Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/473

Rh CHAP. dition for a legend gained through their contact with Iranian tribes, the cloud is in each case a bird, the lightning being either a stone or a worm.^ Thus Benaiah, the son of Jehoiada, discovers the wonder- working pebble Schamir, by watching a moor-hen, which, finding a piece of glass laid over her nest, flies away, and fetching a worm, splits the cover ; or Solomon obtains it in the form of a stone from the raven, of whom he has been informed by the demon Sackar. In similar stories told by JElian and Pliny of the woodpecker or the hoopoe, the instrument by which the bird gets at her young is a grass ; and thus we reach the family of plants whose power of splitting rocks has won for them the name of Saxifrage, or Sassafras. This grass or plant will either reveal treasures, as in the blinding glare of the electric fluid, or will restore life, as in the effects of lightning in setting free the waters on a parched-up soil. Thus the story of Glaukos and Polyidos, of the Three Snake Leaves, and of Rama and Luxman, is repeated in Fouque's Sir Elidoc, where the young Amyot is watching the corpse of a woman as Glaukos watches that of Polyidos. This mysterious herb becomes the German Luckflower, the possessor of which is enabled to go down into the rocks which gape to receive him, and to fill his pockets with the glittering treasures of which the beautiful queen of this hidden palace bids him take his fill, warning him only not to forget the best. This warning is, of course, under- stood by the peasant as a charge to select the most precious stones, and leaving the flower behind him, he finds, as the rocks come together with a crash, that the mountain is closed to him for ever. This flower is sometimes inclosed in a staff, which is obviously only another form of the lightning-spear, as in the tale of the luckless shepherd of Ilsen- stein, who, forgetting to take the staff as he leaves the cave, is himself cloven by the closing rocks. In all these cases the flower or plant, as the talismanic spell, is more precious than the hid treasures ; and unless the treasure-seeker keeps it by him he is lost. It is, in short, the flower, sometimes blue, sometimes yellow or red (as the hues vary of the lightning flashes), which exclaims in feeble piteous tone, " Forget me not," but its little cry is unheeded.

In the story of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves the flower itself Ahmed has disappeared, but the spell still lies in its name ; for sesame is hauser. the name of a well-known Eastern plant {Sesannan orietitale); so that probably, in the original form of the Persian tale absorbed into the Arabian Nights, a flower was employed to give admission to the mountain.^ In the story of Allah-ud-deen, the same verbal talisman • Curious Myths, second series, * In Slavonic tradition, the Sassafras ' ' Schamir. " of the thunder-god Perkunas is a golden