Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/124

114 which converted her into a rock that still bears her name. Then he went joyfully on his way.

So the figure of the weeping Niobe turned into a rock, might be seen on Mount Sipylus. The groups of upright stones, set up by old inhabitants in Africa and India, are now giants, men, flocks and herds changed into stone; the avenues of monoliths at Karnak are petrified battalions; the stone-circles on English downs have suggested other fanciful legends, as where for instance the story has shaped itself that such a ring was a party of girls who were turned into stone for dancing carols on a Sunday. There is a tradition, probably still current in Palestine, of a city between Petra and Hebron, whose inhabitants were turned into stone for their wickedness. Seetzen, the traveller, visited the spot where the remains of the petrified inhabitants of the wicked city are still to be seen, and, just as in the American tale, he found their heads a number of stony concretions, lying scattered on the ground. The imagination which could work on these rude objects could naturally discover in stone statues the result of such a transformation. Statues sculptured by a higher Peruvian race at Tiahuanaco, seemed to the ruder Indians petrified men, and the clumsy stone busts on Asiatic steppes are, to the rude Turanians who worship them, as it were fossilized deities. Especially the Jewish and Moslem iconoclastic mind thinks ancient statues men transformed by enchantment or judgment, and here we have the source of the Arabian Nights' tale of the infidel city, found with its inhabitants turned to lifelike counterfeits in stone.

The myths of footprints stamped into the rock by gods or mighty men are hot the least curious of this class, not only from