When a watch of the night was past, the king laid the amulet upon his wife’s breast, and she thus began:  “By a former husband I had a son, and when my father gave me to this king, I was ashamed to say I had a tall son.  When my yearning passed all bounds, I brought him here by an artifice.  One day that the king was gone to the chase, I called him into the house, when, after the way of mothers, I took him in my arms and kissed him.  This reached the king’s ears, and he unwittingly gave it another construction, and cut off the head of that innocent boy, and withdrew from me his own heart.  Alike is my son lost to me and the king angry.”  When the king heard these words he kissed her and exclaimed:  “O my life, what an error is this thou hast committed?  Thou hast brought calumny upon thyself, and hast given such a son to the winds, and hast made me ashamed!” Straightway he called the chamberlain and said:  “That boy whom thou hast killed is the son of my beloved and the darling of my beauty!  Where is his grave, that we may make there a guest-house?” The chamberlain said:  “That youth is yet alive.  When the king commanded his death I was about to kill him, but he said:  ’That queen is my mother; through modesty before the king she revealed not the secret that she had a tall son.  Kill me not; it may be that some day the truth will become known, and repentance profits not, and regret is useless.’” The king commanded them to bring the youth, so they brought him straightway.  And when the mother saw the face of her son, she thanked God and praised the Most High, and became one of the Muslims, and from the sect of unbelievers came into the faith of Islam.  And the king favoured the chamberlain in the highest degree, and they passed the rest of their lives in comfort and ease.

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This tale is also found in the Persian Bakhtyar Nama (or the Ten Vazirs), the precise date of which has not been ascertained, but a MS. Turki (Uygur) version of it, preserved in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, bears to have been written in 1434; the Persian text must therefore have been composed before that date.  In the text translated by Sir William Ouseley, in place of the daughter of the kaysar of Rome it is the daughter of the king of Irak whom the king of Abyssinia marries, after subduing the power of her father; and, so far from a present of jewels to her being the occasion of her mentioning her son, in the condition of a slave, it is said that one day the king behaved harshly to her, and spoke disrespectfully of her father, upon which she boasted that her father had in his service a youth of great beauty and possessed of every accomplishment, which excited the king’s desire to have him brought to his court; and the merchant smuggled the youth out of the country of Irak concealed in a chest, placed on the back of a camel.  In Lescallier’s French translation it is said that the youth was the fruit of a liaison of the princess, unknown to her father; that his education was secretly entrusted to certain servants; and that the princess afterwards contrived to introduce the boy to her father, who was so charmed with his beauty, grace of manner, and accomplishments, that he at once took him into his service.  Thus widely do manuscripts of the same Eastern work vary!