CLOUD MYTHS.
Charon.
The cloud myths, to which frequent allusion has already been made, comprise not only the cattle of the sun, the Centaurs, Nephele, Phryxus, Helle, and Pegasus, but as, “in primitive Aryan lore, the sky itself was a blue sea, and the clouds were ships sailing over it,” so Charon’s boat was supposed to be one of these vessels, and the gilded shallop in which the sun daily made his pilgrimage back to the far east, another.
Niobe.
As the ancient Aryan had the same word to denote cloud and mountain (“for the piles of vapor on the horizon were so like Alpine ranges”), the cloud and mountain myths are often the same. In the story of Niobe we have one of the cloud myths. According to some mythologists, Niobe herself is a personification of the clouds. Her many children, the mists, are fully as beautiful as Apollo and Diana, by whose bright darts they are ruthlessly slain. Niobe grieves so sorely at their untimely death, that she dissolves in a rain of tears, which turns into hard ice on the mountain summit. According to other authorities, she was a personification of winter, and her tears represented the thaw occasioned by the sunbeams (Apollo’s arrows).