1913.] ADVENTURES OF MULADEVA 617 



larly, the heroine has a faithful female friend, who is almost in- 

 variably the go-between, or love's messenger (servus currens) be- 

 tween herself and the hero. The lady, as a rule, takes the initiative, 

 by look or act, in establishing relations with her lover-to-be. 



Comfortably settled kings, in their maturer years, are also taken 

 with a kind of " wanderlust," and roam in search of adventures.* 

 Merchants and merchants' sons start on quests of trade and wealth ; 

 travel to a great distance; suffer ship-wreck; are rescued by dan- 

 gerous sirens ; are destroyed by them ; or attain in the end mar- 

 velous prosperity. Holy men, gifted with supernatural powers, 

 wander about ; whensoever they are treated properly they secure 

 the happiness of deserving lay persons. On the other hand, all 

 sorts of rogues in the guise of holy men play tricks under the mantle 

 of their sanctity, usually to meet with discomfiture and disgrace in 

 the end. Faithful or faithless wives; noble or degraded courtezans; 

 gamblers, thieves, and robbers are further instances of the stere- 

 otyped dramatis personre of Hindu fiction. To a very considerable 

 extent all these adventures are lifted to a higher plane of romanti- 

 cism by the interference, or deus ex machina cooperation of super- 

 natural beings : benign gods, magic-loving Vidyadharas, Yaksas, and 

 heavenly nymphs, called Apsaras. And all persons, divine or human, 

 operate with supernatural agencies: magic objects that grant wishes, 

 or perform wonderful acts ; powerful charms ; the forecast of 

 dreams ; the prophecies of holy men and women. 



The adventures of all these personages contain as a rule no very 

 continuous plots. They usually consist of a chain of salient, indi- 

 vidual, romantic episodes, strung together, one after another. Quite 

 frequently, one or the other of the happenings are in the nature 

 of an anecdote, or prank, or trick which one person in the story plays 

 upon the other. In this latter phase of fiction puns and riddles 

 often play a part. The separate events of a story rarely unfold 

 character, and do not necessarily contribute to such denouement as 

 the story may happen to have. There is the familiar boxing of story 

 within story, and frequently the events told in one and the same 

 story are really different events which merely overlap each other at 

 some one point. 



* See Prabandhacintamani, Tawney's Translation, pp. 12, 30, 42. 



