Chapter VI: Section III (2)

In the interesting story of Merhuma,[315] we read of the wife who is persecuted by the seducer her brother-in-law. To avenge her refusal, he causes her to be stoned during the absence of his brother; being innocent, she rises again from under the stones; being sheltered by a Bedouin, a monster of a slave seduces her; being repulsed, he accuses her of the death of the Bedouin's little son, whom he had himself killed; the beautiful girl flees away; she frees a youth who was condemned to death, and who in his turn seduces her. She then embarks in a ship; while she is at sea all the sailors become enamoured of her and wish to possess her; she invokes the god who caused Pharaoh to be drowned and who saved Noah from the waters. The waves begin to move; a thunderbolt descends and burns to ashes all who are in the ship, with the exception of the beautiful girl, who lands safe and sound upon the shore (it is the aurora coming out of the gloomy ocean of night, and the monsters who persecute her are burned to ashes by the thunderbolts and the sun's rays); she thence escapes into a convent, in which she ministers to the unfortunate, cures the lame, and gives eyesight to the blind. Among the latter is her persecutor, the brother of her husband; she pardons him and gives him back his eyesight; in the same way she cures all her other persecutors. It is scarcely necessary for me to remind the reader how this oriental tale, which developed itself from the myth of the persecuted and delivering aurora which we have seen in the Vedic hymns, reappears in numerous very popular western legends, of which Crescentia and Geneviève are the most brilliant types.

The aurora comes out of the gloomy ocean and is espoused by the sun; these heavenly nuptials in proximity to the sea gave rise to the popular tale[316] of the king who wishes the sea with its pearls to be present at his nuptials; the pearls of the bride-aurora are supposed to come out of the sea of night. The sea sends as gifts to the king a casket of pearls, a chest of precious dresses, a horse that goes like the morning wind, and a chest full of gold.

The wise aurora figures again in the story of the ingenious princess[317] who discovers, by means of a story-riddle, the robbers who, during the night, stole the precious gem destined for the king.

The aurora imparts splendour and eyesight to the blinded sun. The story of the three-breasted princess who, while she meditates poisoning the blind man, in order that she may enjoy unrestrained the affections of her young and handsome lover, relents and gives him back his sight, reappears in a rather incomplete form in the _Tuti-Name_.[318]

The girl who has been married to a monster, whom she flees from to follow a handsome young lover, who, arriving at the banks of a river, despoils her of her riches, leaves her naked and passes over to the other side, after which she resigns herself to her fate and resolves to return to her husband the monster,[319] represents the evening aurora, who flees before the monster of night to follow her lover the sun, who, in the morning, after adorning himself with her splendour, leaves her on the shore of the gloomy ocean and runs away, the aurora being thereupon obliged in the evening to re-unite herself to her husband the monster. It is interesting, moreover, as bearing upon our subject, to note the expression of which the youth who flees with the beautiful woman makes use to express his fear of discovery. He says that the monster-husband will follow them, and that should he sit upon the horns of the bull (the moon) he would be sure to recognise him. The story of two young people fleeing upon a bull, and followed by the monster, occurs again in the Russian popular tales. By the horns of the bull, the youth means the most prominent and visible situation; and he knows, moreover, that if the monster overtakes them, he will be sure to demonstrate the truth of the brave proverb which advises us in arduous undertakings to take the bull by the horns.

It is also the aurora who is represented by the beautiful maiden[320] whom her father, mother, and brother have, without each other's knowledge, severally affianced to three youths of different professions. The three young men contend for her person, but while the quarrel is undecided, the girl dies. The three then go to visit her tomb; one discovers her body, the second finds that there is still some life in her, and the third strikes her and raises her up alive, upon which the quarrel is resumed. She flees from them, and withdraws into another living tomb, a convent. In the most popular form of this legend the three companions, or three brothers, fighting for the bride, divide her; the aurora is torn into pieces as soon as the sun, her true lover and rightful suitor, appears.

From darkness comes forth light; from the old, the young; from death, life; from the dust of a dead man's skull, tasted by a virgin, is born a wonderful child, who knows how to distinguish false pearls from real, dishonest women from honest ones[321] (the morning sun can distinguish between light and darkness); the wise boy (the young sun) is the brother of the wise girl (the young aurora). The flesh of a killed Brâhman is turned into gold in another story of the _Tuti-Name_.[322]

We have seen that the aurora and the sun are mother and son, brother and sister, or lover and mistress. The sun in the evening dies ignominiously, is sacrificed and hanged upon a gibbet, and with himself sacrifices his mother or his mistress. The legend is popular and ancient which speaks of the robber son, when about to end his life upon a gibbet,[323] biting the nose off his mother, who gave birth to him and brought him up badly. In the _Tuti-Name_,[324] it is the young adulterer (and robber too) who, condemned to death for his adultery, asks to see his mistress once more before his death and kiss her, and who, as she does so, gratifies his revenge by inflicting upon her a like indignity. It is remarkable how, even in the Hindoo popular tale, the story of the adulterer is confounded with that of a thief; the adulterer ends by being thrown into the water (the sun and the aurora fall into the gloomy ocean of night).

