Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/532

500 and in whom we may see an image of the months of the year or the hours of the night, in themselves producing nothing, until the spring reawakens the slumbering earth or the davm flushes the eastern sky. In either case, it is but one hour or one day doing the work which otherwise many hours and many days would be unable to accomplish. Then follows a series of transformations which have the effect of counteracting the arts of the twelve queens as those of Matabrune are frustrated in the western story, and which end in the change of all the brothers not into swans but into crows, the only one of Guzra Bai's children who is saved being the daughter, as Helias alone is not transformed in the myth of Matabrune. The subsequent marriage of Guzra Bai's daughter under the name of Draupadi to a king who sees her feeding the crows is the return of Persephone from the lower world in more than her former beauty. Draupadi now becomes the mother of a child who avenges her wrongs as Perseus requites the persecutors of Danae, and punishes the demon who, with the wand of Kirke, had changed his Bothefs brothers into crows. The final incident is the deliverance of Guzra Bai from the prison to which the twelve princesses had committed her, and the discomfiture of the latter, answering to the humiliation of Matabrune.

As the storm-cloud brooding over the earth without yielding rain became in Greek mythology the Theban Sphinx or the Pythian Dragon, so the clouds as rain-givers were the Hyades or the rainy sisters. These, it is obvious, might be described in a hundred ways, and accordingly almost every mythographer has a different account to give of them. They are the daughters of Atlas and Aithra, the heaven and the pure air, or of Okeanos, the water, or of Erechtheus (the earth) ; and thus the myths do but repeat the generation of the cloud,

giving it names which all denote their cherishing, fructifying, and reviving powers. They are the nymphs of Nysa or Dodona, who guard the infant Dionysos, or are the nurses of Zeus himself; and this kin Iness the wine-god requites by causing Medeia, the wise dawn-goddess, to restore them to youth when they had grown old, a sight witnessed every morning. These nymphs are seen again in their sisters the Pleiades, whose name, pointing only to their watery nature, became confused with that of the ring-dove, Peleias, and so