125.
2. Ibid., p. 125.]
{p. 268}
CHAPTER XI.
THE ARABIAN MYTHS.
AND when we turn to the Arabian tales, we not only see, by their
identity with the Hindoo and Slavonic legends, that they are of great
antiquity, dating back to the time when these widely diverse races,
Aryan and Semitic, were one, but we find in them many allusions to
the battle between good and evil, between God and the serpent.
Abou Mohammed the Lazy, who is a very great magician, with power over
the forces of the air and the Afrites, beholds a battle between two
great snakes, one tawny-colored, the other white. The tawny serpent
is overcoming the white one; but Abou Mohammed kills it with a rock.
"The white serpent" (the sun) "departed and was _absent for a while_,
but returned"; and the tawny serpent was torn to pieces and scattered
over the land, and nothing remained of her but her head.
And then we have the legend of "the City of Brass," or bronze. It
relates to "an ancient age and period in the olden time." One of the
caliphs, Abdelmelik, the son of Marwan, has heard from antiquity that
Solomon, (Solomon is, in Arabic, like Charlemagne in the middle-age
myths of Europe, the synonym for everything venerable and powerful,)
had imprisoned genii in bottles of brass, and the Caliph desired to
procure some of these bottles.
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