Page:Curious myths of the Middle Ages (1876).djvu/292

 idols, they say, returned during this flood to their places, because they had been a little shaken. This flood was brought by the idols as a judgment upon the people of the land of Babel for having abandoned the dead body of Yanbūshādh, as it lay on the bare ground in the desert of Shāmās, so that the flood carried his dead body to the Wādī el-A’hfar, and then swept it from this wādī into the sea. Then there was drought and pestilence in the land of Babel for three months, so that the living were not sufficient to bury the dead. These tales (of Tammūz and Yanbūshādh) have been collected and are read in the temples after prayers, and the people weep and lament much thereupon. When I myself am present with the people in the temple, at the feast of Tammūz, which is in the month called after him, and they read his story and weep, I weep along with them always, out of friendly feeling towards them, and because I compassionate their weeping, not that I believe what they relate of him. But I believe in the story of Yanbūshādh, and when they read it and weep, I weep along with them, very differently from my weeping over Tammūzī. The reason is this, that the time of Yanbūshādh is nearer to our own than the time of Tammūz, and his story is, therefore,