In his _True History_ Lucian relates what he is at pains to point out
is a fictitious voyage to the moon and to various isles of the outer
seas. Grotesque half-human beings people his narrative. There are grape
vines, the upper parts of which have the shape of women, and these
entwine themselves about his men. There are Hippogypi, or men carried
upon vultures; Onoscileas, or ass-legged women, with long robes and a
free manner of harlotry; Bucephali, or men with bulls’ heads and horns
and lowing voices; Schorodomachi, or garlic-fighters; Psyllotoxotæ, or
flea-archers; Acroconopes, or gnat-riders; cloud-centaurs, nut-eaters,
pirates riding dolphins that neigh like horses, and a variety of other
fantastic creatures. The Samosatan wrote, he says, “about such things
as neither are nor ever can be.”
Yet races of men very much like these were long supposed to live
upon earth. Their descriptions are in the ancient histories, their
habitats are defined in the classic geographies, their effigies are
upon mediæval maps. As late as the century after Columbus, travelers
were still coming upon them, and repeating the interrogatory of _The
Tempest_, “What have we here, a man or a fish?” Perhaps twoscore of
these imaginary tribes are better documented, and not so long ago were
better known, than most of the tribes of real men and women upon the
earth; the documents are on dusty shelves of the larger libraries.
Some of the singular folk entered literature by the double gates of
mistaken etymology and literal acceptance of figurative language.
In the lineaments of others one discerns races that are still upon
earth, but divested of the masks of fable. In the rest one sees the
creative fancy of man following its natural bent--cartooning humanity
by exaggerating a limb or feature or by eliminating it; borrowing
something from the brute; making men taller or shorter, or longer-lived
or shorter-lived, than reality; fashioning the moon calves, the
Calibans; setting up a realm in which paradox is law. Thus mankind gave
itself new and interesting neighbors.
_Singular Speech_
Men judge one another by the testimony of the ear as well as of the
eye; and the speech of all these peoples, no less than their anatomy,
proclaimed the law of paradox. Sometimes the surprise was in hearing
Indian or Greek or Arab words from lips that seemed bestial rather
than human. Often no words came at all, but only unintelligible animal
sounds. This, indeed, was to be expected from races whose bodies varied
from the normal; but the list of prodigious folk is lengthened by the
addition of other men who, while looking like ordinary mortals, were
not quite human in their speech.
There were nations which used dumb-barter because they had no
language. There were tribes in Ethiopia which, as Pliny says, “have
to employ gesture by nodding the head and moving the limbs instead
of speech.” On the Atlantic seaboard were troglodytes that “have no
articulate voice, but only utter a kind of squeaking noise.” “Like the
screeching of bats,” says Herodotus of the same people. Another tribe
of troglodytes, according to John Lok, “have no speech, but rather a
grinning and chattering.” The Arabians dwell in caves and have shrill,
boyish voices, declares Jordanus. In the eastern mountains of Ind, says
Tauron, are the Choromandæ, a forest folk with hairy bodies, canine
teeth, and sea-green eyes who “screech in a frightful manner.” Kazwini
speaks of hairy little men in Ramni with a speech like the chirping
of birds. Carpini names among the peoples of Ind the dog-faced men
who speak two words in human wise and bark for the third. There were
people with a small hole in place of the mouth, whose conversation was
a whistling. Among the isles of Maundeville is one “clept Traconda,
where the Folk be as Beasts and unreasonable, and dwell in Caves; and
they eat Flesh of Serpents, and they eat but little; and they speak
Nought, but they hiss as Serpents do.” In a desert beyond paradise this
authority says there are wild men “that be hideous to look on, for they
be horned and they speak Nought, but they grunt as Pigs.” However,
there was speech in that country, for “Popinjays speak of their own
Nature and say ‘Salve’ to Men that go through the Deserts.”
