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As Michael approached him, he called out in a weak but sonorous voice a sura from the Koran: "'Verily those who do deeds of real kindness shall drink of a cup tempered with camphor." Michael understood. The quaffing of camphor, as spoken of in the Koran, is supposed to subdue unlawful passions; it cleanses the heart; it rids man's mind of all material desires. "I thank you, O my father."
Then traversing Alkotzonath, &c., to Sura, once the site of a celebrated Jewish college, and Shafjathib, whose synagogue is built with stones from Jerusalem, and crossing the desert of Yemen he passed Themar, Tilimar, and Chaibar which contained a great number of Jewish inhabitants, to Waseth; and thence to Bassorah on the Tigris, nearly at the end of the Persian Gulf.
He calls upon the people to believe, and warns them of their fate if they refuse. The suras indicate the attitude of indifference borne by the Kureisch towards Mahomet's mission at its inception. Wherever there are denunciatory suras, they are either for the chastisement of unbelievers or, as in Sura cxi, in revenge for the refusal of his relations to believe in his inspiration.
When the trance was over, he declared that Ayesha was innocent, and revealed the passage dealing with divorce in Sura 24: "They who defame virtuous women and bring not four witnesses, scourge them with fourscore stripes, and receive ye not their testimony forever, for these are perverse persons.... And they who shall accuse their wives, and have no witnesses but themselves, the testimony of each of them shall be a testimony by God four times repeated, that He is indeed of them that speak the truth."
Bouzes therefore at first remained at Hierapolis, keeping his whole army with him; but when he learned what had befallen Sura, he called together the first men of the Hierapolitans and spoke as follows: "Whenever men are confronted with a struggle against an assailant with whom they are evenly matched in strength, it is not at all unreasonable that they should engage in open conflict with the enemy; but for those who are by comparison much inferior to their opponents it will be more advantageous to circumvent their enemy by some kind of tricks than to array themselves openly against them and thus enter into foreseen danger.
On the following day, therefore, they sent the bishop of the city to plead for them and to beg that the town be spared; so he took with him some of his attendants, who carried fowls and wine and clean loaves, and came before Chosroes; there he threw himself on the ground, and with tears supplicated him to spare a pitiable population and a city altogether without honour in the eyes of the Romans, and one which in past times had never been of any account to the Persians, and which never would be such thereafter; and he promised that the men of Sura would give him ransom worthy of themselves and the city which they inhabited.
And, O thou of Bharata's race, Sura, always truthful in speech, gave from friendship this his firstborn daughter unto his childless cousin and friend, the illustrious Kuntibhoja the son of his paternal aunt pursuant to a former promise. And Pritha in the house of her adoptive father was engaged in looking after the duties of hospitality to Brahmanas and other guests.
In his difficulties he took counsel with L. Licinius Sura, a lifelong friend of Trajan, and in October, 97, he ascended the Capitol, and with all due solemnity proclaimed that he adopted Trajan as his son. The Senate confirmed the choice, and acknowledged the emperor's adopted son as his successor.
And Gandhari, ever devoted to her husband, gratified her superiors by her good conduct; and as she was chaste, she never referred even by words to men other than her husband or such superiors." "Vaisampayana continued, 'There was amongst the Yadavas a chief named Sura. He was the father of Vasudeva. And he had a daughter called Pritha, who was unrivalled for beauty on earth.
Upon which he was surnamed Sura, sura being the Roman word for the calf of the leg. Being at another time prosecuted at law, and having bribed some of the judges, he escaped only by two votes, and complained of the needless expense he had gone to in paying for a second, as one would have sufficed to acquit him.
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