian-born.
Convoke the Rúman and Íránian chiefs
To merrymake, feast, conference, and banquet.

When Sikandar

Received this answer he made haste to change
His purpose and bade summon to his court
The Rúman and Íránian notables
That were possessed of valour, ranked them duly,
And drew the patents so that none should seek
The least addition to the share assigned him.
To these renowned and independent princes
They gave the name of “Tribal Kings.”

The night

Whereon Sikandar reached Bábil, and saw
The chiefs right glad to look on him again,
A woman bare a child that filled beholders
With wonderment. It had a lion's head
With hoofs for feet, an ox's tail, the breast
And shoulders of a man. The monster died
At birth but, though such things are best forgotten,
They bare it to the Sháh forthwith who gazed
Thereon with horror, held it ominous,
And said: “Let this be hidden by the dust.”
He summoned many readers of the stars,
And held discourse at large of that dead child.
In great dismay they veiled their views thereon
From that fair-fortuned Sháh who raged, and said:—
“If aught be hid forthwith I will behead you,
And naught but lions' maws shall be your shroud!”
The Sháh being wroth, they told him: “Famous king!
That thou wast born beneath the Sign of Leo
Was patent both to archmage and to chief.
Thou seest the lion-like head on this dead child;
So will the head of thine own empire droop.
All thine astrologers have said as much
Already and adduced the signs.”

Sikandar,

On hearing this, was grieved; his wits and counsel
Failed, and he said: “Death is past cure. My heart
Is not concerned thereat. No longer life
Is mine. Our period waxeth not nor waneth.”
He sickened at Bábil that very day,
Knew that calamity was near and called
A veteran scribe before him to impart
The dispositions that he had at heart.

He sealed and closed

The letter, and bade men on speedy steeds
Convey these tidings from Bábil to Rúm:—
“The Grace of king of kingship is bedimmed!”
Now when the army was aware thereof
The world was darkened to the chiefs, who set
Their faces toward the throne of majesty,
And all the world was full of hue and cry.

On hearing how the army was bestead,
And knowing that his time was near, Sikandar
Bade carry from the palace to the field
His throne. The troops bewailed his malady
When they beheld the Sháh's pale face. The plain
Was one great cry; they seethed as on quick fire.
All said: “What misadventure for the Rúmans
To lose their king! Ill fortune is upon us,
And field and fell henceforth are desolate;
Our foes have won their wish and gained their goal;
The world becometh bitter to us now;
In public and in private we shall wail!”
With failing voice said Cæsar: “Be devout,
Wise, modest, and heed all my last requests,
If ye would prosper both in soul and body.

Like mountain-sheep

They hurried to the wood that he called Khurm,
They asked their question and this answer came:—
“Why long delay the coffin of the Sháh?
Iskandaríya, which he built in life,
Is destined to contain Sikandar's dust.”
The soldiers heard the voice and bare away
The coffin from the wood without delay.

Another said:—

“Soon shall we be as thou art, thou that wast
An uncut gem.”

Another said: “The Master,

On seeing thee, will teach thee things forgotten.”
Another said: “Since he hath been death-smitten
We should not clutch at self-aggrandisement.”
Another said: “O higher than moon and sun!
Why hidest thou from all thy goodly face?”
Another said: “A man of many parts
Is fain to cover him face-deep in gold,
But now, O man of such accomplishment,
And brave! the yellow gold hath whelméd thee!”
Another said: “Thou hast put on brocade,
And veiled to us therewith thy lovely looks.
Now lift thy head therefrom, for crown and armlet,
And ivory throne, of thee are all in quest.”
“Thou hast been severed from thy moon-faced
youths,”
Another said, “and thralls of Chín and Rúm,
And huggest gold to thee. Oh! deal not thus,
'Tis not kings' usage, with brocade and gold.”

Another said: “Thy day

Is over-passed, thy tongue hath ceased to parle.
Now wilt thou see a mighty Court—a world
Wherein the sheep is parted from the wolf.¹⁸⁷

The observer of thy throne and crown should turn
His reins from greatness for, as 'tis with thee,
It will abide with none. The tree of greatness
Should not be planted!”

Said another: “Thy deeds

Are turned to wind, the chiefs' heads quit of thee.”
Another said: “Why in this Wayside Inn
Laboriously didst thou employ thyself,
Since this is all that thou hast gained by toil?
A narrow coffin is thine only wealth.
Thou seekest not the trumpet-call but choosest
The bondage of a bier?”

Another said:—

“What time thy troops depart thou wilt remain
All by thyself on this wide waste, good sooth!
With longing eyes pursue them as they go,
And mourn thine own lost life with boundless woe.”

Then came Sikandar's mother hurrying,
And long while pressed her visage over him.
She said: “O thou illustrious king of kings,
Lord of the world, star-favoured, and devout!
Near as thou art, thou art yet far from me,
Far from thy host, thy kingdom, and thy people.
May my soul wait on thine, and be their hearts
Plucked out that joy hereat.”

Then Rúshanak

Came full of anguish, saying: “Noble Sháh!
Where are Dárá, son of Dáráb, the master
And up-stay of the world,¹⁸⁸

and all the kings
Whose head the blast sent dustward on the day
Of battle? Like a fierce cloud charged with hail
Wast thou and safe, I would have said, from death.
With so much warfare, combating, and bloodshed
In single action and in stricken field,
I would have said that fate had given thee
Safe conduct, and thou keepest from thy men
The secret, yet hast thou, when thou hadst voided
The world of chiefs, cast off the imperial crown,

The ancient Hostel's wont is still the same;
Sikandar went, but left behind him fame.
Though able six and thirty kings to slay
Where is his portion in the world to-day?
Ten cities were erected 'neath his sway,
All splendid, but ten thorn-brakes now are they.
He sought what no man ever sought before,
And wide-spread fame is left him but no more,
Yet fame is good for fame will not decay
Like some old dwelling weather-worn away.
The barrier of Sikandar we have past,
May all be well and of auspicious cast,
And may the monarch of the world¹⁸⁹

be still
Of joyous heart and free from every ill.

High-springing arch of heaven! Oh! why dost thou,
When eld is on me, keep me thus forlorn?
Thou madest much of me in youth but now
Thou passest my decrepitude with scorn.
The pampered blossoms take a sallow hue,
The pictured silk is cheapened by much stress,
The dainty cypress-tree is bent in two
Within the garth, the bright lamp lustreless,
The mountain-top once black is capped with snow,
The soldiers mark the Sháh's deficiencies:
Thou wast a mother to me long ago,
Who needs shed blood-drops at thy tyrannies.
I find no wisdom or good faith in thee;
Thy dark proceedings aggravate my lot:
Oh! would that thou hadst never nurtured me,
Or, having nurtured, persecuted not!
Whene'er I quit this gloom I will arraign
This tyranny of thine before the Just,
Of thee before the All Holy One complain
With clamourings and head bestrewn with dust.

