THE ARABIAN MYTHS.
AND when we turn to the Arabian tales, we not only see, by their
identity with the Hindoo and Slavonic legends, that they are of great
antiquity, dating back to the time when these widely diverse races,
Aryan and Semitic, were one, but we find in them many allusions to
the battle between good and evil, between God and the serpent.
Abou Mohammed the Lazy, who is a very great magician, with power over
the forces of the air and the Afrites, beholds a battle between two
great snakes, one tawny-colored, the other white. The tawny serpent
is overcoming the white one; but Abou Mohammed kills it with a rock.
"The white serpent" (the sun) "departed and was _absent for a while_,
but returned"; and the tawny serpent was torn to pieces and scattered
over the land, and nothing remained of her but her head.
And then we have the legend of "the City of Brass," or bronze. It
relates to "an ancient age and period in the olden time." One of the
caliphs, Abdelmelik, the son of Marwan, has heard from antiquity that
Solomon, (Solomon is, in Arabic, like Charlemagne in the middle-age
myths of Europe, the synonym for everything venerable and powerful,)
had imprisoned genii in bottles of brass, and the Caliph desired to
procure some of these bottles.
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Then Talib (the son of Sahl) tells the Caliph that a man once voyaged
to the Island of Sicily, but a wind arose and blew him away "to one
of the lands of God."
"This happened during the black darkness of night."
It was a remote, unfrequented land; the people were black and lived
in caves, and were naked and of strange speech. They cast their nets
for Talib and brought up a bottle of brass or bronze, containing one
of the imprisoned genii, who came out of it, as a blue smoke, and
cried in a horrible voice, "Repentance, repentance, O prophet of God!"
All this was in a Western land. And Abdelmelik sent Talib to find
this land. It was "a journey of two years and some months going, and
the like returning." It was in a far country. They first reach a
deserted palace in a desolate land, the palace of "Kosh the son of
Sheddad the son of Ad, the greater." He read an inscription:
"Here was a people, whom, after their works, thou shalt see wept over
for their lost dominion.
"And in this palace is the last information respecting lords
collected in the dust.
"Death hath destroyed them and disunited them, and in the dust they
have lost what they amassed."
Talib goes on with his troops, until they come to a great pillar of
black stone, sunk into which, to his armpits, was a mighty creature;
"he had two wings and four arms; two of them like those of the sons
of Adam, and two like the fore-legs of lions with claws. He had hair
upon his head like the tails of horses, and two eyes like two burning
coals, and he had a third eye in his forehead, like the eye of the
lynx, from which there appeared sparks of fire."
He was the imprisoned comet-monster, and these
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arms and eyes, darting fire, remind us of the description given of
the apostate angel in the other legends:
###
THE AFRITE IN THE PILLAR.
"He was tall and black; and he was crying out 'Extolled be the
perfection of my Lord, who hath appointed me this severe affliction
and painful torture until the day of resurrection!'"
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The party of Talib were stupefied at the sight and retreated in
fright. And the wise man, the Sheik Abdelsamad, one of the party,
drew near and asked the imprisoned monster his history. And he
replied:
"I am an Afrite of the genii, and my name is Dahish, the son of
Elamash, and I am restrained here by the majesty of God.
"There belonged to one of the sons of Eblis an idol of red carnelian,
of which I was made guardian; and there used to worship it one of the
kings of the sea, of illustrious dignity, of great glory, leading,
among his troops of the genii, a million warriors who smote with
swords before him, and who answered his prayer in cases of
difficulty. These genii, who obeyed him, were under my command and
authority, following my words when I ordered them: all of them were
in rebellion against Solomon the son of David (on both of whom be
peace!), and I used to enter the body of the idol, to command them
and to forbid them."
Solomon sent word to this king of the sea that he must give up the
worship of the idol of red carnelian; the king consulted the idol,
and this Afrite, speaking through the idol, encouraged the king to
refuse. What,--he said to him,--can Solomon do to thee, "when thou
art in the midst of this great sea?" And so Solomon came to compel
the island-race to worship the true God; he surrounded his island,
and filled the land with his troops, assisted by birds and wild
beasts, and a dreadful battle followed in the air:
"After this they came upon us all together, and we contended with him
in a wide tract _for a period of two days_; and calamity befell us on
the third day, and the decree of God (whose name be exalted!) was
executed among us. The first who charged upon Solomon were I and my
troops: and I said to my companions, 'Keep in your places in the
battle-field while I go forth to them and challenge _Dimiriat_."'
(Dimiriat was the Sun, the
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bright one.) "And lo, _he came forth, like a great mountain, his
fires flaming and his smoke ascending;_ and he approached and _smote
me with a flaming fire; and his arrow prevailed over my fire_. He
cried out at me _with a prodigious cry_, so that I imagined the
_heaven had fallen_ and closed over me, and the mountains shook at
his voice.
###
DAHISH OVERTAKEN BY DIMIRIAT.