Neither classical nor mediæval relators mention the device which has
given a South African tribe its name, and rumors of which may have
provided a basis for fable. Merolla, who went to the Congo in 1682,
heard that the Hottentots “have not the gift of human voice, but
understand each other by a sort of hissing tone and motion of the
lips.” This is the Hottentot “click” which the Portuguese called a kind
of stammering and the Dutch likened to the turkey’s gobble. It is made
by applying the tongue to the roof of the mouth, the teeth, or the
gums, and suddenly drawing it back. There are four of these clicks--the
dental, like the smack of a kiss; the palatal, like the tap of a
woodpecker; the cerebral, like the pop of a cork; and the lateral, like
the quack of a duck.
_The Dog-headed People_
The Amazon and pygmy, and certain tribes of the satyrs, had speech
entirely human. Because in them credulity has won unlooked-for triumphs
over skepticism, these three peoples, best known of the races of
legend, are reserved for separate treatment later. The men of another
race vie with the Amazons as figures in plastic art, although only
in its more grotesque manifestations. The Cynocephali, or dog-headed
people, writes Ctesias, are a swarthy and extremely just people living
in the mountains of northern India at the sources of the Hyparkhos. The
tribe numbers about one hundred and twenty thousand persons and pays
tribute to the King of the Indians.
These people have the heads of dogs, but with larger teeth, and the
bodies of men; and they have dog claws. They cannot use human speech,
although they understand it. They converse with one another by barking,
and with other people by barking and the sign language. They practice
no arts but live by the chase, using the bow and spear; and they can
outrun wild animals. Their staple food is raw flesh, which, however,
they roast in the sun. They rear numbers of sheep, goats, and asses
and drink the milk and whey of the ewes. They are fond of the fruit of
the siptakhora, the tree that produces amber. The surplus fruit they
dry and pack in hampers as the Greeks pack raisins. Every year they
freight rafts with the hampers and with two hundred and sixty talents
weight of amber, and a like weight of a pigment which they make from
a purple flower. This they convey as tribute to the Indian king. They
ship other raft-loads of the same commodities to their neighbors,
receiving bread and flour in return and a cloth made from a stuff grown
on trees (cotton). They also sell arms to other peoples.
The dog-headed people are troglodytes, sleeping on a litter of straw
or leaves spread in caves. The women bathe once a month, the men not
at all, merely washing their hands; but thrice a month they anoint
themselves with butter. They are clad in skins and the richest have
cotton raiment. Some of them live to be two hundred years old.
The inhabitants of the Andaman Islands, says Marco Polo, are a
savage race “having heads, eyes and teeth resembling those of the
canine species”; and they kill and eat strangers. Odoric is equally
uncomplimentary, but Ibn Batuta, always sensitive to female charm, says
their naked wives are of exquisite beauty. Carpini speaks of India’s
dog-faced men. Even Greenland has a similar legend as to an older race
of barbarians who had magic, but not the bow and arrow. These were men
with dog paws. They disappeared in battle with the Eskimos, or from
natural causes, since “the world was too small to hold both races.”
Myths of dog descent are found among the Aleuts, Dog-ribs, and Ojibwas
in North America, as well as in Madagascar, Java, the Nicobars, New
Guinea, Indo-China, and even Europe. In North America the wild dog
(coyote) frequently figures as the creator of mankind.
Sunamukha is the Indian name of the Cynocephali, and a manuscript of
the Prabhâsakhanda recites that this people lives on the Indus. What
Ctesias has set down seems to be an account of an actual race, a tribe
of black aborigines.
When Hayton, the intrepid traveler-king of Armenia, paid a visit in
the thirteenth century to Batu, the Mongol prince, he brought back a
related and still stranger story. Beyond Cathay, a journey of two years
and two months from Nakin, was a country where the women had the human
shape and speech, but the men were like hairy dogs and had no speech.
These dog-men repelled all strangers from their land, and supported
themselves and their wives by the chase, the men eating flesh raw, the
women cooking it. When children were born, the males had the shape of
dogs, the females that of women. The _Chinese Encyclopedia_ also has a
tale of the Kingdom of Dogs, and it was a Chinese traveler who broke up
this curious commonwealth. The women wished to escape from it and gave
him little sticks, asking him, when he went back to his native land, to
drop one of these every ten li. They got away by the trail he marked.
