asked the king at last , and the hermit replied that he was reading the fates of men ; every one 's fate , he said , was settled from the beginning , and , whatever it were , there was no escape from it . The king laughed . ' I care little , ' he said , ` what my fate may be ; but I should be curious to know the fate of my little daughter . ' ' I can not say , ' answered the hermit . ` Do you not know , then ? ' demanded the king . ' I might know , ' returned the hermit , ` but it is not always wisdom to know much . ' But the king was not content with this reply , and began to press the old man to say what he knew , which for a long time he would not do . At last , however , the king urged him so greatly that he said : ` The king 's daughter will marry the son of a poor slave-girl called Puruna , who belongs to the king of the land of the north . There is no escaping from Fate . ' The king was wild with anger at hearing these words , but he was also very tired ; so he only laughed , and answered that he hoped there would be a way out of THAT fate anyhow . Then he asked if the hermit could shelter him and his beasts for the night , and the hermit said ` Yes ' ; so , very soon the king had watered and tethered his horse , and , after a supper of bread and parched peas , lay down in the cave , with the hound at his feet , and tried to go to sleep . But instead of sleeping he only lay awake and thought of the hermit 's prophecy ; and the more he thought of it the angrier he felt , until he gnashed his teeth and declared that it should never , never come true . Morning came , and the king got up , pale and sulky , and , after learning from the hermit which path to take , was soon mounted and found his way home without much difficulty . Directly he reached his palace he wrote a letter to the king of the land of the north , begging him , as a favour , to sell him his slave girl Puruna and her son , and saying that , if he consented , he would send a messenger to receive them at the river which divided the kingdoms . For five days he awaited the reply , and hardly slept or ate , but was as cross as could be all the time . On the fifth day his messenger returned with a letter to say that the king of the land of the north would not sell , but he would give , the king the slave girl and her son . The king was overjoyed . He sent for his Grand Wazeer and told him that he was going on one of his lonely expeditions , and that the Wazeer must invent some excuse to account for his absence . Next he disguised himself as an ordinary messenger , mounted a swift camel , and sped away to the place where the slave girl was to be handed over to him .
When he XXXXX there he gave the messengers who brought her a letter of thanks and a handsome present for their master and rewards for themselves ; and then without delay he took the poor woman and her tiny baby-boy up on to his camel and rode off to a wild desert .
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