Bijan goes to Turan on an errand, meets Manijeh, who is Afrasiab's daughter, and is caught. Afrasiab does not kill him. He has him lowered into a pit and the mouth of it closed with a rock that Akvan had once thrown, which is a detail the poem is pleased with.

Manijeh is thrown out of her father's house for it and spends those years begging at the villages and carrying the food down to him. Rostam comes for him in the end, disguised as a merchant, and it is her, not any hero, who makes the rescue possible at all.