THE poet praises Sultán Mahmúd and then, having no subject-matter in connexion with this dynasty, proceeds to narrate the story of the rise of the race of Sásán in the person of Ardshír Pápakán and of his triumph over Ardawán, the last of the Ashkánians. He then goes on to tell of Ardshír's campaign against the Kurds, and of the strange case of Haftwád and the Worm.

The abridgment of the epoch of the Ashkánians to 200 years is more drastic even than that of other Oriental writers. Mas'údí's curious explanation of this matter will be found later on.¹⁹³

In one respect at least the Sháhnáma presents a remarkable analogy to the land of its origin: the central portion of both is a barron waste. Of the five centuries and more that intervened between the day of the death of Sikandar (Alexander the Great) and that on which Ardshír Pápakán (Artaxerxes I.) was acclaimed King of kings by his victorious troops on the battle-field of Hurmuzdagán,^193a

that is to say between June 13th B.C. 323 and September 26th A.D. 226, Firdausí knew absolutely nothing save a few names and the semi-mythical circumstances attendant on the coming into being of the second Persian or Sásánian Empire. Consequently, for convenience sake, the period covered by the Ashkánian dynasty has come to be regarded merely as a single reign—the twenty-first in the long series of the fifty Sháhs. After all, however, this dearth of subject-matter in the core of the poem is not so complete as it seems. Firdausí took his authorities as he found them, and long before his days Íránian tradition already had assigned all of heroic or noteworthy that had remained in memory of Ashkánian times to the mythical epochs of the Pishdádian and Kaiánian dynasties. He spoke of the ancient tongue (Pahlaví) and of the paladins (Pahlaváns), he told at large the gests of Káran, Gúdarz, Gív, Bízhan, and others, but had no notion that he was dealing with words, names, personalities, and subject-matter, that had originated in a period dismissed by him in a few couplets as a legendary blank.¹⁹⁴

Again, apart from those heroes of secondary importance, there can be little doubt but that to the invasion of the Sacæ, which took place in Parthian times,^194a

we owe the Personification of that warrior-race, Rustam himself, the great paladin of paladins. The importance of the Ashkánian dynasty in the provenance of the subject-matter of the Sháhnáma therefore is much greater than superficially is apparent, and if all the legendary material of the poem could be replaced in its proper setting there would be no longer such discrepancies in length and interest between this and the two preceding dynasties. Historically of course it synchronises with one of the most important periods in the world's history, that of the successors of Alexander the Great, of the Parthian dynasty, and of the dominance of Rome. No one, least of all a translator, would wish that the Sháhnáma were longer, but one may regret that the misplaced material, which so inordinately prolongs the Kaiánian dynasty, was not kept in its proper connexion in the Ashkánian. As things stand the latter is a mere prelude to the Sásánian dynasty, and is concerned with the rise to power of Ardshír Pápakán, its founder, between which and that of Cyrus the Great there is a remarkable resemblance. In both cases there had been a previous incursion of nomads which had resulted in the establishment of their supremacy in western Írán. In the first case it was the Manda who, being confounded with the Madá or true Medes,^194b

brought about the establishment of the so-called Median Empire under which the dynasty of the Achæmenids occupied a subordinate position in Elam and Párs till the successful rebellion of Cyrus, king of Elam, against his over-lord Astyages, and his other conquests, reduced all western Asia underneath his rule. In the second case it was the Parthians, also nomads, who established a like empire over the same regions, and under whom the rulers of the house of Pápak or Sásán similarly occupied a subordinate position in Párs. As in the case of Cyrus, so Ardshír, the son of Pápak, successfully rebelled against his over-lord, and founded a great Persian empire. Again, the rise to power of Cyrus and Ardshír was embellished in each case by legend. In that of Cyrus two distinct accounts have come down to us, from Herodotus and Ctesias respectively. The former is that given, mutatis mutandis, by Firdausí in his story of the early years of Kai Khusrau,¹⁹⁵

the latter was transferred in Íránian legend from Cyrus to Ardshír as Gutschmid pointed out, who says, speaking of the fable that forms the kernel of the story:—“The hero is a Persian shepherd's son; from dreams shared by his parents the dream-interpreters predicted his future greatness; in his youth he came to the Median Court and there, through a strange fatality, has to do hard service; the crisis comes at last, and with it the flight of the hero to his home in Persis. Directly he has fled the astrologers declare that unless he be brought back in a given time he certainly will gain the kingdom, which comes to pass. This in a short sketch is the story of Ardshír; it is, however, exactly that of Cyrus, translated by Median hands but founded on Persian national sagas as given by Ctesias. The resemblance extends even to trifles; from the stable, where he has to do the most menial work, Ardshír starts on the flight which is to end in his gaining the sovereignty; at the moment when Cyrus resolves to break with Astyages he is met by a Persian slave, Hoibaras, carrying horse's dung in a basket, and that is interpreted as a good omen, horse's dung signifying riches and might (Nicolaus of Damascus, fr. 66, by Müller, iii. p. 400). So great a similarity certainly is not accidental, rather we recognise in it an old national saga transferred from the founder of the old Persian kingdom to the founder of the new.”^195a

The Íránian version of this legend, as applied to Ardshír, is extant in the Sháhnáma and in a Pahlaví text very similar in provenance and character to the Yátkár-i-Zarírán with which we were concerned in the previous volume of this translation.^195b

The work in question begins, after an invocation to Urmuzd, thus:—“In the history of Ardshír, son of Pápak, the following is written.” The word for “history” in the original is “kárnámak,” which is used now as the title of the extant work, and not of the one, now lost, from which it was taken. Our extant Kárnámak appears to date from the seventh century A.D., and is separable into portions each of which once, in all probability, formed an independent legend. Thus we have

1. The adapted Cyrus legend.

2. Ardshír's war with the Kurds.

3. The story of the Worm.

4. The two stories of Shápúr.

These are strung loosely together as illustrations, each in its degree, of the process that led to the restoration of Íránian unity at the hands of Ardshír Pápakán and his immediate successors. The subject-matter of the Kárnámak corresponds with §§ 3-16 of the Ashkánians, and with §§ 1-6 of Ardshír Pápakán, but, like the Yátkár-i-Zarírán in Dakíkí's case, it is not the actual authority followed by the poet but a collateral one. This is clear from the fact that it omits a very important passage given by Firdausí,¹⁹⁶

while it contains a somewhat touching episode which is not in the Sháhnáma, though it seems incredible that the poet should have made no use of it had he known it.^196a

The episodes of the self-mutilation of Ardshír's minister,^196b

and of the game of polo, whereby the Sháh recognised his son, also are lacking in the Kárnámak, though the polo-episode is found there in another connexion.^196c

Other differences are due to Firdausí's more poetical and artistic way of looking at things, and to the toning down of the somewhat pronounced Zoroastrianism that appears in the Pahlaví original, but he may have found this already done in the version that he followed, which was, in all probability, that contained in the modern Persian tenth century prose Sháhnáma.^196d

The compilers of that work seem, however, on the whole to have preferred, or at all events for the most part to have followed, the Arabic versions, and this preference is reflected in the poem.