_The One-Eyed Arimaspians_
Lying between the gold-guarding griffins and the cannibal Issedones was
the country of the one-eyed Arimaspians. They first appear in a poem
of Aristeas of Proconesus, a semi-mythical person who made a northward
journey, as his verses declare, in a mood of “bacchic fury.” Herodotus
bases his account on these, but cannot persuade himself that there is
a race of men born with one eye who in all else resemble the rest of
mankind. Arimaspi, he says, is a word of Scythic origin, a compound of
_arima_ (one) and _spou_ (eye).
There Herodotus drops the legend, and after it has thriven in the tales
of the fabulists for some thousands of years, modern criticism takes
it up again from the same angle. It is suggested that, after all,
Arimaspi never meant one-eyed, and that the race, the tradition of
whose deformed aspect arose from a mistaken translation of its name, is
still in existence in the Russian tribe known as the Tsheremis, which
occupies the left bank of the Middle Volga. This is near enough to the
Ural gold districts to meet the general topography of the legend.
Strabo also describes a one-eyed nation, the Monomatti, with the ears
of dogs, bristling hair, and shaggy breasts.
_Folk That Live on Odors_
The folk that live on odors dwell, says Megasthenes, near the sources
of the Ganges. They have no mouths, hence their name of Astomi. Their
bodies are rough and hairy and they clothe themselves with a down
plucked from trees--silk or cotton. They use neither meat nor drink and
subsist only by breathing and by inhaling scents. When they start on a
long journey they lay in a supply of odoriferous roots, flowers, and
apples. But, says Pliny, “an odor which is a little more powerful than
usual easily destroys them.” Pope’s “die of a rose in aromatic pain”
may define such a fate.
According to other ancient writers the Astomi also supported life by
sniffing at raw meat, and their susceptibility to rank smells made it
hard to keep them alive in camp. In Ethiopia Pliny places a people
that “have the mouth grown together, and being destitute of nostrils,
breathe through one passage only, imbibing their drink through it by
means of a hollow stalk of the oat, which there grows spontaneously and
supplies them with its grain for food.” Maundeville removes the Astomi
to an island and gives them the stature of pygmies and a hissing speech.
_The Noseless Nations_
There were several noseless nations. The flexible-footed Scyritae, says
Megasthenes, had only two breathing orifices above the mouth; and he
sketches pygmies similarly made. Maundeville improves on the sketch:
“And in another Ile be Folk that have the Face all flat, all plain,
without Nose and without Mouth.” In contrast still another island had
“Folk of foul Fashion and Shape that have the lip above the Mouth so
great that when they sleep in the Sun they cover all the Face with that
lip.” Megasthenes had named and described these seventeen centuries
before. They were the Amycteres, with upper lips projecting far beyond
the lower--an omnivorous people, fond of raw meat, and short lived.
Tudela tells of desert-ranging, infidel Turks who worship the wind,
eschew bread and cooked meats, and, lacking noses, breathe through two
small holes. The Noseless People of the Eskimo shore are evil spirits
that drag fishermen to gloomy abodes under the sea.
To men with the bold Roman profile, the Levantine contour, or the
scimitar-shaped visage of the Sephardic Jew, Tartary’s small-nosed,
flat-faced peoples would indeed present a countenance very like a plane
surface. The scanty hair of the same peoples may be responsible for the
ancient notion of bald northern nations. The Eskimo legend suggests a
skeleton tenanted by a demon.
_Large-eared Races_
An Indian race called the Enotocoitæ had ears hanging down to their
feet--“great Ears and long that hang down to their Knees” is for once
the more restrained phrase of Maundeville. The philosophers who had
told Megasthenes of so many interesting folk told him also of these.
They could sleep upon their ears as upon a rug, or under them as under
a canopy, or inside them as in a sleeping bag. These appendages were
like winnowing fans, Tzetzes puts it. Their owners were so strong they
could pluck up trees. So could the elephant, which also has flapping
ears and a prolonged upper lip--the pattern, it would seem, for at
least two fables.
