'Rise up,' said the prince to him, 'I do not impute the loss of my princess to thee, but to my own folly. But do not lose time, fetch me a dervish's robe, and take care you do not give the least hint that it is for me.'
Not far from this palace there stood a convent of dervishes, the sheik or superior of which was the palace-keeper's particular friend. He went to this sheik, and telling him that it was for an officer at court, a man to whom he had been much obliged and wished to favour by giving him an opportunity to withdraw from the sultan's rage, he easily got a complete dervish's suit of clothes, and carried it to Prince Firouz Schah. The prince immediately pulled off his own clothes, and put them on; and being so disguised, and provided with a box of jewels, which he had brought as a present to the princess, he left the palace in the evening, uncertain which way to go, but resolved not to return till he had found out his princess, and brought her back again.
But to return to the Indian: he managed his enchanted horse so well that day, that he arrived early in the evening at a wood near the capital of the kingdom of Cashmire. Being hungry, and inferring that the princess was hungry also, he alighted in an open part of the wood, and left the princess on a grassy spot, by a rivulet of clear fresh water.
During the Indian's absence, the Princess of Bengal, who knew that she was in the power of a base deceiver, whose violence she dreaded, thought of getting away from him, and seeking a sanctuary. But as she had eaten scarcely anything on her arrival at the palace in the morning, she was so faint that she was forced to abandon her plan, and to stay where she was, without any other resource than her courage, and a firm resolution to suffer death rather than be unfaithful to the Prince of Persia. When the Indian returned, she did not wait to be asked twice, but ate with him, and recovered herself enough to reply with courage to the insolent language he began to use to her when they had done. After a great many threats, as she saw that the Indian was preparing to use violence, she rose up to make resistance, and, by her cries and shrieks, drew about them a company of horsemen, who