In the next story it is the wicked husband who, travelling with his rich wife for change of dwelling-place, despoils her of her clothes, and then throws her into a well in order to ensure possession of her jewels and wardrobe. These riches, however, do not last long; he becomes poor and goes begging alms, dressed as a mendicant, until he finds his wife again, who had been saved by divine intervention from the well, and provided anew with clothes and jewels of equal gorgeousness. The husband passes some time with his wife, and then sets out again on a voyage with her; he arrives at the same well, and throws her in as before to enjoy alone her stripped-off garnitures and riches. (The meaning of the myth is evident; it is the sun throwing the splendid aurora into the gloomy waters of the night.)

A king becomes enamoured of the beauteous Mahrusa;[325] his councillors tear him from his love, upon which he pines away in solitude and dies. The beautiful girl unites herself to him in the grave (Romeo and Juliet, the evening aurora and the sun die together).

The story of the three brothers, the Ribhavas, occurs again in the _Tuti-Name_,[326] with other particulars which we already know. The first brother is the wise one; the second is a maker of talismans (amongst other things he can make a horse which will run in one day over a space of ground that would take other horses thirty); the third and youngest brother is the victorious archer. They set out to search for the beautiful maiden who has fled by night from the house of her father. The first brother discovers, by his wisdom, that the maiden was carried off by the fairies into an island-mountain which men cannot reach. The second creates a wonderful animal upon which to traverse the intervening waters (Christophoros or Bhîmas). Having arrived at the island-mountain, the third and youngest brother fights the demon, the lord of the fairies, vanquishes him, and frees the beautiful girl, who thereupon is conducted back to her father. Then there arises the usual quarrel between the three brothers as to who is to possess the bride.

In the Vedâs, we have the sky and the moon represented as a cup. From the little cup of abundance (the moon) it is easy to pass to the miraculous little pipkin (the moon), in which the kind-hearted but poor housekeeper of the Pândavas, in the _Mahâbhâratam_, still finds abundance of vegetables, after her powers of hospitality had been exhausted on the god Krishnas disguised as a beggar--to the pipkin from which can be taken whatever is wished for. In the _Tuti-Name_,[327] a woodcutter finds ten magicians round a pipkin, and eating out of it as much and whatever they want; they are pleased with the woodcutter, and, at his request, give him the pipkin. He invites his acquaintances to a banquet at his house, but not able to contain himself for joy, he places the pipkin upon his head, and begins to dance. The pipkin falls to the ground and is broken to pieces, and with it his fortune vanishes (the story of Perrette).

A variation of the small cup is the wooden porringer (the moon), which two brothers (the Açvinâu) dispute for, in the history of the king of China,[328] and from which can be taken whatever drink and food is wished for; as, in the same story, we find the enchanted shoes which carry us in an instant wherever we wish to go;--which brings us back to the fugitive Vedic aurora, the swiftest in the race, and to the popular tales relating to Cinderella, who is overtaken and found again by the prince only when she has lost her enchanted slipper. With the porringer and the enchanted shoes we find, in the popular tales, the little purse full of money which fills again as fast as it is emptied (another form of the cup of abundance), and a sword which, when unsheathed, causes a fine, rich, and great city to arise in a desert, which city disappears when the sword is put back into the sheath (the solar ray is the drawn sword, which makes the luminous city of the rich aurora arise; scarcely does the sun's ray vanish, or scarcely is the sword sheathed, than the marvellous city vanishes). The rest of the story is also interesting, because it applies to three men a double and well-known fable of the animals which contend for the prey (as the three brothers contend for the beautiful maiden whom they have found again). The animals cannot divide it equally; they refer to the judgment of a man passing by; he divides it so well that the animals are ever after grateful to him, and help him in every danger. The story of the _Tuti-Name_ touches upon this form of the myth, but soon abandons it for another equally zoological, and a more familiar one, that of the third who comes in between two that quarrel, and enjoys the prey. The young adventurer undertakes to put an end to the dispute of the two brothers as to the division of the purse, the porringer, the sword and the wonderful shoes; he does so by putting the shoes on his feet and fleeing away with the other three articles contended for (the two brothers Açvinâu, the two twilights, contend for the moon and also for the aurora, as we shall see better in the next chapter; the sun puts an end to their quarrel by espousing her himself).

We are already familiar with the Vedic Ribhavas who out of one cup make four. Probably upon this legend depends that of the four brothers of the _Tuti-Name_,[329] who, as they let each a pearl fall from their forehead upon the ground, see four mines open, one of copper, the second of silver, the third of gold (the third brother is here again the favourite), the fourth only of iron. The gem appears to be the sun itself. The four mines seem to me to represent respectively the coppery sky in the evening, the silver sky in the moonlight night, the sky in the morning, golden with the dawn, and the iron sky, the grey or azure, of the day. The word _nîlas_ in Sanskrit means azure, as well as black, and between azure and black is grey, the colour of iron.