Ctesias describes a people who could blanket the upper parts of their
bodies with their ears. These were the Pandore, a mountain race who
lived to be two hundred years old, yet were destined evidently to
become extinct, for they numbered only thirty thousand persons and the
women bore children but once. The infants were hoary-headed at birth,
but at thirty the hair began to turn black, and at sixty no white hairs
were left. Five thousand bowmen and spearmen of the tribe followed the
Indian king. There was even a Scandinavian tribe with all-enveloping
ears, if Pliny had it right.
_Headless Peoples_
The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders.
--SHAKESPEARE: _Othello_.
To the west of the Troglodytes in distant mountains of Ind, says
Ctesias, live tribesmen who are without necks and have eyes in their
shoulders. In the north of Africa, says Pliny, are the Blemmyes who
“are said to have no heads, their mouths and eyes being seated in their
breasts.” These were also called the Acephalites. Maundeville shifts
their habitat. They occupy one of fifty-four great isles under the
jurisdiction of the king of Dondun. This island is somewhere toward the
south of Asia. In it dwell “Folk of foul Stature and of cursed Nature
that have no Heads. And their Eyes be in their Shoulders, and their
Mouths be round shapen, like an Horse-shoe amidst their Breasts.” The
_Arabian Nights_ locates these same people in the City of Brass. Abu
Mohammed, hight Lazybones, in quest of his wife, who has been carried
thither by a Marid, “heard a noise of cries and found himself in the
midst of a multitude of folk whose eyes were in their breasts.” They
gave him the news he sought and volunteered, “Now we be brethren of the
white serpent.” The Eskimos speak of a headless people living in the
moon and in remote regions of the earth.
Here is a story of a curious race domiciled by various writers in
various parts of the Old World, and yet lacking details to give it
verisimilitude. These are supplied by Sir Walter Raleigh in his report
on the wonders of Guiana. The headless people are Indians of the tribe
of Ewaipanoma living in a district near the Orinoco. He has seen none
of them, but “every childe in the provinces” affirms the story. Their
eyes are in their shoulders, their mouths in the middle of their
breasts, “and a long traine of haire groweth backward between their
shoulders.” A chief’s son whom they had made a prisoner told Raleigh
they were “the most mighty men of all the land, and use bowes, arrowes,
and clubbes thrice as big as any of Guiana.” This confirms, concludes
Raleigh, what was written of them by “Mandevile, whose reports were
holden for fables many yeeres.”
In the interior of Guiana Sir Walter had a trading transaction with
a nation of kindred appearance. He bartered jew’s-harps for fowls at
a town of five hundred houses, where he found Indians plentifully
provisioned with venison, fowls, and wine. He asked their chief “whence
hee had those Hennes.” The answer was that they were brought from a
mountain less than a mile away, “where were many Indians, yea so many
as grasse on the ground, and that these men had the points of their
shoulders higher than the Crownes of their heads, and had so many
Hennes as was wonderful; and if wee would have any wee should send them
Jewes harpes, for they would give for every one two Hennes. Wee tooke
an Indian, and gave him five hundred Harpes; the Hennes were so many
that hee brought us, as were not to be numbered.” Raleigh wanted to
visit these mountain Acephali, but was warned that they were in their
drunken feasts and would kill him.
One may explain the headless peoples about as one will. The Tartar
tribes north of India certainly have short necks. Thus Pliny on the
African Acephalites: “On the invasion of the Persians the Blemmyes were
in the habit of falling on one knee and bowing the head to the breast,
by which means, without injury to themselves, they afforded a passage
to the horses of the enemy.” Buffon accepts and interprets the Raleigh
tale. “This monstrous deformity cannot be natural,” he says. “It is
probable that savages, who are so pleased in disfiguring nature by
flattening, rounding, and lengthening the head, might likewise contrive
to sink it into the shoulders. These fantasies might arise from an idea
that, by rendering themselves deformed, they became more dreadful to
their enemies.” This passage would have interested Sir Walter.
_Half-men_
There were people in the Philippines whose bodies suffered temporary
subtraction at the other extremity. These were the asuangs--men who had
acquired powers of sorcery by eating human livers. When they willed
it their persons divided at the waist line, the lower part remaining
behind and the upper growing wings and long nails and a horrible black
tongue, and flying away on vampire errands. An orifice in the armpit
contained an oil which rendered this human bat invisible. If salt was
cast on his abandoned half he could not assemble himself on his return.