Wherever in the following notes a comparison is instituted between the Kárnámak and Firdausí the former will be referred to as K and the latter as F.

§ 1. In the text of C this forms the concluding portion of § 40 of the previous reign. We follow the arrangement in P.

For Nasr, who is referred to again under the title of Abú'l Muzaffar just below, see Vol. i. p. 100.

At first sight there seems to be a chance here of our being able to determine at what date this passage was written, owing to Firdausí's reference to some occasion on which Mahmúd remitted a year's land-tax, but the fatality which attends all matters of date in the poem is operative even here, and there appears to be no account of this remission elsewhere.^196e

§ 2. As to who the thane (dihkán) of Chách was nothing more seems to be known.

It is the fashion of Íránian legend to connect the dynasties by means of fictitious genealogies. Accordingly the Ashkánians are represented as being descended from Kai Árash, the second son of Kai Kubád, the words Ashk and Árash being sufficiently alike to have suggested the connexion. Ashk is a word expressive of kingly virtues such as “wise,” “pure,” “holy.” In the West it took the form of Arsaces. In the Oriental lists of the kings of the Ashkánian dynasty the other names here mentioned by Firdausí occur, sometimes more than once. There are two Ashks, one Shápúr, several of the name of Gúdarz, one or two Bízhans, two or three Narsís, one or two of the name of Urmuzd or Hurmuz, no Árash, who perhaps is inserted in the Sháhnáma to keep up the nominal connexion with the second son of Kai Kubád, and three or four Ardawáns.^196f

The one here mentioned by Firdausí is the last of that name, and the poet, it appears, considered that his real name was Bahrám, but in the lists there is only one so called, and he is placed much earlier. Some account of Bahrám, Gúdarz, and Bízhan, in this connexion, has been given already.^196g

In the last reign we had Firdausí's story of the establishment by Sikandar of the system of Part or Tribal Kings and his motives in so doing.^196h

Though Sikandar's share in the matter is of course wholly unhistorical, the view taken in Íránian legend of the political system that obtained after his death is, broadly speaking, fairly correct. Írán never again was organised under one supreme head, as it had been in the days of the first Persian empire, till the establishment of the second empire five and a half centuries later. The death of Alexander was followed by long wars due to the rival ambitions of his generals and their descendants. Later on came wars with Rome and the rise of the Parthian power, which remained for centuries the great bulwark of the East against Roman aggression. The system of Parthian rule, however, was a nomad one. It originated in the victories of a nomad tribe, and it was to the nomads that the Parthian kings turned for succour in their hours of need. They called themselves indeed by the title of King of kings, as the Achæmenids did before them, and some of them at all events professed the same religion, but national Íránian tradition never recognised their right to use the ancient Persian title of supreme ruler though, in a sense, it was more applicable to them than to their predecessors. With the Achæmenids it was a claim to universal sovereignty, with the Arsacids a claim to the suzerainty of Írán. The geographical extent of the lands ruled by themselves, or by their governors on their behalf, was not very great, and the remainder of their empire consisted of kingdoms that retained at least a semi-independence under native rulers. Such, for instance, were the kingdoms of Osroene, Gordyene, and Atropatane (Azarbáiján) in the north, Elymais (Elam) and Párs in the south, and Sístán and Bactria in the east. Further, in the case of Párs, as we learn from Tabarí, and, we may presume, elsewhere also, these Part or Tribal Kings had under them small local kings or princes. In the days of Firdausí's Ardawán, the last Parthian Great King, there seem to have been four such rulers in Párs, one of whom was Pápak, under his immediate over-lord, the Part or Tribal King who ruled at Istakhr. Thus in Parthian times Írán was split into two great divisions, one under the Parthian Great King and organised into eighteen provinces administered by satraps directly responsible to him; the other under semi-independent potentates who held the same position with reference to their regal underlings as he held towards them. According to the Kárnámak there were in all 240 kings, according to Arab authorities there were 90,¹⁹⁸

so the Parthian over-lord was entitled to describe himself as King of kings.

§§ 3-9. Tabarí's account of the rise of the Sásánian dynasty is briefly as follows:—Ardshír was the son of Pápak, king of Khír, and was born at a village named Tírúdih in the same neighbourhood. His grandfather, Sásán, was the superintendent of a Fire-temple in Istakhr. His grandmother, Sásán's wife, was of the royal house of the Bázrangí, and was named Rámbihisht. Pápak succeeded his father, and to him was born Ardshír. The king of Istakhr at that time was of the race of the Bázrangí, and his name was Gúzihr. He had a eunuch called Tírí whom he made commandant of Dárábgird. When Ardshír was seven years old his father Pápak took him to see Gúzihr, who lived at Baidá,^198a

and asked him to allow Tírí to bring up Ardshír, who ultimately was to succeed Tírí at Dárábgird. Gúzihr assented, and Ardshír in course of time succeeded Tírí as had been arranged. For a while he remained free from ambition till it was roused in him by the predictions of astrologers and the announcement to him by an angel¹⁹⁹

in a dream, that he was destined to rule Írán. Thereupon he began to assert himself by attacking and slaying three local kings in Párs, and setting up adherents of his own in their stead. He then wrote to his father Pápak, urging him to rise against Gúzihr at Baidá. Pápak did so, slew Gúzihr, and took his crown. Then Pápak wrote to Ardawán for permission to crown his (Pápak's) son, Shápúr, with the crown of Gúzihr. Ardawán replied that Pápak and Ardshír had acted as rebels. Pápak died, his son Shápúr became king and summoned his brother Ardshír to court. Ardshír refused to come, Shápúr marched against him, but on the way to Dárábgird was killed by the fall of part of one of the buildings of Humái.^199a