Of the three brothers, the most learned, he who solves the enigmas, is often the eldest; and in the story of the _Tuti-Name_,[330] the eldest of the three brothers explains why old men have white hair, saying that this whiteness is a symbol of the clearness of their thoughts.

* * * * *

Let us now pass to the Calmuc and Mongol stories of _Siddhi-kûr_, which, as we have said above, are also of Hindoo origin.

In the first story, the three companions, forming at first three groups of two, have resolved into six. The night-time is divided into three, into six, into seven (six, _plus_ an extraordinary one, born afterwards), into nine (three groups of three), into twelve (three groups of four). Hence, near the monster with three, six, seven, nine, or twelve heads, we find sometimes three, sometimes six, seven, nine, twelve brother-heroes. The last head (or the last two, three, or four heads) of the monster, the decisive one, is the most difficult, and even dangerous, to cut off; the last of the brothers is he who, by cutting it off, is victorious. In the first Calmuc story of _Siddhi-kûr_, six brothers or companions separate where six rivers take their rise, and go in search of fortune. The first-born perishes; the second, by means of his wisdom (he partakes of the wisdom of the first-born, with whom he is grouped), discovers the place where the dead one is buried; the third, the strong one, breaks the rock under which the eldest is hidden; the fourth resuscitates him by means of a health-bringing drink, as Bhîmas, the strong hero of the _Mahâbhâratam_, arises again when he drinks the water of health and strength; the fifth brother creates a bird, which the sixth colours; this bird flies to the bride of the eldest brother, and brings her among his companions, who, finding her exceedingly beautiful, become, one and all, enamoured of her; they fight for her, and, that each may have a part, end by cutting her to pieces. We already know the mythical meaning of this legend.

The third and fourth Calmuc tales introduce explicitly the bull and the cow. In the third, a man who possesses but one cow unites himself to her, in order to make her fruitful. Of this union a tailed monster is born, having a man's body and a bull's head. The man-bull (Minotauros) goes into the forest, where he finds three companions--one black, one green, and one white--who accompany him. The man-bull overcomes the enchantments of a dwarf witch; his three companions lower him into a well and leave him there, but he escapes. He meets a beautiful maiden drawing water, at whose every footstep a flower arises; he follows her, and finally finds himself in heaven; he fights against the demons, in favour of the gods, and dies in this enterprise. This story, of Hindoo origin, where the bull and the cow take the place of the hero and the maiden, appears to me to justify the amplitude of the comparisons.

We have already seen the beneficial qualities of the excrement of the cow. In the fourth story, it is under the excrement of a cow that the enchanted gem, lost by the daughter of the king, is found. It is of the cow that the pearl is the secretion. The moon-cow and the aurora-cow are rich in pearls; they are pearls themselves, like the sun; the sun comes out of the aurora, the pearl comes out of the cow.

The subject of the seventh tale is the three sisters who, taking the cattle to pasture, lose a buffalo, or black bull. In their search for it, they came across an enchanted castle, tenanted by a white bird, who offers to marry them. The third sister consents, and marries him. The bird turns out then to be a handsome cavalier (a form of Lohengrin). But having, by the advice of a witch, burned the aviary, she loses him, and cannot recover him till the aviary is restored. We shall see the sun as a bird in the Vedic hymns; the aurora is the aviary, made of flames, of this divine bird. When the aviary is burned at morn, the aurora and the sun separate; they meet again in the evening, when the aviary is reconstructed.

Another beautiful myth of analogous import occurs again in the eighth story. A woodman and a painter envy each other; the painter makes the king believe that the woodman's father, who is in heaven, has written ordering his son to repair to paradise, in order to build him a temple, and to take the route that the painter shall indicate. The king orders the woodman to set out for paradise. The painter prepares a funeral pyre, by way of exit; from this the woodman succeeds in escaping, and, going back to the king, he tells him that he has been to paradise, and presents a letter which his father has given him, ordering the painter to come by the same road, and paint the temple. The king requires the summons to be obeyed, and the perfidious painter perishes in the flames. The morning sun emerges safe and sound from the flames of the morning aurora; the evening sun passes through those flames, and dies.

The tenth Calmuc tale gives us the myth of the two brothers; the rich one avaricious and wicked, and the poor one virtuous. The story ends in a manner analogous to that of the dying adulterer, who, as we have seen in the _Tuti-Name_, bites off his mistress's nose.

The eleventh story is a variation of that of the lover, or husband, who abandons or kills his wife, after having despoiled her of her riches; but instead of the waters of the sea, we have here the sea of sand, the sandy desert, in a cavity of which is deposited the young girl, shut up in a chest, the same chest which in other popular tales drifts about on the surface of the water.[331] But into the place where it was laid, the chest having been taken away by a young prince, a tiger enters; the unworthy husband turns up himself to abstract the chest, and is torn to pieces by the tiger. The sterile night is a vast desert, a sea of waters, a sea of sand; the sun-prince frees the aurora from the waters, out of the well, or the cavern of the desert; the tiger kills the monster-husband.