Wak-wak was one of his names. The reality behind this grim fiction was
the learned counselor, called the asuang, whom each datto had at his
court before the Spaniards came. His evil repute is a Spanish slander.
If there were men whose stature had been reduced as by a transverse
sweep of the knife, there were others whose appearance was as if they
had been sliced. These were the half-men of Moslem legend called the
Shikh and the Nesnas, each with a single arm, leg, and eye, as though
one man had been split in twain. The Zulus had the same story, perhaps
from Moslem sources. They tell of half-men discovering a Zulu girl in
a cave and thinking her two persons. When they discovered their error
they exclaimed: “The thing is pretty! But, oh, the two legs!” The fable
may have sprung from figurative speech, in which men of backward
culture are described as only half-men.
_Diminutive Husbands_
American Eskimo legends tell of a tribe called Ardnainiq living far
to the northwest, whereof the men, small as children and covered with
hair, were carried around in the hoods of their wives, who were of
normal size. The detail oddly parallels Darwin’s statement that he had
found a female crustacean of the common cirripedial character, “and in
two valves of her shell she had two little pockets, in each of which
she kept a little husband.”
_Eel-like Men_
A race of eel-like men, says Julius Scaliger, dwell in Malabar. They
have the serpent’s form, are eight feet long, and, while of horrible
aspect, are harmless unless provoked. They will “stand bolt upright for
hours together, gazing on the boyes at their sportes, never offring to
hurte any of them.” In the upright posture they lose the likeness of
serpents and “spread themselves into such a corpulent breadthe, that
had they feet they would seeme to be men.” This is a tale brought to
Europe by the Portuguese; and at a time when it was debated whether the
serpent assumed a human form in tempting Eve, it was thought this might
be the creature whose body Satan borrowed.
The tale is based in part on the cobra’s power to dilate its neck
into a broad hood. Back of it are Buddhist traditions of the Nagas, a
race of serpents that lived in dragon palaces under the earth. There
were naga-kings, and naga-maidens who assumed human form, had their
mortal lovers, and became the founders of dynasties. The original
inhabitants of the Andamans were reputed to have been of this race, and
according to a popular belief their descendants were oviparous. The
interpretation of this legend is complicated by the surmise that the
Nagas were actually an ancient, non-Aryan people whose emblem was the
cobra.
_Strangely Footed Folk_
Certain races the ancients classified and named according to their
means of getting over the ground. With his instinct for balanced
statement Pliny unearths a passage from Eudoxus which says that “in
the southern parts of India” the men have feet a cubit in length,
“while those of the women are so remarkably small that they are
called Struthopodes.” The word may mean either “sparrow-footed” or
“ostrich-footed.” In the context it probably means the former; the
dames with diminutive feet hopped around as sparrows do. It may be they
were Chinese women.
Near the Indian troglodytes, according to Ctesias, dwelt the Monocoli,
who had only one leg, but were able to leap with surprising agility.
These people were also called the Sciapodes, which means “making a
shadow with the foot.” It was their custom in the time of extreme heat
to lie on their backs and shield themselves from the sun, each under
the shade of his own foot. A later century knew the shadow-footed folk
as the men with parasol feet. Maundeville places them in Ethiopia. In
Armenia, or bordering upon it, the Mongols found another one-legged
nation, but with different structure. Its citizens had only one arm
also, which was attached to the middle of the breast, but they had
two gaits. Hopping, they covered ground with remarkable speed, and
when tired of hopping the men and women whirled themselves around like
cartwheels.
When the Norsemen were exploring America, they encountered a Uniped,
or one-legged man, who launched a lethal arrow at Thorwald Ericson, as
he sat at the boat helm. The dying leader drew it out and exclaimed,
“There is fat around my paunch; we have hit upon a faithful country,
and yet we are not like to get much profit by it.”
