Note 8 — Chapter CI

And one day the prince went out of the town to hunt, accompanied by his soldiers, and by those five companions, and as he was going out, a certain famous female mendicant named Kátyáyaní, bold from the maturity of her age, who had just returned from a distant foreign country, saw him, and said to herself, when she beheld his superhuman beauty, “Is this the Moon without Rohiṇí or the god of Love without Rati?” But when she asked his attendants, and found out that it was the prince, she was astonished, and praised the marvellousness of the creation of the Disposer.8 Then she cried out to the prince from a distance with a shrill and far reaching voice, “Be victorious, O prince,” and so saying she bowed before him. But at that moment the mind of the prince was wholly occupied by a conversation which he had begun with his ministers, and he went on without hearing the female ascetic. But she was angry, and called out to him in such a loud voice that he could not help hearing her, “Ho! prince! why do you not listen to the blessing of such a one as I am? What king or prince is there on the earth that does not honour me?9 But if your youth and other advantages render you so proud now, it is certain that, if you obtain for a wife that ornament of the world, the maiden Mandáravatí, the daughter of the king of Hansadvípa, you will be too much puffed up with arrogance to listen to the speech of Śiva,10 the great Indra, and other gods, much less to the words of wretched men.”