ed by us, only to converse with thee. Now
he maintained thy daughter to be more beautiful than I am. Thereupon I
vowed vengeance. But I agreed to leave her unmolested, if thou didst
give her to him for a wife. So to preserve her from my vengeance, he
asked her of thee in marriage. Now, then, since thou hast rejected his
suit, despising him hastily for his outward form, and since my own
beauty has been slighted by his comparison, ye two shall be punished,
she for her beauty, and thou for thy insolence, and through the means of
that very beauty, on account of which my father and I have become
contemptible. See, O thou who despisest a suitor, whether thou canst
easily procure another. This shall be the condition of thy daughter's
marriage. Whatever suitor shall lay claim to her, thou shalt send up to
this terrace alone at flight. And if he claims, and does not come, we
will swallow thy city whole, houses and all. Then those two vultures
disappeared. And not long afterwards, hearing that my daughter was to be
given in marriage, suitors arrived like swarms of bees from every
quarter of the world, attracted by her fame. For she is called
Yashowati, because the fame of her fills the world. Then all those
suitors followed one another, like the days of the year in which they
went, up upon the terrace of the city wall: and like those days, not one
of them all has ever returned, but they have vanished utterly, none
knows how, or where. And when all the distant suitors were exhausted,
and all the neighbouring kings, then, in my ardent desire to get her
married, no matter how, to no matter whom, I offered her to the men of
my own city, showing her to them from the palace windows. And every man
that saw her ran to win her; and one by one, the men of the city
followed after her former suitors, till they grew few in the city.
Thereupon the women banded together, and took their husbands and their
sons and everything in the shape of a man, and hid them: and now as thou
seest, there is not a man to be seen or found, in the whole city. But
every stranger that comes to the city, they catch, and bring him
straight to me, as they have done in thy case also. And the mere sight
of my daughter always makes him not only willing, but, as thou art, even
eager, to marry her at any cost. And yet they have all utterly vanished,
like stones, dropped, one after another, into a well without a floor.
And there is my daughter, maiden and unmarried still. And