Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/374

364 bathed, their bodies shone as if they had been oiled, and smelt like the scent of violets. In Europe, too, stories of miraculously healing fountains have long been current. The Moslem geographer Ibn-el-Wardi places the Fountain of Life in the dark south-western regions of the earth. El-Khidr drank of it, and will live till the day of judgment; and Ilyas or Elias, whom popular belief mixes not only with El-Khidr, but also with St. George, the Dragon-slayer, has drunk of it likewise. Farther east, the idea is to be found in the Malay islands. Batara Guru drinks from a poisonous spring, but saves himself and the rest of the gods by finding a well of life; and again, Nurtjaja compels the pandit Kabib, the guardian of the caverns below the earth, where flows the spring of immortality, to let him drink of its waters, and even to take some for his descendants. In the Hawaiian legend, Kamapiikai, "the child who runs over the sea," goes with forty companions to Tahiti (Kahiki, that is to say, to the land far away), and brings back wondrous tales of Haupokane, "the belly of Kane," and of the wai ora, waiola, "water of life," wai ora roa, "water of enduring life," which removes all sickness, deformity, and decrepitude from those who plunge beneath its waters. It is perhaps to this story of the Sandwich Islands that Turner refers, when he says that some South Sea islanders have traditions of a river in the spirit-world called "Water of Life," which makes the old young again, and they return to earth to live another life.

One easy explanation of the Fountain of Youth suggests itself at the first glance. Every islander who can see the sun go down old, faint, and weary into the western sea, to rise young and fresh from the waters, has the Fountain of Youth before him; and this explanation of several, at least, of the stories is strengthened by their details, as when the fountain is described as flowing in the regions below, or in the belly of Kane, where the boy who climbs over the sea goes to it; or when, like the dying and reviving sun, Batara Guru is poisoned, but finds the