The Snake-Woman and King Ali Mardan

Once, King Ali Mardan rode out hunting in the forests that rise above the Dal lake, whose still, clear water lies between the mountains and the royal city of Srinagar. Deep among the trees he came upon a girl as lovely as a flower, sitting under a tree and crying as if her heart would break. The king told his huntsmen to wait some way off, and he walked over to her alone.

“Who are you,” he asked, “and why are you all by yourself in this wild place?”

She lifted her face to him. “Great king, I am a handmaiden of the Emperor of China. I was walking in the gardens of his palace and I wandered too far and lost my way. I have no idea how far I have come, but I am so tired and so hungry that I think I shall die here.”

“Nobody so beautiful shall die while Ali Mardan is able to save her,” said the king, and he could hardly take his eyes off her.

He had her carried with great care to his summer palace in the Shalimar gardens. There fountains threw sparkling drops over the flower beds, and fruit trees heavy with fruit leaned over long rows of marble pillars. In that place of flowers and sunshine the girl lived with the king, and before long he loved her so much that he thought of nothing and nobody else.

Time went by. Now, there was a holy man, a jogi, who lived far away, and every year his servant travelled to the sacred lake of Gangabal, high on the snowy mountain of Haramukh, to fetch holy water for him. One year, on his way home, the servant passed the wall of the Shalimar gardens. Over the top he could see the fountains leaping and glittering like silver in the sun. He had never seen anything like it. He set his jar of water down, scrambled over the wall, and wandered through the gardens, dazzled by all the beauty, until he was so worn out that he lay down under a tree and fell fast asleep.

The king, strolling in his garden, found the stranger asleep there, and noticed that his right fist was tightly closed around something. Very gently, Ali Mardan opened the fingers. Inside lay a tiny box of sweet-smelling ointment. As the king was looking at it, the man woke up, saw that his box was gone, and burst into loud sobs.

“Do not cry,” said the king, holding up the box. “You shall have it back, if you tell me honestly why it matters so much to you.”

“Great king,” said the servant, “it is not mine. It belongs to my master, and the ointment inside is holy and full of power. While I carry it, nothing can hurt me, and I can travel to Gangabal and home again with my jar so fast that my master always has his sacred water.”

The king studied him closely. “Tell me the truth. Is your master really so holy? Is he really so wonderful?”

“He really is, O king. There is nothing in the whole world that he does not know.”

Now the king was very curious indeed. He tucked the box inside his coat. “Go home,” he said, “and tell your master that King Ali Mardan has his box, and will keep it until he comes for it himself.” In this way he hoped to bring the wise jogi to his court.

The poor servant had no choice. Without the magic ointment his journey home took him two and a half years. All that time Ali Mardan stayed with the beautiful stranger in the Shalimar palace, forgetting everything else in the world. Yet he was not happy. His face grew white and strange, and his eyes took on a hard, stony stare.

At last the servant reached home and told his master what had happened. The jogi was furious, but he could not manage without the box that let him fetch the holy water, so he set out at once for the king’s court. Ali Mardan welcomed him with every honour and gave back the box, just as he had promised.

The jogi was truly wise, and the moment he saw the king he knew something was badly wrong. “O king,” he said, “you have been kind to me, and I would like to be kind to you in return. Tell me honestly: has your face always been so pale and frightened, and your eyes so stony?”

The king hung his head.

“Tell me honestly,” the jogi went on. “Is there a strange woman living in your palace?”

Then Ali Mardan felt a curious relief, and he told the whole story of the lovely, lonely girl in the forest.

“She is no handmaiden of the Emperor of China,” said the jogi, without the least fear. “She is not a woman at all. She is a lamia, a terrible snake two hundred years old, which has the power to take the shape of a woman.”

At first the king was angry, for he loved her madly. But the jogi would not take back his words, and slowly the king grew afraid. In the end he promised to do exactly as the jogi told him, to find out whether it was true.

That evening he ordered two kinds of khichri, a dish of rice cooked with lentils, to be made for supper. Both were served in a single dish: one half was sweet, and the other half was salty.

The king and the stranger always ate from the same dish. That night he turned the salty half towards her and the sweet half towards himself. She found her side terribly salty, but since the king was eating happily and saying nothing, she finished hers without a word.

Later, when they had gone to bed, the king lay still and pretended to sleep, as the jogi had told him to. The stranger grew more and more thirsty from all that salt, until she could bear it no longer. There was no water in the room, so she had to go outside for a drink.

