The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, vol 13 by Sir Richard Francis Burton (summer reading list txt) 📕

and Bhadra Datta, heard from munis accounts of the pains of the wicked, and wishing to see for himself, went to Yama-puri. His coming had been announced by N�rada. Yama showed the stranger the different lots of mankind in a future state, in details. S�nanda was touched with compassion for the miseries that he witnessed, and by the use of the five and six lettered spells he delivered those imprisoned souls and took them with him to Kailasa. Yama went to Siva and complained, but Siva civilly dismissed the appeal.—Under the title of “The Harrowing of Hell,” the apocryphal Christian legend was the theme of a Miracle Play in England during the Middle Ages, and indeed it seems to have been, in different forms, a popular favourite throughout Europe. Thus in a German tale Strong Hans goes to the Devil in hell and wants to serve him, and sees the pains in which souls are imprisoned standing beside the fire. Full of pity, he lifts up the lids and sets the souls free, on which the Devil at once drives him away. A somewhat similar notion occurs in an Icelandic tale of the Sin Sacks, in Powell and Magn�sson’s collection (second series, p. 48). And in T. Crofton Croker’s “Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland,” ed. 1828, Part. ii. p.

30 ff., we read of Soul Cages at the bottom of the sea, containing the spirits of drowned sailors, which the bold hero Jack Docherty set free.

 

[FN#413] The Rabbins relate that among the Queen of Sheba’s tests of Solomon’s sagacity she brought before him a number of boys and girls apparelled all alike, and desired him to distinguish those of one sex from those of the other, as they stood in his presence. Solomon caused a large basin of water to be fetched in, and ordered them all to wash their hands. By this expedient he discovered the boys from the girls, since the former washed merely their hands, while the latter washed also their arms.

 

[FN#414] Dr. W. Grimm, in the notes to his “Kinder und Hausm�rchen,” referring to the German form of the story (which we shall come to by and-by), says, “The Parrot, which is the fourth story in the Persian Touti Nameh, bears some resemblance to this”—the Parrot is the reciter of all the stories in the collection, not the title of this particular tale.

 

[FN#415] To Sir Richard Burton’s interesting note on the antiquity of the lens and its applied use to the telescope and microscope may be added a passage or two from Sir William Drummond’s “Origines; or, Remarks on the Origin of several Empires, States, and Cities,” 1825, vol. ii. pp. 246-250. This writer appears to think that telescopes were not unknown to the ancients and adduces plausible evidence in support of his opinion. “Moschopalus,” he says, “an ancient grammarian, mentions four instruments with which the astronomers of antiquity were accustomed to observe the stars—the catoptron, the dioptron, the eisoptron and the enoptron.” He supposes the catoptron to have been the same with the astrolabe. “The dioptron seems to have been so named from a tube through which the observer looked. Were the other two instruments named from objects being reflected in a mirror placed within them? Aristotle says that the Greeks employed mirrors when they surveyed the celestial appearances.

May we not conclude from this circumstance that astronomers were not always satisfied with looking through empty tubes?” He thinks the ancients were acquainted with lenses and has collected passages from various writers which corroborate his opinion, besides referring to the numerous uses to which glass was applied in the most remote ages. He goes on to say: “Some of the observations of the ancients must appear very extraordinary, if magnifying glasses had never been known among them. The boldness with which the Pythagoreans asserted that the surface of the moon was diversified by mountains and valleys can hardly be accounted for, unless Pythagoras had been convinced of the fact by the help of telescopes, which might have existed in the observatories of Egypt and Chaldea before those countries were conquered and laid waste by the Persians. Pliny (L. 11) says that 1600 stars had been counted in the 72 constellations, and by this expression I can only understand him to mean the 72 dodecans into which the Egyptians and Chaldeans divided the zodiac. Now this number of stars could never have been counted in the zodiac without the assistance of glasses. Ptolemy reckoned a much less number for the whole heavens The missionaries found many more stars marked in the Chinese charts of the heavens than formerly existed in those which were in use in Europe. Suidas, at the word {Greek} (glass), indicates, in explaining a passage in Aristophanes, that burning mirrors were occasionally made of glass. Now how can we suppose burning mirrors to have been made of glass without supposing the magnifying powers of glass to have been known? The Greeks, as Plutarch affirms, employed metallic mirrors, either plane, or convex, or concave, according to the use for which they were intended. If they could make burning mirrors of glass, they could have given any of these forms to glass. How then could they have avoided observing that two glasses, one convex and the other concave, placed at a certain distance from each other, magnified objects seen through them?

Numerous experiments must have been made with concave and convex glasses before burning mirrors made of glass could have been employed. If astronomers never knew the magnifying powers of glass, and never placed lenses in the tubes of the dioptrons, what does Strabo (L. 3, c. 138) mean when he says: ‘Vapours produce the same effects as the tubes in magnifying objects of vision by refraction?’”