On this Ardshír went to Istakhr and, with the assent of his other brothers, became king. However, on the pretext, or in consequence, of a conspiracy on their part against him, he put many of them to death later on. He then reduced Dárábgird, where the people had taken the opportunity of his absence to rebel against him. Next he conquered the king of Kirmán, and annexed that district, of which he made one of his own sons governor. After this he slew Astawadh, a king on the coast of the Persian sea. Next he conquered Mihrak, a king in the district of Ardshír-Khurra, where he founded the town of Gúr, and, while thus engaged, received a hostile letter from Ardawán, which he answered in a similar tone, and returned to Istakhr. After this he made three distinct expeditions from Párs. In the first he subdued Ispahán, Ahwáz, a district on the small Tigris,^199b

and other places. In the second he went to Ahwáz by way of Girih and Kázirún and on to Maishán where he built the town of Karakh-Maishán. In the third he encountered Ardawán at Hurmuzdagán, slew him, and the same day was hailed King of kings. The date of this battle seems to have been September 26th, A.D. 226, but the actual site, according to Professor Nöldeke, is unknown, and he is of the opinion that the three expeditions of Ardshír from Párs, mentioned above, correspond with the three battles that, according to Western writers, took place before Ardawán was disposed of for good and all.^199c

The plain of Rám Hurmuz, south of Shúshtar, has been suggested as the probable scene of the decisive battle.^199d

§ 3. In the Sháhnáma the Sásánian dynasty is connected with the Kaiánian by a double genealogy, one already given under the reign of Bahman,²⁰⁰

the other here. Both are fictitious, Tabarí's account making it clear with regard to the latter that Ardshír was the son, not the grandson on the female side only, of Pápak.^200a

In Tabarí also two genealogies are given, both of which serve to connect the line of Pápak with the Kaiánians. They run as follow:—^200b

Two similar genealogies, tracing back the line of Ardshír to Luhrásp, are given by Mas'údí.^200c

Neither he nor Tabarí credits the legends, found in the Kárnámak and in the Sháhnáma, that Sásán was a shepherd in the employment of Pápak, who adopted him and gave him a daughter in marriage. In Firdausí Pápak is called the son of Rúdyáb, but as the poet makes that name a rhyme-word it is open to suspicion apart from the fact that it does not appear in any of the above-mentioned genealogies. The same reason, probably, led Firdausí (F) to put the visit of the master of the herds (ramah) to Pápak in the winter-season (damah)—a touch not found in the Kárnámak (K). In K Pápak has three dreams. The first of them, in which he sees the sun illuminating the whole world from the head of Sásán, is not in F. In K too the three Fires are Frúbá, representing the priestly class, Gushasp, the warrior-class, and Mihr Barzin, the agricultural.²⁰¹

The sending of Sásán to the bath, doubtlessly a very necessary preliminary, is not in the more primitive K.

§ 4. Ardawán, the Artabanus III. or IV. of Western writers, the last ruler of the Parthian dynasty, was regarded in Persian historical tradition as being himself the chief Tribal or Part King, the primus inter pares, not as the general suzerain, and as having Media Magna as his territory. Hence F assigns him Rai as his capital.^201a

K adds chess to the accomplishments learnt by Ardshír at Court, but F tells us further on, under the reign of Núshírwán, the story of its introduction into Persia.

The present of money that accompanied Pápak's reply to Ardshír is not mentioned in K.

§ 5. The details of the slave-girl's descent by means of a lasso in order to visit Ardshír, and her name, are not in K, which omits too the mention of Pápak's death and Ardawán's appointment of a successor, and makes Ardawán the Part King over Ispahán, Párs, and the neighbouring lands, and Pápak himself the prince of Párs.^201b

The account of the astrologers working out their calculations in the house of the slave-girl, and her over-hearing them, is lacking in K, which gives no reason for her knowledge in the matter. On the other hand the pronouncements of the astrologers are more elaborate and technical in K, where also they state that the servant who escapes from his master in the course of the next three days will supplant him.^201c

§ 6. In K the fugitives arrive at a village, where they are afraid to stop, and are met by two women who tell Ardshír to fear not, and to hasten to the sea where he will be safe. In F the fugitives reach a pool where they want to drink and rest, but are warned by two young men to hasten on. In K Ardawán thrice in the course of his pursuit inquires of those whom he meets as to how far the fugitives are ahead. On the third occasion it is a caravan that he comes upon. F omits the caravan passage.

For the mountain-sheep see Vol. i. p. 374.

§ 7. F is more detailed here. In K the corresponding passage runs thus:—“Then he (Ardawán) sent an equipped army to Párs, under his own son, to take Ardshír prisoner.²⁰²

In the meanwhile Ardshír went his way to the coast. As he proceeded, some of the men of Párs, who were hostile to Ardawán, handed over to him goods and chattels and their own persons, and promised him fealty and obedience.”^202a

The city founded by Ardshír was called Rív-Ardshír.^202b

§ 8. In K we have Banák of Ispahán with six sons for the Tabák of Jahram with seven sons of F. The Persian for “seven” comes in handily as a rhyme-word; hence the change. In K it is stated that Ardshír called the district where he first met Banák “Rámishn-i-Ardshír,” i.e. “Joy of Ardshír,” and founded a city there of the same name and also known as “Rám Ardshír,” i.e. “Happy Ardshír.”^202c

It was natural that he should, or be thought to, have founded a Fire-temple there, and this may be the origin of F's Rám in that connexion.

The account of Ardshír's battle with Bahman, son of Ardawán, is not in K.

§ 9. Firdausí's description of this battle is in his usual style. The corresponding passage in K may be read to indicate three battles or campaigns.^202d

It runs as follows:—“Then he (Ardshír) began war with Ardawán, slaughtered his whole army, and took from him his goods and chattels, houses, and property. Then he settled in Istakhr, and assembled from Kirmán, Makrán, Ispahán, and the different regions of Párs, a very great host. Then he began another war with Ardawán. For four months there were daily much fighting and slaughter. Ardawán collected from various regions—Rai, Damáwand, Dílamán,^202e

and Patash-wárgar ^202f—

armies and horses; but as the Majesty of the Kaiánians had descended on Ardshír he was successful, killed Ardawán, and all his possessions came into Ardshír's hands. He took Ardawán's daughter to wife and went back to Pars.”^202g

§§ 10, 11. Here we have the account of an “unfortunate incident,” and shall meet, later on, with others that befell Ardshír after his triumph over Ardawán. He still had to fight hard to make good the title of “King of kings” conferred on him by his troops on the field of Hurmuzdagán.^202h

Naturally this would be so. A dynasty that had endured for centuries could not fail to have many adherents and dependants; Ardawán had left sons; Chosroes, the king of Armenia, was either his brother or at all events had been set on the throne by him; the Part Kings too had everything to lose by Ardshír's success, for it was manifest that he had no intention of leaving them in the semi-independent position that they had enjoyed under Parthian suzerainty; his view with regard to them was, as we have seen already, that “stone dead hath no fellow.”²⁰³