In the twelfth tale, a thief steals the enchanted gem from the prince; he throws the gem to the ground, the consequence of which is that the prince's nose bleeds so excessively that he dies. The nose is the most prominent part of the face, the most conspicuous and splendid part; it is the gem of the sun-prince. The sun falls at night upon the mountain; the gem falls to the ground; the prince's nose bleeds; he has struck his nose against the ground, and it bleeds. The sun-prince dies, and the evening sky is tinged red, blood-colour; the sun, who loses his blood in the evening, dies.

The thirteen Calmuc stories are followed by ten Mongol tales; in all, twenty-three, of which the sixteenth, however, is lost.

The fourteenth tells us of the rich and avaricious man whose poor brother goes in despair into the forest to die upon a rock; but his presence not being known to the spirits, he has the good luck to come upon a hammer and a sack, of which the former, when struck against an object, produces whatever is desired by the owner, the latter being used to carry away the objects thus obtained, this hammer and this sack having been left there by the hobgoblins. Thus the poor brother becomes rich, and is envied by the other, who goes to the same place, in hopes of experiencing the same good fortune; but as he does not hide himself, the hobgoblins see him, and believing him to be the man who stole the hammer and the sack, avenge themselves upon him by lengthening his nose, and covering it with protuberances. To this myth may perhaps be referred the origin of the Italian expression, "Restare con uno o due palmi di naso," to remain with one or two spans of the nose; that is to say, to be laughed at, and with the gesture by which derision is accompanied, and which is addressed to the man who is laughed at, by applying one or sometimes both hands to the end of one's nose. The poor brother, now rich, visits the miserly brother, who has a long nose covered with protuberances, and knocks them off with his hammer. He had already knocked off eight, and only one remained, when, at his wife's request, he desisted and left the last one on. The rich man's wife, seeing how the protuberances had been taken off by striking them, tries herself to remove the last one, and strikes it with a hammer; but not calculating her aim accurately, she splits her husband's head open, and he dies.

In the seventeenth Mongol story, an old man and an old woman have nine cows. The old man is fond of meat, and eats all the calves; the old woman, on the other hand, has a great liking for milk and butter, with which she satiates herself. When the old man has eaten all the calves, he thinks that one cow more or less will not affect his wealth; reasoning thus, he eats all the cows except one, which he spares out of respect for the whim of his old wife. But one day that the old woman is out, the old man cannot resist the temptation, and kills the last cow. His wife returns, is angry, and abandons him, upon which he throws after her one of the cow's breasts. The woman, in grateful memory of the milk and butter she liked so much, takes it up and goes up the mountain, where she strikes the cow's breast against the summit of the rock, and thereupon there flow out milk and butter in rivers. She satisfies her appetite, and then remembers that her husband is perhaps dying of hunger, feeding, as he does, upon ashes; she therefore, but secretly, throws butter into the house down the chimney, and then disappears. In this attention the old man recognises the love of his wife, and resolves upon the plan of following her footsteps during the night upon the snow. He comes to the mountain, sees the breast, and cannot resist the temptation it offers; he eats it, and takes the butter away with him. The old woman wanders about till she comes upon a herd of deer, who pasture freely, and who, instead of fleeing, let themselves be milked. Again, she thinks of her husband, and she throws deer's butter down the chimney. The old man follows her over the snow, finds her near the deer, and kills them in his inordinate passion for meat. The old woman continues to wander about, and stumbles this time upon a cavern of the wild beasts, guarded by a hare. The hare defends her from the wild beasts; but she then conceives the idea of giving her husband a stick, and throws it down the chimney whilst he is taking the ashes up with a spoon. He follows her, and comes to the cave of the wild animals, who, seeing them arrive together, tear them to pieces. Here again we have the myth of the sun and the aurora (or the fine season); the hare who guards the cavern and tames the wild beasts is, as we shall see in the chapter which treats of it, the moon, the cows and the deer being the same. The ferocious animals of the cavern of night rend both sun and aurora (or fine season), both old man and old woman.

The eighteenth Mongol story is too indecent for me to relate, or for the reader to peruse; suffice it to say, that we have in it a comic variation of the Amazon heroine, and that this heroine calls herself Sûrya (the sun) Bagatur (to which corresponds the bagatír; or hero, of the Russians).

In the twentieth tale we have a calf and a lion's whelp brought up together by a lioness upon the same milk.[332] When grown, the lion goes and inhabits the forest, or the desert, and the bull, the mountain illumined by the sun, meeting as good friends and brothers to drink the same water. This good understanding is, however, put an end to by their perfidious uncle the fox, who persuades the lion to believe that the bull designs to kill him, and adds that when the bull in the morning strikes the ground with his horns, and bellows loudly, will be the sign that he is going to carry his purpose into effect; he then tells the bull that the lion has a similar design against him. In the morning, when the two brothers, bull and lion, go to drink the same water, they approach each other with suspicion, engage in battle and kill each other, the fox, or wolf, being the only one to benefit by the quarrel. This is a form of the story of the two twilights (the Açvinâu), which we shall illustrate in the following chapter.

