Page:Mythology Among the Hebrews.djvu/101

Rh fall; he accompanies the victory of the warm heaven of the day with cries of triumph and applause, and his hymns immortalise what he felt and thought on this victory. Here it is the defeat of the sunny heaven that attunes him to lamentation. The fallen Samson is a tragical figure. Every reader will be able himself to supply the application of these general propositions to the myth of the Hebrews, if he pays attention to the chapter in which the chief figures of the Hebrew mythology were brought forward, with the chief traits by which they are accompanied in Mythology. I should deem it superfluous to prosecute this application further, as it is to be found in every case in the nature of the myth itself.

But it is not only from a feeling of sympathy towards the heaven of night and clouds that the Nomad puts it in the foreground. This aspect of heaven is to him also the datum, the prius, the natural, which the heaven of day afterwards opposes as foe and persecutor. With the nature of Nomadism, and especially of the night-wanderings, is also connected the Reckoning of time by Nights. This has been best preserved by the Arabs, who count by nights, instead of days, as we do. It is especially marked in the determination of the distance between two places and of the length of a journey: e.g. 'His face perspires with desire for the payment held back for long nights (i.e. for a long time);' 'Between Damascus and the place where Walîd b. Yazîd lived in the desert are four nights;' 'I will give him five hundred dînârs and a camel, on which he can travel for twelve nights;' in a poem of Abû Zeyd al-‘Abshamî, 'When the tribe travels for sixteen nights ' (iḏa-l-ḳaumu sârat sittat ‘ashrata leylatan). This Arabic idiom is so firmly established that in the opposite case, when a period is for once to be expressed in days, the equivalent expressed in nights is added as a more