tions which he received en route. At the Mogul capital he speedily made himself at home. A natural linguist he quickly acquired such proficiency in Hindustani that it is recorded of him that by his generous use of appropriate native expletives he reduced to silence within an hour a native virago who was employed by Roe as washerwoman, and who had given much trouble to the ambassador's household by her extreme volubility.
A more questionable and dangerous use of his knowledge of the native language was made one evening at the time of Mohammedan prayer, when in response to the muezzin's cry, "There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his Prophet," he shouted in Hindustani that the assertion was a lie, that the true Prophet was Jesus. It says much for the toleration which prevailed at the Mogul capital that the insult was overlooked as the indiscretion of the half-witted "English fakir." Coryat, however, was no fool, as he showed when, having sought and obtained an audience of Jehangir, he launched at him a highly-flattering eulogy in the Persian tongue.
In the flowery periods for which that language is famous, he recalled the episode of the Queen of Sheba and Solomon, and assured him that as the famous Queen had found Solomon greatly to surpass the expectation she had formed of him, so he had discovered in the dazzling glory of the Great Mogul a picture far beyond the range of his utmost imaginings. Jehangir seems to have been pleased with this barefaced flattery and possibly also amused by the spectacle of the quaint Englishman fluently declaiming the flowery Persian sentences. At the close he said some kindly words to Coryat and dismissed him with a gift of a hundred rupees.
