Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/319

Rh muddy and wet was the surface of the ground, and it was before the sun appeared, and then only the sun rose like a man. But his heat had no strength, and he did but show himself when he rose, he only remained like (an image in) a mirror, and it is not indeed the same sun that appears now, they say in the stories."

Obscure as much of this is, there are things in it which agree very curiously with the phenomena of the Arctic regions. The cold and darkness, the sea not like a sea but like rocks rolled on the sand, the long waiting for the sun, and its appearance at last with little strength, and but just rising above the horizon, form a picture which corresponds with the nature of the high north, as much as it differs from that of the tropical regions where the tradition is found. We read of the people of Thule of old, after their 35-day night, climbing hills to look out for the returning sun, as in more modern times of Arctic voyagers going out to watch for the sun towards the close of the long dismal winter. The judgment that it was not indeed the sun of Central America that appeared so strangely, may be placed by the side of a remark made by a savage in another country. Sir George Grey, travelling in Australia, was once telling stories of distant countries to a party of natives round the camp fire; "I now spoke to them of still more northern latitudes; and went so far as to describe those countries in which the sun never sets at a certain period of the year. Their astonishment now knew no bounds: 'Ah! that must be another sun, not the same as the one we see here,' said an old man; and in spite of all my arguments to the contrary, the others adopted this opinion."

The legend of the introduction of rice in Borneo relates how a Dayak climbed up a tree which grew downward from the sky, and so got up to the Pleiades, and there he found a personage who took him to his house and gave him boiled rice to eat. He had never seen rice before, and the story says that when he saw the grains, he thought they were maggots. Now there is a