"Dost thou know with what the mollahs of our Khan write? Her eyebrows are blacker than their ink."
"Dost thou see these glowing embers? Her eyes are brighter still."
Another specimen which follows this consists of detached sentences without any connection.
"The hawk has pounced on the ducks—on a flight of ducks—on a great flight!"
"I am very ill, and hardly ever think of eating," or "yonder is a tall pine-tree, the mist has fallen over it."
"Yesterday she allowed me to enter her house. Formerly she would come herself and caress me."
These more or less may be found among all purely popular tales of oriental people. There is even a trace of them in Hungarian, as for example,—
"Three apples and a half, I invited thee, and thou camest not," or "the crane flies high, singing beautifully, my loved one is angry, for she will not speak to me," &c.
A considerable number of tales or narratives of hero deeds exists among nomadic tribes, partly in verse, partly in prose. In these the spirit of the literature of the Turkish tribes of South Siberia is more prominent than that of their Central Asiatic neighbours; and I have heard many compositions of Kirghis Bakhshis, which I find with little variation and dialectic differences faithfully conveyed in the more recent work,—"Proofs of the Popular Literature of the Turkish tribes of South Siberia," by Dr. Radloff.