Storia do Mogor 98.9

98.9

Let not the reader be astonished at the eunuch ordering into his presence his miserable, poverty-stricken parents, for it is against our nature to have arrived at high rank and yet not be annoyed at having to disclose the misery from which we started, and allowing it to be found out that our progenitors were of lowly origin ; but it is notorious that all eunuchs, grandees as they may be, have no other than poor and miserable progenitors, who out of absolute hunger have sold their sons. Nor do they themselves hold it out as otherwise, deriving hence occasion to vaunt themselves of their own high abilities and great deeds, through which they have risen to such rank. It was very revolting, the strange manner in which this eunuch treated his own parents, and angered thereby I resolved to leave Agrah. This eunuch was such a close-fisted fellow that it soon came to his selling the dung of his elephants and horses, whereby he made ten thousand rupees. With this money he bought an elephant, which one day escaping broke one of its legs, and the populace, who in Hindustan are very free of speech, began to shout as a joke that it was no wonder the elephant broke its leg, for it was an elephant made out of dung. In spite of all this avarice, he built for a memorial during his government an outer wall (coirassa, literally 'cuirass') round the whole of the Agrah Fort, which cost him a great deal of money, it being good work and decorative.