Ardshír followed up his success over Ardawán by striking at the heart of that king's power which, according to Íránian tradition, lay in Media, and here is recorded for us in the account of his expedition against the Kurds, by whom the people of Media are meant, for in K the name of the Kurd king is Mádík, which simply means “the Mede.”^203a

These, so far as Media Magna was concerned, Ardshír seems to have conquered, but Tabarí's statement that he subdued Ázarbáiján and Armenia appears to be an exaggeration. The case of Ázarbáijan is doubtful, but Armenia, whither some of the Arsacid princes had fled for refuge, succeeded with the help of Rome in maintaining its independence.^203b

§§ 12-16. To the exegesis of this strange story, as Firdausí calls it, three great authorities—Mohl, Darmesteter, and Nöldeke— have contributed. The two latter see reason to connect it with other more ancient Indo-European myths of dragons, such as Indra with Vritra, Apollo with the Python, &c., and Darmesteter quotes an interesting Scandinavian parallel which he considers more primitive and unaffected by industrialism:—“Le comte Herraudr a donné à sa fille, la belle Thora, un serpent qu'il a trouvé dans un œuf de vautour. Le serpent plaît à Thora qui lui fait un lit d'or dans un coffret. Le serpent grandit, l'or grandit avec lui, le coffre devient trop étroit pour lui, et même la maison de la jeune fille qu'il enveloppe de son corps. Il était méchant et malicieux: nul n'osait l'approcher que l'homme qui lui apportait chaque jour sa nourriture, consistant en un bœuf entier. Le comte promet sa fille et l'or à qui tuera le dragon. Ragnar, âgé de quinze ans, se fait un vêtement garni de poix (pour se garder du poison du serpent), surprend le monstre et le tue de la pointe de son épieu qu'il lui laisse dans la gueule. Il se retire sans dire son nom et plus tard se fait reconnaître publiquement au manche de son épieu: il reçoit Thora en mariage.”^203c

Still more to the point are Mohl's explanation and illustration, which are as follow:—“Je suis disposé à croire que ce conte est un vague souvenir de l'introduction du ver à soie en Perse et de la prospérité que cette nouvelle industrie devait avoir répandue. On me permettra peut-être de citer à l'appui de cette supposition un conte analogue et presque aussi étrange, qui date de nos jours. Je me rappelle avoir vu, il y a une trentaine d'années, au ministère du commerce, un rapport du préfet d'un des départements de la Bretagne au sujet de la détresse que répandait dans la campagne l'introduction du fil de lin produit par les machines, et de la difficulté que les fileuses à la main trouvaient à lutter contre cette concurrence. Le préfet raconte, à cette occasion, que ces pauvres femmes avaient fini par composer une légende, selon laquelle il y avait une fée, appelé Machine, qui avait sept doigts d'acier et pouvait ainsi filer plus et plus vite qu'elles ne pouvaient le faire avec leurs cinq doigts humains.”²⁰⁴

The full process of silk manufacture from the worm (Bombyx mori) to the finished fabric was known in China from time immemorial, and the secret was guarded very carefully. Long before the Christian era the raw silk had begun to be imported into Europe, and a famous manufactory for weaving it was established in the island of Cos in the Ægean Sea. The secret of the method of the production of the raw material itself was kept till much later times, sufficiently, at all events, for the maintenance of the Chinese monopoly, though Aristotle in his History of Animals, Bk. V., ch. xvii., sec. 6, ed. Schneider, speaks of a certain great worm with horns, as it were, which produces bom-bycina or cocoons which the women use in weaving. Aristotle's knowledge probably came to him as one of the results of Alexander's expedition to the East. The silk-worm itself, of which the secret had spread during the fourth century A.D. through India to Írán and the West, was brought for the first time into Europe by two Persian monks, at the special request of the Emperor Justinian, in A.D. 550. They smuggled the eggs from China in the hollow of a bamboo, and thus founded the Western silk industry. Justinian's object was to break the monopoly of the silk-trade then, by land and sea alike, in Persian hands.^204a

Two reasons may be suggested why the scene of our story was laid on the shores of the Persian sea. One is that a Part King of that region, e.g. of Hurmuz (Ormus), may have grown rapidly rich in the latter days of the Parthian dynasty by means of the silk or cotton trade of the Persian Gulf, and suffered for his prosperity at the hands of Ardshír Pápakán. The other is to be found in the popular etymology of the word Kirmán—a region more famous for its date (khurmá) than for its silk. In Persian, however, it so happens that “kirm” means “worm,” and in fact is the same word. Kirmán was supposed to mean “The Land of the Worm,” and thus to be a suitable scene for some ancient Dragon-myth,²⁰⁵

or a story may have been invented to account for the name. Both in K and F, it should be noted, Ardshír, after killing the Worm, proceeds to conquer Kirmán, so that we have the romantic and historic accounts of the same event put side by side, the former given at large and the latter very shortly. In Tabarí too we have the historic version and two brief rationalised versions of the romantic side of the story. He informs us that Ardshír subdued Kirmán, slew its king Balásh (Vologeses, an Arsacid), and made his own son ruler. This is represented as taking place before the war with Ardawán. Then (here begins one of the romantic versions) he went against a king named Astawadh, who lived on the coast of the Persian sea, and to whom divine honours were paid, killed him, cut him in two with his sword, slew also his retinue, and brought out from his treasure-house, and carried off, much treasure that was stored there.^205a

Astawadh, Professor Nöldeke notes, is a corruption by misreading of the Pahlaví name,^205b

which becomes Haftwád in the Sháhnáma. According to the other account there was in Alár, a village in the province of Kujárán, which belonged to the coast-land of Ardshír-Khurra (Gúr), a queen who enjoyed divine honours and possessed great wealth and many soldiers. Ardshír, toward the end of his reign, killed the queen and captured much gold and treasure which she had.^205c

In these accounts divine honours are transferred, in the first, from the dragon to Haftwád and, in the second, to his daughter.

