Page 169 - Early English Adventurers in the Middle East_Neat

A’GROUP OF ENGLISH ADVENTURERS IN INDIA 169

tions which, he received en route. At the Mogul capital he
speedily made himself at home. A natural linguist he
quickly acquired such proficiency in Hindustani that it is
recorded of him that by his generous use of appropriate
native expletives he reduced to silence within an hour a
native virago who was employed by Roe as washerwoman,
and who had given much trouble to the ambassador’s
household by her extreme volubility.
A more questionable and dangerous use of his knowledge
of the native language was made one evening at the time
of Mohammedan prayer, when in response to the muezzin’s
cry, “ There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his
Prophet,” he shouted in Hindustani that the assertion
was a lie, that the true Prophet was Jesus. It says much
for the toleration which prevailed at the Mogul capital
that the insult was overlooked as the indiscretion of the
half-witted “ English fakir.” Coryat, however, was no
fool, as he showed when, having sought and obtained an
audience of Jehangir, he launched at him a highly-flattering
eulogy in the Persian tongue.
In the flowery periods for which that language is famous,
he recalled the episode of the Queen of Sheba and Solomon,
and assured him that as the famous Queen had found Solo­
mon greatly to surpass the expectation she had formed of
him, so he had discovered in the dazzling glory of the Great
Mogul a picture far beyond the range of his utmost imagin­
ings. Jehangir seems to have been pleased with this bare­
faced flattery and possibly also amused by the spectacle of
the quaint Englishman fluently declaiming the flowery
Persian sentences. At the close he said some kindly words
to Coryat and dismissed him with a gift of a hundred
rupees.