The beginning of the twenty-first Mongol story offers a new analogy with the apologue of Perrette.[333] A poor father and mother find a little lamb's-wool; they consult together, and resolve with the wool to make cloth, and with the cloth to buy an ass. Upon this ass they will place their little child, and go a-begging; by begging they will become yet richer, and buy another ass. Of the two, a young ass will be born. The youngster immediately exclaims that if a young donkey is born he will ride upon it; whereupon his mother answers, "You would break its back," when, accompanying these words with the movement of a stick, she strikes the youngster's head with it, and kills him; with him the fine projects of the poor parents also vanish.

In the last of the stories of _Siddhi-kûr_, which is joined to the three legends of the grateful animals, the disguises, and the laughing princess, a man uses the horns of his dead buffalo to grub up the roots upon which he lives in exile.

The history of _Ardshi-Bordshi_ also contains several interesting stories.

It begins with a challenge among the children who keep the king's cows to run a race from the summit of a mountain. The first who comes to the winning-post is honoured as a king by his companions for that day, and acts and judges on the spot where the race takes place as a real king; indeed, he judges and decides as a court of final appeal on cases which have not been well examined by the great king of the country. He unmasks and convicts robbers and false witnesses acquitted by the king as innocent, and sends a missive to the king, recommending him to be more cautious in future in his judgments, or else to resign his royal dignity. The great king wonders at the extraordinary wisdom of the king of the children, and ascribes his preternatural sagacity to the magical influence of the mountain where the children who guard the cows play their games. On another occasion, the king of the children, by his craftiness, detects a demon in one whom the king had thought to be the legitimate son of his minister. The discovery is made by means of a challenge to the minister's real son and his demoniacal counterfeit to get into a small jug at hand. The real son cannot; but the supposititious makes himself small and enters the jug, in which the king of the children shuts him up with a diamond, and administers thereupon fresh reproof to the great king for his carelessness. The great king then visits the mountain of the children, and sees a golden throne with thirty-two steps emerge from the ground; upon each step there is a wooden puppet (the moon). The great king has the throne carried into his palace, and endeavours to ascend it; the puppets arrest him, and one of them tells him that this was once the throne of the god Indras, and afterwards of King Vikramâdityas. The great king inclines himself in reverence, and one of the puppets begins to narrate the history of Vikramâdityas.

The history of Vikramâdityas, narrated by the puppets, refers to a wise child, born of the wife of the king, after she had eaten a cake made of earth mixed with oil, and dissolved in water in a porcelain vase (of which cake the servant-maid eats the remainder). The young Vikramâdityas passes his infancy in the forests, where he learns all the arts, not excluding the art of thieving, taught him by the most experienced robbers, as well as every kind of mercantile fraud; by cheating, he becomes possessed of an enchanted gem which was in the hip of a dead man, and of a child who has the faculty of understanding the language of the wolves, and who calls himself son of the wolves, but was, in fact, born by the roadside of the maid who had eaten the rest of the cake; this child is nursed by his mother, and although at first ill-favoured, becomes in the long run very handsome. Vikramâdityas afterwards kills the king of the demons in battle, in which it is remarkable that as many new demons arise to combat him as there are pieces into which the hero cuts the demon, until the hero multiplies himself in his turn, and to every demon opposes a lion sprung from his own body. Vikramâdityas mounts upon a throne where those who had sat before him had all perished, each after a reign of twenty-four hours, because they had omitted to offer up funeral sacrifices to the dead during the night; Vikramâdityas, with his companion, the son of the wolf, fulfils the sacred duty, and escapes death.

In the same story, which reminds us of the _Ribhavas_ and the four cups and the cow, four young shepherds, one after another, work at the same piece of wood; one gives it the general shape of a woman, the second colours it, the third imparts the features peculiar to the feminine form, and the fourth gives it life; they then dispute for her person. The case is referred to the king; a wise man pronounces that the two first who worked the wood are the father and mother, the third is the priest, the fourth, who gave it life, is the legitimate husband. Thus the four become three, by making a group of the first two.

Next comes the legend of the wife who, taking her husband by the feet, makes him fall into a fountain, because she hears a melodious voice, perhaps an echo of her own, which charms her; she sees a monster instead, and bewails her lost husband. In zoological mythology, the fable of the dog who, at the sight of his own shadow, lets the meat drop into the river, is analogous to this legend, which, however, we introduce here, only because of its relation to the similar stories of the wife who kills her husband, and of the husband who kills his wife by throwing her into the water, already vaguely hinted at in the Vedic hymns.