§ 12. This passage is not found elsewhere, but there is no reason to assume that the poet invented, though very likely he embellished, it. From what we can gather of Firdausí's literary methods, he would not have introduced such a string of incidents without authority for so doing. When “gravelled for lack of matter,” he does not “take occasion to” invent, but passes on as we see in the case of the present dynasty, where he had an unequalled opportunity for the exercise of his imagination had he been disposed to avail himself of it. The absence of the passage in the Kárnámak and in the Arabic may be accounted for easily. In the former, Haftwád (Haftánbúkht) is introduced quite abruptly,^205d

and the story of his rise to power was omitted not because it was well known or unknown, but because it was foreign to the purpose in hand, which was to show by what steps Ardshír rose to supreme power, effected the unification of Írán, and founded a new dynasty. From this point of view the destruction of Haftwád and the Worm was of importance, but not their genesis. In the latter we have a much more drastic system of lopping in the interests, apparently, of rationalism. In the second of Tabarí's versions we get a hint that it was the one which, in its unrationalised state, Firdausí followed. The queen there is the daughter here.

The name of Ardshír's opponent in K—Haftánbúkht, which does not scan—becomes Haftwád in F, as it may be so read in the Pahlaví if the central letters are omitted. Haftánbúkht, according to Professor Nöldeke, means “The Seven have redeemed” with reference to the seven planets which, as creations of Áhriman²⁰⁶

might be expected, from the orthodox Zoroastrian point of view, to watch over the fortunes of Haftánbúkht and the Worm. In Professor Darmesteter's opinion, however, Fir-dausí's etymology is correct, though based on a misapprehension. The word “wád” was due to a misreading of the Pahlaví, but the word “búkht” does mean “son,” and the seven sons are the sevenfold coils, or the seven heads, of the dragon. Both agree that in the original form of the story Haftánbúkht was the dragon.^206a

According to K, Haftánbúkht's seat was at Gulár in Kujárán. In Tabarí, Haftánbúkht becomes Astawadh, and Gulár, in the version which substitutes a queen for a king, becomes Alár.^206b

The situation of Kujárán is unknown.

In K the food of the dragon is the blood of sheep and bullocks,^206c

not rice, milk, and honey, as in F.

§ 13. In K the army of Haftánbúkht is represented as the aggressor. The forces of Ardshír, who is not present, are attacked after his return from his victory over the Kurds. This preliminary engagement is omitted by F. Haftwád's son crossed over from Arabia to help his father.^206d

The water behind Ardshír was probably the sea, but the Persian word is a vague one.

§ 14. In K the older form Mithrak is preserved. According to Tabarí, who places Ardshír's war with him before the defeat of Ardawán, he lived in a district of Ardshír-Khurra.”^206e

§ 15. In K Ardshír, after his defeat by Haftánbúkht, reaches the shore of the sea quite alone and almost abandoned by the divine Grace, but then it stood in front of him and led him out of danger to the village where the two brothers, named Burjak and Burjátur, dwelt.²⁰⁷

In K Ardshír gets admitted into the castle with the two young men of the village only. In F he takes seven men with him. Seven is a favourite number in Persian story, and if, as we have seen above, one of the legends told of Cyrus the Great could be transferred to Ardshír, there seems no reason why a fragment of the legend of the Seven, who made the famous expedition against the stronghold of the mage Gaumata—the false Smerdis—in the days of Darius Hystaspis, should not be transferred here in like manner.^207a

In K Ardshír appoints, for some reason not clear to us, the 27th day of the month as the one for decisive action, and Haftánbúkht appears to have perished in the fight, not afterwards by formal execution as in F.^207b

Now be the monarch of the world our theme
As one in feast and fight and lore supreme—
The great Mahmúd; much prosperous rede hath he
And doth uphold the fame of majesty,
A king, Abú'l Kásim! most sage and wise
Beyond e'en wisdom in his policies.
Glad be his heart for evermore and free
From toil and trouble. King of kings is he
Both of Írán and of Zábulistán,
And from Kannúj^207c

up to Kábulistán.
On him, upon the troops of his command,
On his allies, his kindred, and his land,
On that world-lord and chief, Nasr the amír,
A source of joyance to time's circling sphere,
Be praise, while o'er the moon the army's head
Ascendeth by Abú'l Muzaffar led;
By fortune and by name victorious he,
Whose arrows in their flight out-top the tree.
Oh! may the Sháh live scathless evermore,
And be his seat upon his treasury's store,
And may his general be happy too,
In heart illumed, in treasure well to do.
Thus while revolving heaven maintain its place
Ne'er may its love be severed from this race,
But be it ever a victorious one,
And crowned from sire to sire and son to son.
Upon this day, the fourteenth of Shawwál,
May benediction on our sovereign fall

For ever may this family, endued
With worth, with wisdom, and with rectitude,
Continue. Lasting foothold here hath none,
But his good name will last when he is gone.
Where now are Farídún, Zahhák, Jamshíd,
The chiefs of Arab and of Persian breed?
Where are the great of the Sásánians,
Those of Bahrám's race, and the Ashkánians?
Zahhák the Sháh was most reviled, for he
Was all injustice and impurity,
While glorious Farídún approval won;
He died, and his renown still liveth on.
In this world fame is our memorial—
A better thing than gems imperial!
The man unjust, whose joyance was in throne
And treasure, never hath made praise his own;
His reputation in the world is naught,
And none is fain to pleasure him in aught.
Because of our foe-quelling king's decree
May he still throne it in felicity.
Forth from their homes the people plain-ward hied,
With praise transcending heaven, and thus they cried:—
“Aye may he live, the crowned head of our state,
And may time's course to him prove fortunate;
Here may he look on naught save what doth please,
His name be graven on the palaces,
And may our benisons withal embrace
His kin, host, land, his royal form, and face.”

the Great
Because he kept the wolf's claws from the sheep.
He governed in Shíráz and Ispahán,
Which scholars call the “Marches of the princes.”
He set up in Istakhr Pápak²¹¹

as ruler,
Whose thumb-stall used to make the monsters^211a

yell.
How all these princes perished, root and branch,
Their time-worn chronicle narrateth not.
Naught have I heard of them except the name,
And in the Book of Kings seen but the same.

Bright as Sol, Mars, and Venus; all blazed up
Before Sásán, their fuel aloe-wood.
Pápak awoke, his soul and heart possessed
By care. Those skilled in dreams and in that lore
Puissant, magnates, sages, counsellors,
Assembled in the palace of Pápak,
And as he set forth what had chanced, and told
His dreams to them at large, the adviser mused,
The interpreter gave ear, and in the end
Said: “O exalted king! this must be scanned,

Pápak rejoiced on hearing,

Rewarded each according to his rank,
Then bade his master-shepherd to forsake
The flock and come. It was a winter's day.
Wrapped in his cloak, its wool was thick with snow,
His heart with fears, he came in haste. Pápak
Dismissed all strangers, slave and counsellor
Went, and he graciously received Sásán,
Assigning him a seat beside his lord,
And asked him of his quality and birth.
The herd, through terror of him, answered not,
But said at last: “O prince! if thou wilt give
A promise to respect thy shepherd's life
I will inform thee of my quality
When thou shalt grasp my hand and pledge thyself
To harm me not in public or in private.”
Pápak, on hearing this, loosed his own tongue,
Invoked the Giver of all good, and said:—
“I will not harm but make thee glad and honoured,”
Then spake the youth: “I am, O paladin!
Son of Sásán and sprung from Sháh Ardshír,
Whom chroniclers call by the name Bahman,
The great son of the brave Asfandiyár,
Who was Gushtásp's memorial.”