The stiff-legged men, Carpini heard, lived south of the country of the
Kara-Khitai, upon a great desert. They had no speech and no joints in
their limbs, and when they fell down somebody had to help them up. They
wore felt of camel’s hair and made wind shelters thereof. When wounded
in battle they stanched the blood with grass and fled swiftly away.
A related tale is told by Rubruquis, who had it from “a certain priest
of Cathaya who sat with me clothed in a red-coloured cloth.” When the
friar asked him whence he had such a color, “he told me that in the
east part of Cathaya there were high craggy rocks, wherein certain
creatures dwell, having in all parts the shape of men, but that they
bow not the knees, but leap instead of walking; which are not above one
cubit long, and their whole body is covered with hair, who have their
abode in caves, which no man can come unto; and they who hunt them, go
to them, and carry strong drink with them, and make pits in the rocks
like wells, which they fill with that strong drink. The hunters hide
themselves, and then these creatures come out of their holes and taste
the drink, and cry ‘chin-chin’ and drink till they are made drunk, so
that they sleep there. Then the hunters come and bind them hand and
foot, while they are sleeping, and afterwards open the veins in their
neck and draw forth three or four drops of blood from every one, and
let them go free; and that blood, as he told me, is the most precious
purple.”
Megasthenes describes a race of Indians living upon a mountain called
Nulo, who had their feet turned backward with the heel in front and
with eight toes on each foot. Pliny places this race “beyond the
other Scythian Anthropophagi in a country called Abarimon situate in
a certain great valley of Mount Imaus” (Himalayas). They had great
rapidity of movement and wandered about indiscriminately with the wild
beasts. The fable may have originated in the Caucasus, where there is
still a tradition that dæmons take the shapes of armed men, and have
their feet reverted. Farther north dwelt an ox-footed race.
Classic note is made of two writhing nations. The Scyritæ of India who
“have merely holes in their faces instead of nostrils” have “flexible
feet like the body of the serpent,” says Megasthenes. There was also
the thong-footed people or Himantopodes, residents of northern Africa,
who moved with a serpentine, crawling gait. This may be a traveler’s
impression of some sinuous dance of the desert.
Under the hand of Maundeville the centaurs pass out of mythology into
history. The “Folk that have Horses’ Feet” are in his collection of
marvelous islanders: “And they be strong and mighty and swift Runners,
for they take wild Beasts with Running and eat them.” These are the
Hippopodes of Pliny, tenants of a Baltic island. A related folk are
the islanders permanently mounted on ostriches, with which they seem
to form one body. Kazwini, who records this Arab legend, says they
devour the bodies of drowned persons cast up by the sea. On another
isle Sir John seems for the once to have invented a people rather than
revived a legend. Here be “Folk that go always upon their Knees full
marvellously. And at every Pace that they go, it seemeth that they
would fall.”
In Ethiopia, “on that side of the Nile which extends along the borders
of the Southern Ocean,” Pliny domiciles the Artabatitæ, who have four
feet and wander about after the manner of wild beasts. Maundeville is
more detailed: “And they be all skinned and feathered, and they would
leap lightly from Tree to Tree.” Farther south were the Aigamuxa, theme
of a Hottentot story cycle, whose eyes were in the back of their feet.
Regarding human beings as zebras, they hunted them down and tore them
to pieces.
Chinese marvel tales describe a race of people living somewhere in the
west. They have a hole right through their bodies at the breast. When
their mandarins would take the air, they thrust a stick through the
aperture, and two domestics carry them so. “If the bearers are strong
enough,” says Huc, “they often string on several gentlemen at once.”
_In the Russian East_
There was an east other than the sun-bathed lands whose fabulous
peoples are in literature. It lay just beyond northern Europe, on the
farther flanks of the Urals and beside the Obi. To the Russians of the
Middle Ages it was a land of strange races and weird happenings. About
these a body of legends grew up which in a measure parallel the classic
stories, but give them backgrounds of ice and snow and add new actors
and enriching details. A Russian manuscript of the fifteenth century,
found at Novgorod a few years ago and entitled “The Unknown Peoples of
the East,” pictures these forgotten folk. Nine different races, all
called Samoyeds, are described, and six are races of marvel.