 

Mr. W. F. Thompson, in his translation of the “Ahlak-i-Jalaly,”

from the Persian of Fak�r J�n� Muhammad (15th century), has the following note on the J�m-i-J�mshid and other magical mirrors: “J�msh�d, the fourth of the Kaianian dynasty, the Soloman of the Persians. His cup was said to mirror the world, so that he could observe all that was passing elsewhere—a fiction of his own for state purposes, apparently, backed by the use of artificial mirrors. Niz�m� tells that Alexander invented the steel mirror, by which he means, of course, that improved reflectors were used for telescopy in the days of Archimedes, but not early enough to have assisted J�msh�d, who belongs to the fabulous and unchronicled age. In the romance of Beyjan and Manija, in the “Shah N�ma,” this mirror is used by the great Khosr� for the purpose of discovering the place of the hero’s imprisonment: “The mirror in his hand revolving shook, And earth’s whole surface glimmered in his look; Nor less the secrets of the starry sphere, The what, the when, the bow depicted clear, From orbs celestial to the blade of grass, All nature floated in the magic glass.”

 

[FN#416] We have been told this king had three daughters.

 

[FN#417] See in “Blackwood’s Magazine,” vol. iv., 1818, 1819, a translation, from the Danish of J. L. Rasmussen, of “An Historical and Geographical Essay on the trade and commerce of the Arabians and Persians with Russia and Scandinavia during the Middle Ages.—But learned Icelanders, while England was still semi-civilized, frequently made very long journeys into foreign lands: after performing the pilgrimage to Rome, they went to Syria, and some penetrated into Central Asia.

 

[FN#418] This, of course, is absurd, as each was equally interested in the business; but it seems to indicate a vague reminiscence of the adventures of the Princes in the story of The Envious Sisters.

 

[FN#419] There is a naivete about this that is particularly refreshing.

 

[FN#420] This recalls the fairy Meliora, in the romance of Partenopex de Blois. who “knew of ancient tales a countless store.”

 

[FN#421] In a Norwegian folk-tale the hero receives from a dwarf a magic ship that could enlarge itself so as to contain any number of men, yet could be earned m the pocket.

 

[FN#422] The Water of Life, the Water of Immortality, the Fountain of Youth—a favourite and wide-spread myth during the Middle Ages. In the romance of Sir Huon of Bordeaux the hero boldly encounters a griffin, and after a desperate fight, in which he is sorely wounded, slays the monster. Close at hand he discovers a clear fountain, at the bottom of which is a gravel of precious stones. “Then he dyde of his helme and dranke of the water his fyll, and he had no sooner dranke therof but incontynent he was hole of all his woundys.” Nothing more frequently occurs in folk tales than for the hero to be required to perform three difficult and dangerous tasks—sometimes impossible, without supernatural assistance.

 

[FN#423] “Say, will a courser of the Sun All gently with a dray-horse run?”

 

[FN#424] Ting: assembly of notables—of udallers, &c. The term survives in our word hustings; and in Ding-wall—Ting-val; where tings were held.

 

[FN#425] The last of the old Dublin ballad-singers, who assumed the respectable name of Zozimus, and is said to have been the author of the ditties wherewith he charmed his street auditors, was wont to chant the legend of the Finding of Moses in a version which has at least the merit of originality: “In Egypt’s land, upon the banks of Nile, King Pharaoh’s daughter went to bathe in style; She took her dip, then went unto the land, And, to dry her royal pelt, she ran along the strand.

 

A bulrush tripped her, whereupon she saw A smiling baby in a wad of straw; She took it up, and said, in accents mild—

Tare an’ agurs, girls! which av yez owns this child?”

 

The Babylonian analogue, as translated by the Rev. Prof. A. H.

Sayce, in the first vol. of the “Folk-Lore Journal” (1883), is as follows:

 

“Sargon, the mighty monarch, the King of Agan�, am I. My mother was a princess; my father I knew not, my father’s brother loved the mountain-land. In the city of Azipiranu, which on the bank of the Euphrates lies, my mother, the princess, conceived me, in an inaccessible spot she brought me forth. She placed me in a basket of rushes, with bitumen the door of my ark she closed. She launched me on the river, which drowned me not. The river bore me along, to Akki, the irrigator, it brought me. Akki, the irrigator, in the tenderness of his heart, lifted me up. Akki, the irrigator, as his own child brought me up. Akki, the irrigator, as his gardener appointed me, and in my gardenership the goddess Istar loved me. For 45 years the kingdom I have ruled, and the black headed (Accadian) race have governed.”

 

[FN#426] This strange notion may have been derived from some Eastern source, since it occurs in Indian fictions; for example, in Dr. R�jendral�la Mitra’s “Sanskrit Buddhist Literature of Nep�l,” p. 304, we read that “there lived in the village of V�sava a rich householder who had born unto him a son with a jewelled ring in his ear.” And in the “Mah�bh�rata” we are told of a king who had a son from whose body issued nothing but gold—

the prototype of the gold-laying goose.

 

[FN#427] Connected with this romance is the tale of “The Six Swans,” in Grimm’s collection— see Mrs. Hunt’s English translation, vol. i. p. 192.

 

[FN#428] Mahb�b. a piece of gold, value about 10 francs, replaces the din�r of old tales. Those in Egypt are all since the time of the Turks: 9, 7, or 6 1/2 frs. according to issue.—Note by Spitta Bey.

 

[FN#429] Here again we have the old superstition of “blood speaking to blood,” referred to by Sir Richard, ante, p. 347, note 1. It often occurs in Asiatic stories. Thus in the Persian “Bakhty�r