SECTION X
ORIENTAL TALES
Under this heading I propose to notice two stories only. The first of these is called the "Maidens who Bathed in the Moonlight" (Kreutzwald), and is peculiarly tame and inconsequential, but yet exhibits one or two features of special interest which forbid its being passed over altogether.
A young man who had already learned the language of birds and other mysteries, and was still desirous to peer into all sorts of secret knowledge, applied to a famous necromancer[66] to initiate him into the secrets hidden under the veil of night. The Finnish sorcerer endeavoured to dissuade him from his purpose; but as he persisted, he told him that on the evening of St. Mark's Day, which was not far off, the king of the serpents would hold his court at a place which he indicated, as was the custom every seven years. There would be a dish of heavenly goat's-milk before the king, and if the young man could dip a bit of bread in it, and put it in his mouth before taking to flight, he would gain the secret knowledge which he desired.
At the appointed time, the young man went at dusk to a wide moor, where he could see nothing but a number of hillocks. At midnight a bright light shone from one of the hillocks; it was the king's signal, and all the other snakes, which had been lying like motionless hillocks, uncoiled themselves, and began to move in that direction[67]. At last they gathered themselves into a great heap as large as a haycock. The youth at first feared to approach, but at last crept up on tiptoe, when he saw thousands of snakes clustered round a huge serpent with a gold crown on his head. The youth's blood froze in his veins and his hair stood on end, but he sprang over the heap of hissing serpents, who opened their jaws as he passed, but could not disengage themselves quickly enough to strike him. He secured his prize and fled, pursued by the hissing serpents, till he fell senseless; but at the first rays of the sun he woke up, having left the moor four or five miles behind him, and all danger was now over. He slept through the day, to recover himself from the fatigue and fright, and went into the woods in the following night, where he saw golden bathing benches arranged, with silver bath whisks[68] and silver basins. Presently the loveliest naked maidens assembled from all quarters, and began to wash themselves in the bright moonlight, while the youth stood behind a bush looking on. They were the wood-nymphs, and the daughters of the Meadow-Queen.[69] Towards morning they disappeared suddenly from his sight, and though he visited the woods again night after night, he never again saw either the bathing utensils or the maidens, and pined away in hopeless longing.
The next story is extremely interesting, and it contains a more elaborate description of the Seal of Solomon (which we should hardly expect to be known in the legends of a country like Esthonia) than any other which I have seen, except that given by Weil in his Biblische Legenden der Muselmänner. Weil, however, represents it as a cluster of stones, possessing different virtues, and not as a single stone. The symbol called the Seal of Solomon by the Freemasons, &c., consists of two equilateral triangles intersecting each other within a circle, and is regarded by mystics of every class as one of the most sacred of all symbols. In Eastern legends the mystical name of God is said to have been inscribed on the Seal. Arabian writers say that the embalmed body of Solomon, with the ring on his finger, sits enthroned on one of the islands of the Circumambient Ocean. Cf. the story "Bulookiya" (Thousand and One Nights), and Kirby's poem of Ed-Dimiryaht.