The last of the tales contained in the history of _Ardshi Bordshi_ shows us, on the other hand, a far too complaisant wife. A king has a daughter, named Light of the sun, who is to be seen by no one. The daughter asks to be allowed to go out into the city to walk on the 15th of the month (at full moon); this granted, the king orders every one to stay that day in his house, and all the doors and windows to be shut; and capital punishment is the penalty of disobeying the king's command. (The like occurs again in the British legend of Godiva, the Countess of Mercia, in the eleventh century.) A minister, Ssaran by name (moon), cannot repress his curiosity, and observes her from a balcony; the girl makes signs to him, inviting him to join her; the wife of the inquisitive minister interprets the signs to him, and urges him to overtake the beautiful girl, giving him, at parting, a pearl of recognition. Light of the sun and Light of the moon meet at the foot of a tree, and spend the night until sunrise in amorous dalliance. One of the persons employed to guard the princess discovers this intrigue, and denounces it before the king; the wife of the minister Ssaran ascertains, by means of the pearl, that her husband is in danger; she rejoins him, disguises and disfigures him, suggesting a formula of oath by which Light of the sun swears that it was the monster, and the monster only she embraced; which seeming impossible to the king and courtiers, the minister Ssaran and Light of the sun are acquitted. (The aurora, or the sun, hides during the night, and no one sees, no one is allowed to see her; the god Lunus shows himself; he remains during the night with the sun, or with the solar aurora, whom no one can see during the night; the god Lunus then transforms and disfigures himself, so that he becomes unrecognisable, invisible; the guilty one glides away, and escapes; it then seems impossible that the god Lunus, who is no longer seen, can have been with the light of the sun; their loves having come to an end, the adulterers being separated, their guilt is no longer believed, their innocence is recognised, and the morality of the myth is left to take care of itself as best it can.)

But the Calmuc and Mongol stories _Siddhi-kûr_, and the history of _Ardshi Bordshi_, being, as they are, only paraphrases of Hindoo tales, would not alone suffice to prove the derivation from the zoological legends of Aryan mythology of the oral Turco-Finnic tradition, properly speaking. We must, therefore, search for the proofs of their influence in other quarters as well.

A Turanian story of the south of Siberia[334] combines together several of the mythical subjects which we are already acquainted with.

A poor old man and woman have three sons; the three sons go upon the mountain to dream; the two eldest dream of riches, and the third dreams that his father and mother are lean camels, his brothers two hungry wolves running towards the mountains, while he himself, between the sun and the moon, wears the morning star upon his forehead. The father orders the brothers to kill him; they dare not do so; they only expel him from the house, and kill the dog instead, the blood of which they take to their father, who, thinking it is his son's, says they have done well. The young man wanders about till he comes to a hut where a lame old man and a blind old woman are eating out of a golden cup, which of itself fills with meat as they empty it (the moon). The hungry youth helps himself to some of this meat, but the old man finds, as he continues to eat the food, that some one has put his teeth into it; with a hook, which he whirls around him, he clutches hold of the young man, who begs for his life, pledging himself to be the eye of her who has no eyes, and the foot of him who has no feet. This proposal pleases the old couple, and they adopt him as their son; he makes himself a bow and a wooden arrow, and goes to hunt wildfowl for their support. The old man lends him his iron-grey horse, one day old, but advises him to ride him only by day; the young man, thinking that by night he conceals treasures, cattle, and people, disobeys, and rides by night. What the horse then does we shall see in the next chapter. The youth fights and vanquishes the demon, by fastening one of his lips to the heavens, and the other to the earth; the defeated demon advises him to rub himself with the fat of his stomach; inside his stomach he will find a casket of silver, inside that a casket of gold, and inside that another casket of silver; he is to take it and throw it into the sea of milk. From the monster's stomach, cut open, come forth innumerable animals, men, treasures, and other objects. Some of the men say, "What noble man has delivered us from the black night? what noble man has shown us the clear day?" The youth finds in the caskets money and a white handkerchief, which he puts into his pocket; from the last casket come forth more men, animals, and valuables of every kind; he drives the white cattle before him and returns home, where the old couple are asleep. He opens the handkerchief, and finds in it the old woman's eyes; whilst he is smoking near the fire, the old people waken, see him, and embrace him. The old man then endows him with the power of transforming himself into a fox, a wolf, a lion, a vulture, and other shapes, at will. He goes, to find for himself a wife, to the residence of the prince Ai-Kan; the latter promises to give his daughter to whoever will bring him the necessary amount of gold. It is in the shape of a vulture[335] that the young man sets out to search for it; he then wins the young maiden who has the gold, and she, who is herself the daughter of Ai-Kan, says to him, "Thou art my husband." After various other transformations, in one of which the two lean camels reappear, _i.e._, his two parents, of whom he had dreamt, whom he loads with a sack, he ends by taking to himself another wife, the daughter of Kün-Kan, and he lives now with one, now with the other, to whom he gives the flesh of his own infanticide father to eat. Let us recapitulate the moments of this significant legend:--1st, We have the presage, the dream of the mountain-peak; 2d, The three brothers, the third of whom, predestined to good fortune, the others wish to sacrifice; 3d, The lame and the blind in the forest; 4th, The hero's hunt; 5th, The struggle with the monster of night; 6th, The treasures, spiritual and material, which come out of the monster; 7th, The cattle in conjunction with the sea of milk; 8th, The passage of the hero from the milky sea to the fireside, from the alba to the aurora, from the whitish sky to the reddish one; 9th, The awakening of the sleepers, and restoration of sight to the blind, whilst he sits by the fire, whilst the sun is united to the aurora; 10th, The transformation of the hero himself; 11th, Winning his bride, by procuring the necessary amount of gold; 12th, His marriage of two wives; 13th, His revenge on his persecuting father. The legend is in itself an epic poem, and we can only regret that the Altaic story-tellers did not give it a more artistic form than that in which it appears in the excellent collection of Radloff.