There were Samoyeds who shed their skins like snakes. For a month each
year they stayed in the water, avoiding dry land, lest their bodies
crack open. The Russian anthropologist, Professor Anutschin, whose
interpretation of the narrative is followed here, says that these
are natives who fish and hunt in the watery domain of the tundras,
where the summer attacks of mosquitoes and horse flies give their
skins a rough and bloody aspect, as if cracking before sloughing off.
There were also Samoyeds like other people from the navel up, but all
shaggy-haired from the navel down--in reality wearing trousers of
reindeer skins with the hair outside. There were other and speechless
Samoyeds with their mouths on the top of their heads. When they would
eat, says the Novgorod manuscript, “they crumble the meat or fish,
stick it under their fur caps and then move their shoulders up and
down.” This is the account of a people whose speech the Russians did
not understand, who wore the head skin of the reindeer, ears and all,
for a cap, and whose sack-like garments had collars so high as to
conceal their mouths.
There were also headless Samoyeds with eyes in their breasts and the
mouth between the shoulders, and their diet was raw reindeer heads and
bones; in warfare and the chase their weapon was an iron tube through
which they drove an iron arrow by hitting it with a hammer. This, it
is thought, was an early race of ironworkers who wore peaked head-caps
which concealed the shoulder line and made the face of the wearer seem
to be in the breast. Another explanation is that several Siberian
tribes had faces painted on the leathern fronts of their garments.
The descriptive phrase, “with the face upon the breast,” might easily
become “headless” when translated into Russian.
Then there was a strange Samoyed race--an independent creation of
Russian fantasy--the members of which died every winter and revived
two months afterward, if let alone. When the fatal hour had come, they
sat down and a stream of water gushed from their nostrils and froze to
the ground. If a stranger came from another land and broke this icicle
or removed it, the Samoyed never woke up. If he merely jarred it, the
refrigerated native would open his eyes and ask, “Why, little friend,
have you disfigured me?” Others were brought to life by the warmth
of the spring sun. According to a German writer the day of death was
November twenty-seven and revival came on the twenty-third day of the
following April. It is supposed that the wooden idols scattered over
the Obi country, three hundred of them on a single river island, were
the basis of this curious story. Covered with ice and drifted snow,
they looked human enough, and there were native reports that these were
ancestral Samoyeds.
[Illustration: _The First People Engaged in Such Cosmic Adventures as
Warfare Against Stone Giants_]
One race of Samoyeds, says the Novgorod manuscript, travels day and
night with torches by underground ways and comes out upon a sea over
which a strange light falls and beside which is a great fortress and
a deserted city. When the stranger approaches he hears a tumult in
the streets, but, entering, he sees no one and the clamor dies away.
In each house, however, there are things for him to eat and drink,
and other commodities. He takes what he needs, lays down money in its
stead, and goes his way. Should he fail to make payment, the wares
he takes with him vanish and return to the silent town. And when the
stranger leaves, “then he hears again a tumult as in other inhabited
cities.”
This story has the Celtic magic and might be a chapter from Malory.
It is thought that the mysterious sea is Lake Koliwan in the western
Altais. Granite rocks in the semblance of towers, terraces, and
dismantled fortifications rise from its shores, and in the hills are
the pits and galleries of a copper camp long abandoned by the Tchudi.
These are the underground Samoyed ways of legend. Perhaps dumb barter
was once carried on here. The radiance across the lake, if not the
northern lights, may have glanced from some Russian tale, like that in
which Bishop Theodor saw the earthly paradise on a mountain side with
an azure light upon it.
_New World Prodigies_
The New World, it has been seen, had its own prodigious peoples. In
Spanish America their legends are overlaid with imported material, but
elsewhere there is little alien alloy. North America has traditions
of stone giants, pygmies, one-eyed cannibals, hermaphrodites,
flint-armored warriors, double-headed men, dog-headed tribes. There are
also storm-raising mermen, phantom boatmen, underwater folk, otter-men,
seal-men, pug-nosed people, skeletons that resume human shape at night,
talking skulls. Many stories tell of the marriage of mortals with
unearthly beings, of the living with the dead, and of the union of
women with animals. The best known Indian myth has two versions, in
one of which the people of the First Age had human forms but an animal
nature, and took the animal guise before the real men appeared; in the
other, which is of the southwest, the first people had bestial forms
but a human nature, and presently laid aside their animal masks. In
the latter version there was an Amazonian phase in the ascent of the
primitive people. Their women seceded from society and lived with a
water monster. Hunger drove them back, but they brought into the world
a number of prodigious beings whom their lords had to destroy.
