eves his own."

FIRST TALE

AN INDIAN JATAKA

BY ACHMED ABDULLAH

_This is the tale which Jehan Tugluk Khan, a wise man in
Tartary, and milk brother to Ghengiz Khan, Emperor of the East
and the North, and Captain General of the Golden Horde,
whispered to the Foolish Virgin who came to him, bringing the
purple, spiked flower of the Kadam-tree as an offering, and
begging him for a love potion with which to hold Haydar Khan, a
young, red-faced warrior from the west who had ridden into camp,
a song on his lips, a woman's breast scarf tied to his tufted
bamboo lance, a necklace of his slain foes' skulls strung about
his massive chest, and sitting astride a white stallion whose
mane was dyed crimson in sign of strife and whose dainty,
dancing feet rang on the rose-red marble pavement of the
emperor's courtyard like crystal bells in the wind of spring._

_This is a tale of passion, and, by the same token, a tale of
wisdom. For, in the yellow, placid lands east of the Urals and
west of harsh, sneering Pekin, it is babbled by the toothless
old women who know life, that wisdom and desire are twin sisters
rocked in the same cradle: one speaks while the other sings.
They say that it is the wisdom of passion which makes eternal
the instinct of love._

_This is the tale of Vasantasena, the slave who was free in her
own heart, and of Madusadan, a captain of horse, who plucked the
white rose without fearing the thorns._

_This, finally, is the tale of Vikramavati, King of Hindustan in
the days of the Golden Age, when Surya, the Sun, warmed the
fields without scorching; when Vanyu, the Wind, filled the air
with the pollen of the many flowers without stripping the trees
bare of leaves; when Varuna, Regent of Water, sang through the
land without destroying the dykes or drowning the lowing cattle
and the little naked children who played at the river's bank;
when Prithwi, the Earth, sustained all and starved none; when
Chandra, the Moon, was as bright and ripening as his elder
brother, the Sun._

_LET ALL THE WISE CHILDREN LISTEN TO MY JATAKA!_

Vasantasena was the girl's name, and she came to young King
Vikramavati's court on the tenth day of the dark half of the month
Bhadra. She came as befitted a slave captured in war, with her
henna-stained feet bound together by a thin, golden chain, her wh