Another interesting Turanian story, in the same collection, which preserves several traces of the primitive myth, is another version of the story of the hero who solves the riddle proposed by his father-in-law, and thus wins his wife. A father has three sons; the first-born dreams that their cow has devoured a wolf; he goes to see, and finds it is true (the aurora destroys the night). We have already seen that, as the third brother is the wise child, so the first-born of the three is often the one who possesses the secret of solving riddles. The father of the three brothers wishes to obtain a wife for his first-born son, and the bride's father, to give her up, demands that the bridegroom's father should come to take her, arriving, the first time, with a fur-coat and without one (in the morning the old man, by the advice of the eldest son, departs wearing a coat of fur which seems to be one, but is not, being in reality a coat of mail), and coming, the second time, without touching the road, yet not off the road, on horseback, yet without horses (the old man, by the advice again of his first-born son, arrives at the father-in-law's abode, going on the side of the road, and riding on a stick; thus he obtains permission to take the bride away for his son).

Professor Schiefner gives a Finnic variation of the same story. A king orders the son of a peasant to come neither by day nor by night, neither by the road nor by the road-side, neither on horseback nor on foot, neither dressed nor naked, neither inside nor outside. The intelligent boy makes a robe of goat's skin, goes to the city lying in the bottom of a coffin, during the morning twilight, having a sieve fastened to one foot, and a brush to the other, and stops on the doorstep of the antechamber, with one leg out and the other in.

Such was the humour, and such the wisdom of our fathers; ingenuity was measured by skill in solving astronomical riddles. Now the riddles have taken another form; they are strokes of diplomacy, amorous hieroglyphs, ethical ambiguities, metaphysical nebulosities, which we, the men of progress, must solve; but not wishing to acknowledge our inferiority in acuteness to the children of the legends, we are fain to persuade ourselves that the new riddles are more obscure than the ancient.

In the Vedic riddles proposed to one another by the aurora and the sun, we have seen how they were solved in the morning by the nuptials of the guesser and the guessee. Thus in the two riddles which we have just described, the son of the old man and the child solve the riddle in the morning. As to the sieve, the brush, and the coffin, they are mythical furniture of great interest and obvious import. The nocturnal sky is the great coffin; to sweep the sky of night, we must have a brush; to sunder the good grain from the bad during the night, as the cruel mother-in-law commands, we must have a sieve; the child-sun arrives, in the twilight, in the bottom of the coffin, at the doorstep of the royal palace, and presents to the maiden aurora (the Vedic cleaner or purifier) the brush and the sieve. The sun, at twilight, is neither in nor out. In the second Scottish story of Mr J. F. Campbell, the giant commands the hero, among other things, to cleanse, in one day, the stables which had not been cleansed for seven years (Heraklés and Augeias).

But let us continue our subject, for the path is a long one.

A Mongol tradition, contained in the _Mongol Crestomathy_ of Papoff,[336] speaks of the boy who comes riding upon a black ox, instead of in a coffin.

We have seen above the cow who eats the wolf; in another Altaic legend we find an old woman who gives up her seven azure (dark-coloured) cows to be eaten by the seven wolves, in order that the latter may spare the child Kan Püdai, whom she had found at the foot of a tree; meanwhile the child, who has fed upon two hundred hares,[337] has become strong, and breaks his iron cradle (the iron sky of night is the cradle of the young sun); from the horns of six roebucks he makes himself a bow; from the skin of a colossal marine animal (the cloud, the gloomy one), he makes a string for the bow (the string of the Hindoo bow is also called _go_, _i.e._, cow, as a cloud in the sky, and as being formed from the hide of a cow); he rides upon the azure calf (the dark calf, which recalls our attention to the black ox, and leads us to conclude the colossal animal to have been a cow), and subdues and tames it; he then comes to a field of snow, upon which he breathes a black and numbing wind, and where he finds the seven wolves; he ties them to the tail of his calf, and drags them along the ground till they die. The boy continues his wild beast hunt; he kills the black and fat ones, and leaves the yellow and lean ones alone. He goes into a black sea, and erects there a black castle, into which he receives both the old woman who had sustained him, and his azure (_i.e._, dark-coloured) calf. Thereafter the young Kan Püdai, applying himself to warfare, forsakes or exchanges his calf for a horse. We shall see in the next chapter what he does with his horse;--suffice it to notice here, that, in the end, he meets the black bull, who will one day be the king of the Altaï. The soul of the black bull takes refuge in a red thread in the middle of the rainbow (in the popular belief of the East the rainbow was supposed to be a bridge, a road traversed by the souls of mortals); the young Kan Püdai transfixes it with his arrows. He wins the white cattle, kills the monstrous Kara Kula, and, taking the latter's wife and daughter with him, returns home; and for seven days there is eating, drinking, and festivity in the house of Kan Püdai. But up to this point it is not said that he has espoused the daughter and the wife of Kara Kula. Kan Püdai is, on the contrary, passionately enamoured of Tämän Ökö, the daughter of the sky (duhitar divas, or daughter of the sky, is the name usually given to the aurora in the Vedic hymns), and ascends, in order to secure her and make her his wife, to the third heaven (it is the third step of Vishnus; it is the third brother, the sun of the third night-watch, who carries off the palm against the gloomy monster). In order to become worthy of the daughter of the sky, Kan Püdai has to kill two monsters; to scatter ashes on the field of victory, and lead away from it the white cattle; to catch the three bears; to take the three black bulls and make them swallow three hills; to take the tiger and give it the grass of the three mountains to eat; to kill the whale in the azure sea (all different forms of one and the same mythical and heroic battle); and, finally, to play upon the mountain-peak with the golden-haired monster Andalma. He then obtains his bride, and returns with her to his own country, where he hunts, and makes war, and vanquishes all his enemies, until he grows old; he then renounces all except his old companion (the old sun and the old aurora meet again in the evening).

