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loss, O my sons! Where was the eye of your father this day, that it might have seen you?’ Then one of the crew questioned her, saying, ‘Whose wife art thou?’ And she answered, ‘I am the wife of such an one the merchant. I was on my way to him, and there hath befallen me this calamity.’ When the merchant heard her speech, he knew her and rising to his feet, rent his clothes and buffeted his head and said to his wife, ‘By Allah, I have destroyed my children with mine own hand! This is the end of whoso looketh not to the issues of affairs.’ Then he fell a-wailing and weeping over them, he and his wife, and he said, ‘By Allah, I shall have no ease of my life, till I light upon news of them!’ And he betook himself to going round about the sea, in quest of them, but found them not.
Meanwhile, the wind carried the two children [out to sea and thence driving them] towards the land, cast them up on the sea-shore. As for one of them, a company of the guards of the king of those parts found him and carried him to their master, who marvelled at him with an exceeding wonderment and adopted him to his son, giving out to the folk that he was his [very] son, whom he had hidden,[1] of his love for him. So the folk rejoiced in him with an exceeding joy, for the king’s sake, and the latter appointed him his heir-apparent and the inheritor of his kingdom. On this wise, a number of years passed, till the king died and they crowned the
- ↑ It is a common practice with Eastern nations to keep a child (especially a son and one of unusual beauty) concealed until a certain age, for fear of the evil eye. See my “Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night,” Vol. III. p. 234; Vol. IX. p. 67, etc., etc.
