Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/399

 Cairene Folklore. 379

should be born to him cleverer and better than all the forty sons he had lost. Acccordingly Solomon was born."^

" Pharaoh [Fara^ihi) was originally poor. He came to Cairo with water-melons and stood in the corner of a street offering them for sale. The policeman drove him away» but he made his peace with the policeman by giving him a melon. So he was allowed to stand in another place. The owner of a neighbouring house, however, came out and drove him away from it. To pacify the latter, he gave him another melon. This happened again and again, until all the melons were given away. Then he concluded that it was useless for him to remain in the city ; so he took his cudgel {nebbilt), which was as long as a palm-tree, and established himself in the desert behind Turra. When any- one died, he demanded half a piastre before he would allow the corpse to be buried in the desert, and the fee was paid from fear of his cudgel. One day the king's daughter died, and as it was the daughter of the king he demanded two piastres from her brother. Thereupon he was taken and led before the king, who seeing that he was a giant with a big cudgel proposed to make him watchman {rhafir) of Cairo. He consented on condition that he should be allowed to kill with his cudgel whoever left his house after dark. After a time the king wished to see if Pharaoh was doing his duty, and accordingly disguised himself and went out after nightfall. He found Pharaoh asleep, but as he passed by the giant awoke, and not knowing that it was the king, killed him. So Pharaoh became King of Cairo in place of the king."

I will now pass from stories to folk-lore of a more general kind, giving it as I have noted it down and leaving it to others to arrange it methodically.

' The story of the death of David's sons on their wedding-night reminds us of the Greek myth of the murder of the Lemnians by their wives, on which see a very interesting paper by J. Darmesteter : " Cabires, Bene Elohim, at Dios- cures," in the Me moires de la Societc de Lin^^iiistiquc dc Paris, iv., 2 (1880).