In the First People who had the human form but became animals the
Eastern Algonquins and the Pacific tribes have a myth which ranks
beside the Greek myth of the Titans that were before Zeus, and
the myths of the Golden Age. Its quality is at once haunting and
challenging, the more so because these dawn-folk are nowhere described.
“In old times,” a Micmac Indian told Leland, “men were as animals and
animals as men; how this was no one knows. But it is told that all were
at first men, and as they gave themselves up to this and that desire,
and to naught else, they became beasts. But before this came to pass,
they could change to one or the other form; yet even as men there was
always something which showed what they were.”
The story cycle of the Mewan Indians of California pictured the First
People as living in great ceremonial houses and engaging in such cosmic
adventures as sun-capture, fire-theft, and warfare against stone
giants. How nearly human and how much animal they were the Western
Indians left in doubt. When they became animals and went forth from
the ceremonial house, they carried to their future haunts not only
their old names, but their distinctive traits, such as Grizzly Bear’s
appetite for acorns, Frog’s aptitude at water jumps and the clamorous
voice of Sandhill Crane. After the transformation was effected--and
only casual reasons for it are suggested--man was created. Coyote made
him out of feathers, or sticks, or clay, and Lizard gave him five
fingers because he had five himself and knew their value. In Popol
Vuh, the Guatemalan saga, the First People were manikins that the
gods carved out of wood and endowed with life; but so frivolous and
irreverent were these that a flood was invoked to destroy them; “the
little monkeys that live in the woods” are descended from survivors.
All over North America were stories of stone giants, and crudely
archaic as are these stalking figures of legend, the myth has the
elemental vigor of Norse epic. According to the Iroquois, a cannibal
race--“stonish giants,” Schoolcraft calls them--who made their bodies
hard by rolling in sand, overran America seventeen centuries ago, and
nearly exterminated the natives. The Holder of the Heavens took giant
form in order to destroy them. These are the icy-hearted Chenoos of
Algonquin story who lived in northern Canada; in summer they rubbed
themselves with fir balsam and rolled on the ground so that moss,
leaves, and twigs adhered to them. The California Indians have tales of
a cannibal rock-giant who went abroad with a rock basket on his back
into which he tossed people. There was another stony Titan, tall as a
pine tree but vulnerable under the heel. Only after the First People
had killed him by planting sharp sticks in his path did they elect to
become animals. The theory that these clanking folk typify mountains is
not convincing.
Maundeville has a tale of a bodiless head, but North America is the
true home of this weird legend. Glooskap, culture hero of the Eastern
Algonquins, played at ball with a snapping skull. There were Indians
who went all to pieces leaving only the head, which ate the other
members. Everywhere stories were told of heads that pursued people and
devoured them. The skull of a mother chased her children over hill and
plain. In nightmare flight the heroes of Indian epic cast obstacles or
attractive things behind them to delay or divert the rolling skull.
Reading a new meaning into the legend, the Arapahoes used it to explain
the railroad.
A Sioux story describes a duel between the Monster and the Bladder,
twin sons of the Turtle. They kept striking off each other’s heads,
and these flew into the sky and, falling back, adhered again to their
necks. But at length Bladder pushed Monster’s body aside, and the head
rebounded, and to this day it rebounds, for it is the sun, and Bladder
is the sky; but only to old men or wise is this part of the story told.
It may be that these tales derive from the conception of the sun and
moon as traveling heads, or from the use of a skull as tribal medicine,
or from the war custom of decapitation later supplanted by scalping,
or even from the appearance of the tumbleweed of the western prairies,
which wanders like a ball before the autumn wind.