Page:Sagas from the Far East; or, Kalmouk and Mongolian traditionary tales.djvu/407

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1. Bagatur-Ssedkiltu, "of heroic capacity." (Jülg.) See Note 2, Tale XVII.

2. The Three Precious Treasures, see note 3, Tale XVI.

3. Pearls. Arrianus (Ind. viii. 8) quotes from Megasthenes, a legend in which the discovery of pearls is ascribed to Crishna. The passage further implies that the Greek name μαργαρίτης was received from an Indian name, which may be the case through the Dekhan dialect, though there is nothing like it in Sanskrit, unless it be traced from markarâ, a hollow vessel. The Sanskrit word for pearls is muktâ, "dropt" or "set free," "dropt by the rain-clouds." (See Lassen, Indische Alterthumskunde, i. 244 n. 1. See also note 4, Tale XIV.) How the Preserver of mother-o'-pearl shells comes to live up a river, I know not, unless in his royal character he was supposed to have an outlying country-villa. However Megasthenes (quoted by Lassen, ii. 680, n. 2) tells us not only that there were many crocodiles and alligators in the Indus, but also that many fishes and molluscs came up the stream out of the sea as far as the confluence of the Akesines, and small ones as far as the mountains. Onesikritos mentions the same concerning other rivers.

4. The serpent-gods are spoken of sometimes as if they were supposed to wear a human form and as often as in their reptile form. In the present place in the text there is a strange confusion between the two ideas, the "son" whom the White Serpent-king comes to seek evidently wore a reptile form, as when he was in the owl's mouth he resembled the Tamer's girdle, yet the king himself and his companion are said to be riding on horses; as it is also said they come out of the water it was probably a crocodile that the story-teller had in his mind's eye, and which might fancifully be conceived to be a serpent riding on horseback, as a centaur represents a man on horseback. The serpent-gods generally would seem to be more properly termed reptile-gods, as not only ophidians and saurians seem to belong to their empire, but batrachians also; in this very story the gold frog is reckoned the actual daughter of the White Serpent-king, probably even emydians also, though I do not recall an example. Water-snakes, however, are common in Asia, and there is also there a group of batrachians called cæliciæ, which are cylindrical in form, without feet and moving like serpents, and considered to form a link between that family and their own. I do not know if this in any way