Pápak

Wept from those shrewd eyes that had seen the dream,
Then brought the raiment of a paladin,
And steed with royal trappings, saying thus:—
“Go to the bath what while they fetch fresh raiment.”
He raised Sásán o'er that chief shepherdship,
Prepared for him a noble residence,
And, having lodged him there, provided slaves,
Both boys and girls, to wait on him, bestowed
Addition by all means, set him past need
Of wealth, then gave the Crown on his own brows—
A daughter well beloved—to him as spouse.

When nine months had elapsed the beauteous dame
Brought forth an infant like the radiant sun,
The image of illustrious Ardshír,
A growing, glorious, heart-delighting child.

They taught him all accomplishment, wherein
He bettered e'en the promise of his birth.
He was so wise and goodly that the sky,
Thou wouldst have said, was luminous through him.
News of the youth's intelligence and knowledge
Reached Ardawán: “He is a savage Lion
In fight,” it ran, “and like Náhíd in feast.”
The king wrote to that famous paladin,
Pápak, and said: “O counsellor of mine,
Wise, trusty, eloquent, and good! thy son,
Ardshír, is, I have heard, a cavalier
Of eloquence and heed. On reading this
Be pleased to send him unto us forthwith.
I will supply his every want, advance him
Among the chiefs and, when he is associate
With mine own sons, deny him not my kinship.”
Pápak, on reading this, wept tears of blood;
He bade a writer, and that rising youth,
Ardshír, attend, and said: “Peruse this letter
Of Ardawán's and let thy clear mind scan it;
Behold, I write an answer to the king,
And send it by some friend to this effect:—
‘Lo! I have sent to thee a gallant youth,
One much approved, who is my heart and eyes,
And whom I have advised. When he shall come
To thy high court treat him right royally,
And suffer not the blast to blow upon him.’”
Then swift as wind he oped the treasury-doors,
And gratified the youth with various gifts
Of golden harness, swords, and iron maces;
There was not aught that he refused the boy.
The treasurer brought forth brocade, dínárs,
Steeds, slaves, with stuffs of Chín and cloth of gold,
Such as kings wear, and gave them to the youth
What time he went to wait on Ardawán.
The favoured youth, departing from his grandsire,
Went to the court of Ardawán at Rai,
Who, hearing of his coming, graciously
Received him, spake at large about Pápak,

One day

It happened that the escort of the king,
And his own sons, were scattered in the chase.
Ardshír himself attended Ardawán,
Who found that gallant youth acceptable.
Now Ardawán had four sons of his own,
Each king-like. Onager had come in sight,
And that great company was all astir.
They urged their wind-foot steeds and mixed the dust
With sweat. Ardshír pressed on in front and, nearing
The quarry, placed an arrow on his bow,
And struck an onager upon the haunch.
The arrow-point and feather went right through.
Anon came Ardawán who, when he saw
The strength of that young archer, cried: “May he
That shot possess a soul to match his hand.”
Ardshír replied: “I shot the onager.”
A son said: “It was I that brought it down,
And I am looking out for one to match it.”
Ardshír retorted: “Well the plain is broad,
And there are onagers and arrows too.
By that same token slay another such:
It is a sin for noble men to lie.”
Now Ardawán was angry with Ardshír
Thereat and roared at him: “Mine is the blame,
Because this bringing up is all mine own.
Why should I have thee in my company,
Both in the banquet and the hunting-field,
In order that thou mayst surpass my sons,
And show off thine address and excellence?
Begone. See to mine Arab steeds and choose

Ardshír in tears

Went to be keeper of the Arab steeds,
And in his wretchedness and discontent
Wrote to his grandsire thus: “In what a way
Hath Ardawán dealt with us! Anguish take
His body, care his soul.”

He told the matter,

And why king Ardawán was wroth with him.
Pápak was troubled when the letter came,
But held his peace, and from his treasury
Dispatched ten thousand to his son in gold
By camel and by cavalier, commanded
A scribe to come, and wrote: “O foolish boy!
When thou wast hunting game with Ardawán
Why didst thou pass his sons although thou art
His servant, not his kin? He wronged thee not
In malice; 'twas thine own insensate deed.
Now strive to make him pleased and satisfied,
And do his will in all. I have dispatched thee
Gold and this letter of advice withal.
When thou hast spent the money ask for more
Until the times shall change.”

The dromedary

Sped with the ancient veteran to Ardshír,
Who when he read the letter was content,
And plotted and dissembled, chose a lodging
Near to his steeds, though one not worthy of him,
Provided it with carpets, food, and raiment,
And spent his days and nights in revelry,
Companioning with wine and minstrelsy.²¹⁷

Now Ardawán possessed a lofty palace,
Wherein there dwelt a favourite slave of his.
She was a Moon-face hight Gulnár^217a—

a picture
All jewelry and colour and perfume.
She ministered to Ardawán and kept
His treasury. He loved her more than life,
And joyed and smiled to look on her.^217b

One day,

she saw Ardshír;
His lips were smiling, and he won her heart.
She waited till the eve or rather night,
Then tied a lasso to the battlements
With many a knot. She proved it with her hand,^217d

And then, invoking Him who giveth good,
Descended boldly. When in all her gems,
And savouring musk and other spicery,
She reached Ardshír she raised his head, which lay
Upon the pillow of brocade, and clasped him,
When he was wakened, tightly to her breast.
The young man marked that lovely one, her face,
Her hair, and scented bravery, and said:—
“Whence hast thou sprung to grace my troubled heart?”
“A slave am I and love thee, heart and soul,”
She answered. “I am Ardawán's beloved,
His treasurer, his darling, and delight,
But, if thou wilt accept me, thy slave now
To live but in thy sight and visit thee,
Whene'er thou wilt, and brighten thy dark days.”
A while passed thus and then mishap befell
Ardshír's inspirer. Veteran, shrewd Pápak
Died and resigned this ancient home to others.
When news reached Ardawán he sorrowed much;
His soul grew dark. The chiefs all asked for Párs,
But he bestowed it on his eldest son,²¹⁸

Bade bring the drums and march forth to the waste.
As for Ardshír the world gloomed to his heart
For his protector's sake, old, shrewd Pápak.
He loathed his service under Ardawán,
And, when those tidings came, formed new designs,
For he was rash through grief and fain to flee.
Anon king Ardawán brought to his court
Some shrewd men of the readers of the stars
To learn his future, to direct his course,
And find whom fortune would inspire thereafter.