Then he commanded his companions, and they charged upon us all
together: we also charged upon them, and we cried out one to another:
_the fires rose and the smoke ascended_, the hearts of the combatants
were almost cleft asunder, and the battle raged. The birds fought in
the air, and the wild _beasts in the dust_; and I contended with
Dimiriat until he wearied me and I wearied him;
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after which I became weak, and my companions and troops were
enervated and my tribes were routed."
The birds tore out the eyes of the demons, and cut them in pieces
until _the earth was covered with the fragments_, like the trunks of
palm-trees. "As for me, I flew from before Dimiriat, but he followed
me a journey of three months until he overtook me." And Solomon
hollowed out the black pillar, and sealed him in it with his signet,
and chained him until the day of resurrection.
And Talib and his party go on still farther, and find "the City of
Brass," a weird, mysterious, lost city, in a desolate land; silent,
and all its people dead; a city once of high civilization, with
mighty, brazen walls and vast machinery and great mysteries; a city
whose inhabitants had perished suddenly in some great calamity. And
on the walls were tablets, and on one of them were inscribed these
solemn words:
"'Where are the kings and the peoples of the earth? They have quitted
that which they have built and peopled. And in the grave they are
pledged for their past actions. There, after destruction, they have
become putrid corpses. Where are the troops? They repelled not nor
profited. And where is that which they collected and boarded? The
decree of the Lord of the Throne _surprised them_. Neither riches nor
refuge saved them from it.'
"And they saw the merchants dead in their shops; their skins were
dried, and their bones were carious, and they had become examples to
him who would be admonished."
Everywhere were the dead, "lying upon skins, and appearing almost as
if they would speak."
Their death seems to have been due to a long period of terrible heat
and drought.
On a couch was a damsel more beautiful than all the daughters of
Adam; she was embalmed, so as to preserve all her charms. Her eyes
were of glass, filled with quick
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silver, which seemed to follow the beholder's every motion. Near her
was a tablet of gold, on which was inscribed:
"In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful.... the Lord of
lords, the Cause of causes; the Everlasting, the Eternal. . . . Where
are the kings of the regions of the earth" Where are the Amalekites?
Where are the mighty monarchs? The mansions are void of their
presence, and they have quitted their families and homes. Where are
the kings of the foreigners and the Arabs? They have all died and
become rotten bones. Where are the lords of high degree? They have
all died. Where are Korah and Haman? Where is Sheddad, the son of
Add? Where are Canaan and Pharaoh? God hath _cut them off_, and it is
he who cutteth short the lives of mankind, and he hath made the
mansions to be void for their presence. . . . I am Tadmor, the
daughter of the king of the Amalekites, of those who ruled the
countries with equity: I possessed what none of the kings possessed,"
(i. e., in extent of dominion,) "and ruled with justice, and acted
impartially toward my subjects; I gave and bestowed; and I lived a
longtime in the enjoyment of happiness and an easy life, and
emancipated both female and male slaves. Thus I did until _the
summoner of death came, and disasters occurred before me_. And the
cause was this: _Seven years_ in succession came upon us, _during
which no water descended on us from heaven, nor did any grass grow
for us on the face of the earth_. So we ate what food we had in our
dwellings, and after that we fell upon the beasts and ate, and there
remained nothing. Upon this, therefore, I caused the wealth to be
brought, and meted it with a measure, and sent it, by trusty men, who
went about with it through _all regions_, not leaving unvisited a
single large city, to seek for some food. _But they found it not_,
and they returned to us with the wealth after a long absence. So,
thereupon we exposed to view our riches and our treasures, locked the
gates of the fortresses in our city, and submitted ourselves to the
decrees of our Lord; and thus we all died, as thou beholdest, and
left what we had built and what we had treasured."
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And this strange tale has relations to all the other legends.
Here we have the great demon, darting fire, blazing, smoking, the
destructive one; the rebel against the good God. He is overthrown by
the bright-shining one, Dimiriat, the same as the Dev-Mrityu of the
Hindoos; he and his forces are cut to pieces, and scattered over the
land, and he, after being chased for months through space, is
captured and chained. Associated with all this is a people of the
Bronze Age--a highly civilized people; a people living on an island
in the Western Sea, who perished by a calamity which came on them
suddenly; "a summoner of death" came and brought disasters; and then
followed a long period of terrible heat and drought, in which not
they alone, but all nations and cities, were starved by the drying up
of the earth. The demon had devoured the cows-the clouds; like Cacus,
he had dragged them backward into his den, and no Hercules, no Indra,
had arisen to hurl the electric bolt that was to kill the heat,
restore the clouds, and bring upon the parched earth the grateful
rain. And so this Bronze-Age race spread out their useless treasures
to the sun, and, despite their miseries, they praise the God of gods,
the Cause of causes, the merciful, the compassionate, and lie down to
die.
And in the evil-one, captured and chained and sealed by Solomon, we
seem to have the same thing prefigured in Revelation, xx, 2:
"2. And he laid hold on the dragon, the old serpent, which is the
devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years.
"3. And he cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set
a seal upon him, that he should no more seduce the nations."
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