Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 4 1886.djvu/39

Rh Shêduir Van, before his execution, said: "I am to be executed; but that is no misfortune; my soul shall enter the womb of the wife of the Emperor." Shêduir Van was beheaded. The Empress was pregnant, and gave birth to a son who had a cicatrice on the neck. The Emperor asked his wise men what that signified. They told him the soul of Shêduir Van had entered the womb of the Empress. The Emperor ordered that the child should be slain, and that pieces of flesh as large as money should be plucked off. After this the Empress conceived again, and bore a son with a scar. Again the Emperor asked his wise men, who told him that this, also, was again the soul of Shêduir Van. Then the Emperor ordered the babe to be thrown in the fire; the charcoal went out and changed into water. After this the soul of Shêduir Van did not again enter the womb of the Empress, but revealed itself in a hairless bay mare; the skin of this mare is preserved to the present day ; but it is not known in what Gachoun or in what Khurê it is. In the Gachoun of Bēshēnēltu. Van is secretly kept the standard of the Mongol nation. It will only be unfurled on the day Mongolia is freed from the Chinese yoke.—(Chēnēn, a Khalka man of the River Tamēr.)

A Diurbiut, named Buen Dotkhs, translated to me very briefly another story about Shêduir Van, which only, however, differed from the preceding story that in the place of Noi-on Khutuktu here figures Kuukiun (saintly virgin) Khutuktu. That, say the Mongols, is the gêgên, who is on alternate days of the male and female sex.

Sartaktai lived in ancient days by the sources of the River Êder; from thence he rode in one day on his piebald horse without a tail right to Barun tszu (Tibet); he had a wife and eight children; he slew many wild beasts and caught fishes. The coats and clothes of his family were very bad. Sartaktai himself wished to join the lake Subsennor to the Khara usu; he began to dig; he throws away a scoop of earth dug from the canal. There's a mountain—another—another mountain. Thirty-three times he scoops and throws away