Here evidently the mythology is really zoological.

In the complicated legend of Ai-Kan, we have in the brother Altyn Ayak, who sleeps in the form of a golden cup, and who awakens to help Ai-Kan, a figure which, though not the same as, is similar to, that of the sleeping brother Kumbhakarnas (conch-ear) in the _Râmâyanam_, who awakens to help Râvanas. We have the inebriating liquor which gives strength to the hero, who is resuscitated three times from death, after having been the food of dogs; the wolves who devour Sary-Kan, or the fair-haired prince; the hero (the sun) who beats the wife (the aurora) given him by the two brothers (the Açvinâu); the friendly dog and cat; the golden cup in which the brother of Ai-Kan is shut up asleep, and which falls into the sea; the grateful animals which search for the cup; the gem found in the stomach of a fish (from the whale of the nocturnal ocean the gem comes forth); and the consequent awakening of the sleeping Altyn Ayak.

The following is from an Altaic saga, in the collection of Radloff:--Beyond the sea, on a rock surrounded with treasures, a dwarf girl is brought up, against whom aggressive warriors can prevail nothing. She sends all enemies away, after loading them with gold and silver, and placing on their heads part of the hair of her forehead, which proves to be sufficient to cover seven men. In this marvellous hair, in this enchanted maiden, and in the warriors who come by sea, who does not recognise the veil of the maiden aurora of the Vedâs, who uncovers her bosom before the sun her husband, and the sea which the warrior-sun crosses, and from which he emerges to come to the aurora?--who does not recognise the golden fleece, Jason, Medea, the Argonauts of Hellenic tradition?

In the Finnic mythology of the _Kalevala_[338] also, we have upon the mountain a good and pure hostess, a generous giver, from the golden windows of whose house are observed the women who give the wildfowl; but in this Finnic representation, it is not the heroic girl-aurora, it seems to me, we recognise, but the moon, Diana the huntress (the German _Helljäger_), who also appears on the mountain-peak, surrounded by the stars of the nocturnal forest, where the wildfowl is found, which she can therefore lavish upon the hero.

The Finns worship a thundering god, united with the clouds, who has the thunderbolt for his sword, and who is called Ukko,[339] father of Väinämöinen, the valorous and wise hero, who speaks in the womb of his mother, who performs prodigies when yet a child, and who produces the sun and the moon.

This child-hero occurs again in their dwarf-god (_pikku mies_), who, although, like the Hindoo Vishnus, he is but a span long, wields in his hand an axe the length of a man, with which he cuts down an oak-tree that no one had yet been able to bring to the ground. The sun-hero is little; but his ray, his thunderbolt, his weapon, his hand, lengthen themselves, extend themselves as far as the dwarf-hero can desire, in order to destroy the enemy, who wears here the well-known aspect of the trunk of a tree, or of a dark forest. The woodcutter is therefore a favourite figure in popular tradition. And the fact that Väinämöinen, having grown old and truthful in speech, cuts down in the _Kalevala_,[340] by the help of the little god, the prodigious oak, shows us that this little god is a new and junior form, a younger and victorious brother, or self-reproduction of the erewhile child-hero Väinämöinen, who has lived his life of a day. The valiant child-sun of morning has become the experienced old sun of evening; but as this old sun is not strong enough to cut down the oak-tree, under whose shadow he loses himself, he is obliged to become a child again to develope the requisite amount of strength; he needs a younger brother, a hero or dwarf-god, to free him from the evil shades of the forest of night. To this end he also invokes the sun and the moon to illumine the forest, and also the bear (the middle brother)--(in the _Kalevala_, of the three heroes it is the bear Ilmarinen who shows the greatest strength, and who wins the virgin for his bride)--in order that by his strength he may root up the tree. But to root up the tree is all that bears can do, while Väinämöinen wishes it to be cut down; and so this victorious enterprise is intrusted to the dwarf-god. Thus, without explicit mention of their names, we find the three brothers described in the entirely mythical epopee of the Finns.