Now, when a snake-woman goes out at night, she must take her own true shape. And as the king lay pretending to sleep, he saw the beautiful woman beside him turn into a long, cold, slithering snake that slid off the bed, out of the door and into the garden. He crept after it and watched it drink from every fountain it passed, until it came to the Dal lake, where it drank and swam for hours.

Now the king knew the jogi had told the truth, and he begged him for help to be rid of the creature. The jogi agreed, as long as the king obeyed him exactly. Together they made an oven out of a hundred different metals melted together, with a heavy lid and a strong lock. They set it in a shady corner of the garden and chained it firmly to the ground.

When everything was ready, the king said to the snake-woman, “My darling, let us spend today alone in the garden and cook our own dinner, just for fun.”

She was happy to agree. They strolled about the garden, and when it was time to eat they laughed and joked as they set about cooking. The king heated the oven and kneaded the dough, but he was clumsy at it, and soon he declared that he could do no more and she must bake the bread herself. At first she refused, saying she did not like ovens. Then the king pretended to be hurt. “You cannot really love me,” he said, “if you will not even help me with this.” So she gave in and, very crossly, began to see to the bread.

The moment she bent over the mouth of the oven to turn the loaves, the king pushed her in, slammed down the lid and locked it tight.

At once the oven began to leap and shake. If it had not been chained down, it would have jumped right out of the garden! The king and the jogi kept the fire burning, and the oven bounced and rattled from four o’clock one afternoon until four o’clock the next. Then it was still.

When the oven had cooled, they opened it. The snake-woman was gone. Nothing was left but a little heap of ashes, and from it the jogi picked out a small, round stone.

“This stone is the very heart of the snake-woman,” he told the king. “Anything you touch with it will turn into gold.”

But Ali Mardan shook his head. Such a treasure, he said, was worth more than any man’s life, for it would bring jealousy and war and killing to whoever owned it. So when he next went to Attock, he threw the magic stone into the river, so that it could never stir up trouble in the world.

About this story

Flora Annie Steel included this story, set in Kashmir, in her Tales of the Punjab, Told by the People, and R. C. Temple’s notes distinguish the historical name from the legend. He says the real ‘Ali Mardan Khan was governor of Kashmir, not king, under the Emperor Shah Jahan about A.D. 1650. He explains that in the original the creature is a lamia, described in this historical collection as a two-hundred-year-old snake that can take a woman’s form, and that the stone in the ashes is the paras, which turns whatever it touches into gold.

Some wording of the death is shortened here, but the retelling still depicts the snake-woman being trapped in an oven and burned for a day. It is a violent episode, not a mild disappearance. Khichri is a dish of rice and pulses, and Temple says the river at Attock is the Indus.

Read the original: Flora Annie Steel, Tales of the Punjab (Project Gutenberg #6145, The Snake-Woman and King Ali Mardan)

Reading guidance: for mature readers. The story includes manipulation, captivity in an oven and a prolonged burning death, despite some softened wording.

A closer reading

The king’s curiosity about the ointment harms someone before it helps him: he keeps another person’s property to force an audience, leaving the servant to spend years on the journey home. The later return of the box does not undo that cost. This makes the king’s final rejection of a dangerous treasure more interesting than a simple portrait of unvarying wisdom.

The salty meal creates a test within the legend’s supernatural rules, revealing the woman’s snake form. But the story also uses beauty, foreignness and hidden identity to make a woman threatening, and ends her life through deception and burning. Those motifs are features of this violent legend, not grounds for distrusting real women or outsiders. The final refusal of the gold-making stone addresses the danger of wealth without resolving the moral questions raised by the killing.

Try this with the story

Compare the two magical objects: the ointment the king keeps and the stone he throws away. For each, list its power, its owner, who wants it and what the king thinks possessing it will achieve. Explain what changes in his attitude toward control by the final scene.

Questions to ask

• How did the jogi’s servant come to be in the king’s garden?
• What clues showed that something was wrong with the king?
• How did the salty khichri help the king discover the truth?
• Why did Ali Mardan throw away a stone that could make gold? Do you agree with him?

Related stories

• The Legend Of Gwashbrari The Glacier Hearted Queen — another legend of Kashmir from Tales of the Punjab
• The Jogis Punishment — another tale of a jogi with strange powers
• The Two Brothers — another tale from Flora Annie Steel’s collection