The damsel,

When all was black as pitch, went to Ardshír.
That youth was troubled like the sea and could not
Rest for one day because of Ardawán.
She told him what those shrewd men had apprised
The famous king, whereat Ardshír grew calm
And silent yet his heart was moved thereat.
He thought of flight and asked: “If I quit Rai
And seek Írán, the country of the brave,
Consider whether thou wilt go with me,
Or tarry with the king. If thou wilt go
Thou shalt be great, the Crown of all the realm.”
She said with many a sigh and bitter tears:—
“Thy slave am I, and death alone shall part us.”
Ardshír replied: “We must escape to-morrow,”
And she went back resolved to risk her all.
As soon as earth was gilded by the sun,
And dark night had been taken in the noose,
She oped the treasury and made her choice
Among the royal gems, took what dínárs
She needed, went back to her home, and there

Now Ardawán

Was never happy either day or night
Without the fair Gulnár and would not quit
His couch unless in her auspicious presence.
When it was time to rise and have the throne
Draped with brocade, and still the damsel came not,
He was both angry and aggrieved at her.
The guards were posted at the gate without,
Throne, crown, and palace were in readiness
While from the court-gate rose the chamberlain,
Approached the famous king, and said: “There wait
The chief men of the kingdom at the gate.”

The monarch asked the slaves: “Why doth Gulnár
Neglect the rule and come not to my pillow?
Is she offended with me?”

Thereupon

The chief scribe entered, saying: “Yesternight
Ardshír went off incontinent and took
A grey steed and a black steed from the stables—
The riding horses of the illustrious king—
Companioned by thy well-loved treasuress.”
The warrior-king much moved bestrode his bay,
Escorted by a host of gallant horsemen:
Thou wouldst have said: “He gooth over fire.”
Upon the road he saw a place of note
With many men and cattle, and inquired:—

Ardawán

Said to his minister: “Why ever went
The mountain-sheep with them?”

He made reply:—

“It is his Grace—the wings that will exalt him
To kingship through the favour of the stars.
If this sheep followeth him our task is lengthened.”
There Ardawán dismounted, ate, and rested,
Then hurried on. They followed up Ardshír,
And Ardawán in person led the way
With his wazír. Swift as a blast the youth
Rode with the damsel with no moment's pause,
But he who hath high heaven for his ally
Will take no harm from any enemy.
Ardshír at length, exhausted by the ride,
Beheld a pool of water from the height,
And as he rode said to Gulnár: “Since we
Have wedded toil, dismount we by this pool,
For steed and rider are alike fordone.
Repose we here and drink and start refreshed.”
Now when the twain had drawn anigh the water
Their visages as yellow as the sun,
And when Ardshír was fain to light him down,
He saw beside the watering-place two youths,
Who called out quickly: “There is need to ply
The reins and stirrup still for thou hast 'scaped
Thus far the breath and gullet of the Dragon,
And to drink water now will cost thee dear,
Yea even thy life.”

Ardshír, on hearing this,

Said to Gulnár: “Attend to what they say.”
He pressed his stirrups, gave his steed the reins,
And laid his glittering spear upon his shoulder.
Behind them Ardawán like rushing wind
Continued the pursuit with soul all gloom.
When half the day had passed, and while the
orb—
The lustre of the world—still paced the sky,
He saw a city—one in goodly case—
Whence many flocked to meet him, and he asked
The archimages: “When passed two on horse-back?”
Their leader said: “O prosperous, prudent king!
Just as the sun was growing pale, and night
Spread out the cloak of lapis-lazuli,

Now Ardawán,

On hearing this, knew that it was too late,
And so alighting at that city prayed
To God—the Giver of all good—for aid.

At dawn the monarch bade the host return,
And pale as reeds re-entered Rai by night.
He wrote a letter to his son and said:—
Deceit hath taken action, and Ardshír
Hath left me quicker than the shaft the bow,
And gone to Párs. Seek for him privily,
But say no word to any.”

For his part

Ardshír approached the water and thus prayed:—
“O Thou who art our Helper! Thou hast saved
Me from my foeman: never may he prosper.”
Now when he had reposed he called a boatman,
And spake much of the past. The shrewd, old sailor
Observed Ardshír's high stature, mien, and breast,
Knew: “He can be but of the Kaian stock,”
Rejoicing in his Grace and Majesty,
Then hasting to the water sent his boats
To every part. At news of famed Ardshír
A host assembled by the water-side,
While in Istakhr the kindred of Pápak
All gloried at those tidings of the Sháh,
While those too of Dárá, who dwelt resigned
About the realm, exulted and grew young
Of heart though old, while troop on troop the folk
Flocked to the youth from mountain and from sea,

wrought
Upon the world, slew all mine ancestors,
And laid his hand on it unrighteously.
Now I am one sprung from Asfandiyár,
Yet Ardawán is king! We may not speak
Or think of this as just. If ye will help me
I will not yield the crown and lofty throne
To any. What have ye to say hereto?
Give me a fair reply.”

Then all the assembly,

Both warriors and counsellors, stood up,
And, speaking from their hearts, made answer thus:—
“All we that are the kindred of Pápak
Rejoice to see thy face, and we that are
Descendants of Sásán will gird ourselves
For vengeance. We are thine both soul and body,
Our joys and griefs, our less and more, are thine.
Thy quality from father and from mother
Surpasseth ours, the sovereignty and sway
Are thine of right, and we at thy command
Will turn the hills to plains, and with our swords
Make streams run blood.”

Ardshír's head, when he heard

That answer, rose o'er Mercury and Venus;
He blessed the chiefs and mused upon revenge.
He founded by the water-side a city
To be his seat of power. An archimage
Said: “Well-starred Sháh who winneth over hearts!
Thou fram'st anew the head of sovereignty,
But must clear Párs of Weeds and afterward
Make war on Ardawán, whilst thou and fortune
Are young, because in treasure he surpasseth
The other Tribal Kings; 'twill tax thy strength
To fight with him, but when thou hast cast down
His throne none else will hold his own with thee.”
Whenas the illustrious Ardshír heard this
The words approved themselves and pleased his heart,
And when the sun rose from the mountain-tops
He set forth from the water toward Istakhr.
News reached Bahman, the son of Ardawán,
And filled him, heart and soul, with grief and gloom.
He tarried not upon the throne of might,
But gathered troops and weapons for the fight.