In the twelfth tale, a thief steals the enchanted gem from the prince; he throws the gem to the ground, the consequence of which is that the prince's nose bleeds so excessively that he dies. The nose is the most prominent part of the face, the most conspicuous and splendid part; it is the gem of the sun-prince. The sun falls at night upon the mountain; the gem falls to the ground; the prince's nose bleeds; he has struck his nose against the ground, and it bleeds. The sun-prince dies, and the evening sky is tinged red, blood-colour; the sun, who loses his blood in the evening, dies.
The thirteen Calmuc stories are followed by ten Mongol tales; in all, twenty-three, of which the sixteenth, however, is lost.
The fourteenth tells us of the rich and avaricious man whose poor brother goes in despair into the forest to die upon a rock; but his presence not being known to the spirits, he has the good luck to come upon a hammer and a sack, of which the former, when struck against an object, produces whatever is desired by the owner, the latter being used to carry away the objects thus obtained, this hammer and this sack having been left there by the hobgoblins. Thus the poor brother becomes rich, and is envied by the other, who goes to the same place, in hopes of experiencing the same good fortune; but as he does not hide himself, the hobgoblins see him, and believing him to be the man who stole the hammer and the sack, avenge themselves upon him by lengthening his nose, and covering it with protuberances. To this myth may perhaps be referred the origin of the Italian expression, "Restare con uno o due palmi di naso," to remain with one or two spans of the nose; that is to say, to be laughed at, and with the gesture by which derision is accompanied, and which is addressed to the man who is laughed at, by applying one or sometimes both hands to the end of one's nose. The poor brother, now rich, visits the miserly brother, who has a long nose covered with protuberances, and knocks them off with his hammer. He had already knocked off eight, and only one remained, when, at his wife's request, he desisted and left the last one on. The rich man's wife, seeing how the protuberances had been taken off by striking them, tries herself to remove the last one, and strikes it with a hammer; but not calculating her aim accurately, she splits her husband's head open, and he dies.
In the seventeenth Mongol story, an old man and an old woman have nine cows. The old man is fond of meat, and eats all the calves; the old woman, on the other hand, has a great liking for milk and butter, with which she satiates herself. When the old man has eaten all the calves, he thinks that one cow more or less will not affect his wealth; reasoning thus, he eats all the cows except one, which he spares out of respect for the whim of his old wife. But one day that the old woman is out, the old man cannot resist the temptation, and kills the last cow. His wife returns, is angry, and abandons him, upon which he throws after her one of the cow's breasts. The woman, in grateful memory of the milk and butter she liked so much, takes it up and goes up the mountain, where she strikes the cow's breast against the summit of the rock, and thereupon there flow out milk and butter in rivers. She satisfies her appetite, and then remembers that her husband is perhaps dying of hunger, feeding, as he does, upon ashes; she therefore, but secretly, throws butter into the house down the chimney, and then disappears. In this attention the old man recognises the love of his wife, and resolves upon the plan of following her footsteps during the night upon the snow. He comes to the mountain, sees the breast, and cannot resist the temptation it offers; he eats it, and takes the butter away with him. The old woman wanders about till she comes upon a herd of deer, who pasture freely, and who, instead of fleeing, let themselves be milked. Again, she thinks of her husband, and she throws deer's butter down the chimney. The old man follows her over the snow, finds her near the deer, and kills them in his inordinate passion for meat. The old woman continues to wander about, and stumbles this time upon a cavern of the wild beasts, guarded by a hare. The hare defends her from the wild beasts; but she then conceives the idea of giving her husband a stick, and throws it down the chimney whilst he is taking the ashes up with a spoon. He follows her, and comes to the cave of the wild animals, who, seeing them arrive together, tear them to pieces. Here again we have the myth of the sun and the aurora (or the fine season); the hare who guards the cavern and tames the wild beasts is, as we shall see in the chapter which treats of it, the moon, the cows and the deer being the same. The ferocious animals of the cavern of night rend both sun and aurora (or fine season), both old man and old woman.
The eighteenth Mongol story is too indecent for me to relate, or for the reader to peruse; suffice it to say, that we have in it a comic variation of the Amazon heroine, and that this heroine calls herself Sûrya (the sun) Bagatur (to which corresponds the bagatír; or hero, of the Russians).
In the twentieth tale we have a calf and a lion's whelp brought up together by a lioness upon the same milk.[332] When grown, the lion goes and inhabits the forest, or the desert, and the bull, the mountain illumined by the sun, meeting as good friends and brothers to drink the same water. This good understanding is, however, put an end to by their perfidious uncle the fox, who persuades the lion to believe that the bull designs to kill him, and adds that when the bull in the morning strikes the ground with his horns, and bellows loudly, will be the sign that he is going to carry his purpose into effect; he then tells the bull that the lion has a similar design against him. In the morning, when the two brothers, bull and lion, go to drink the same water, they approach each other with suspicion, engage in battle and kill each other, the fox, or wolf, being the only one to benefit by the quarrel. This is a form of the story of the two twilights (the Açvinâu), which we shall illustrate in the following chapter.
The beginning of the twenty-first Mongol story offers a new analogy with the apologue of Perrette.[333] A poor father and mother find a little lamb's-wool; they consult together, and resolve with the wool to make cloth, and with the cloth to buy an ass. Upon this ass they will place their little child, and go a-begging; by begging they will become yet richer, and buy another ass. Of the two, a young ass will be born. The youngster immediately exclaims that if a young donkey is born he will ride upon it; whereupon his mother answers, "You would break its back," when, accompanying these words with the movement of a stick, she strikes the youngster's head with it, and kills him; with him the fine projects of the poor parents also vanish.
In the last of the stories of Siddhi-kûr, which is joined to the three legends of the grateful animals, the disguises, and the laughing princess, a man uses the horns of his dead buffalo to grub up the roots upon which he lives in exile.
The history of Ardshi-Bordshi also contains several interesting stories.
It begins with a challenge among the children who keep the king's cows to run a race from the summit of a mountain. The first who comes to the winning-post is honoured as a king by his companions for that day, and acts and judges on the spot where the race takes place as a real king; indeed, he judges and decides as a court of final appeal on cases which have not been well examined by the great king of the country. He unmasks and convicts robbers and false witnesses acquitted by the king as innocent, and sends a missive to the king, recommending him to be more cautious in future in his judgments, or else to resign his royal dignity. The great king wonders at the extraordinary wisdom of the king of the children, and ascribes his preternatural sagacity to the magical influence of the mountain where the children who guard the cows play their games. On another occasion, the king of the children, by his craftiness, detects a demon in one whom the king had thought to be the legitimate son of his minister. The discovery is made by means of a challenge to the minister's real son and his demoniacal counterfeit to get into a small jug at hand. The real son cannot; but the supposititious makes himself small and enters the jug, in which the king of the children shuts him up with a diamond, and administers thereupon fresh reproof to the great king for his carelessness. The great king then visits the mountain of the children, and sees a golden throne with thirty-two steps emerge from the ground; upon each step there is a wooden puppet (the moon). The great king has the throne carried into his palace, and endeavours to ascend it; the puppets arrest him, and one of them tells him that this was once the throne of the god Indras, and afterwards of King Vikramâdityas. The great king inclines himself in reverence, and one of the puppets begins to narrate the history of Vikramâdityas.