If the sky is a pasture, it is most natural to see in the clouds beasts feeding there. So the nomad Arab sees in the clouds herds of camels,[[467]] and calls a small herd of twenty or thirty camels by the same name by which he describes a broken-off fragment of cloud—al-ṣirmâ. The poet Abû Ḥibâl calls a rain-cloud dalûḥ, i.e. ‘a heavily laden camel;’[[468]] and according to the Arabian philologist al-Tebrîzî a cloud accompanied by thunder and lightning is called al-ḥannânâ ‘the bellowing,’ because the ancient Arabs compared a thundering cloud[[469]] to a camel that breaks out into loud bellowing from painful desire to reach home.[[470]] How full of meaning is the myth that lies hidden behind this expression ḥannânâ! The camel on a journey has gone far away from home, longs to be back again, and bellows with terrible pain: it is the Thunder.[[471]] And this myth was not confined to the Arabs; we find a slight trace of it among the later Jews, in the Talmûd. When it thundered, they said, ‘The clouds groan.’ Achâ b. Jaʿaḳôbh describes meteorological phenomena in the following words: ‘The lightning sparkles, the clouds groan (menahamîn ʿanânê), and the rain comes’ (Berâkhôth, fol. 59. a). This mythical conception is only a variation of the more general view that thunder is a lion’s roaring (Job XXXVII. 4; shâʾag is used specially of the lion), out of which grew the roaring of Jahveh, mentioned in many passages of prophecy and poetry—a result of the monotheistic transformation of mythical ideas. In Arabic hamhama is used both of the lion’s roaring and of thunder; and so also zamjara. In the work of Ibn Dureyd already quoted an Arab says of a thunder-cloud, ‘Its thunders groan like camels longing to get home (ṭirâb), and roar like raging lions.’[[472]]
The Arab saw in the clouds a herd of camels, in a single cloud a single camel.[[473]] The ostrich, which is a favourite term of comparison in Arabic poetry, is also seen by them in the clouds. Zuheyr b. ʿUrwâ says of a little cloud visible behind a larger one, that it was an ostrich hung up by the feet (kaʾanna-r-rabâba duweyna-s-saḥâbi * naʿâmun tuʿallaḳu bi-l-arjuli).[[474]] From the Hebrew mythology we have the similar conception of the cloud as a sheep, as Râchêl. She is the legitimate wife of the dark, nocturnal or overclouded sky. When the cloud let fall its wet burden in drizzling rain upon the earth, the primitive Hebrews said ‘Rachel is weeping for her children’—a phrase preserved from an age of mythic ideas, which was retained to a late age in a very different sense.[[475]] For as the Arab regarded the thunder as the cloud’s cry of pain, so the Hebrew could see in the rain Rachel’s tears. Even up to the present day the Arabs say of the rain: ‘The sky weeps, the clouds weep;’[[476]] and the idea was not strange to the Greek, who spoke of the ‘Tears of Zeus.’[[477]] In the Romance of ʿAntar, XXV. 58. 4, it is said of the rain:
The gloomy heaven weeps with tears, that stream in constant flow
Out from the eye of a rainful cloud.
The poet Ibn Muṭeyr says most beautifully of the weeping sky: ‘The cloud smiles at the lighting up (of the lightning), and weeps from the corners of her eyes, the moisture of which is not excited by splinters (sticking in the eye); and without either joy or grief she combines laughing and weeping.’[[478]] Rachel has a favourite son called Yôsêph (Joseph). This name signifies: ‘He multiplies,’ or, from the explanation already given, ‘The Multiplier.’ He is called in a hymn addressed to him, ‘The blessing of the heaven above, the blessing of the flood that lies below, the blessing of the (female) breasts and of the womb’ (Gen. XLIX. 25). Can we doubt that this is the Rain, which multiplies—the blessing from above, which lies below in floods of water, the rain which mythologically was so often regarded as the nutritive milk of the milked cows of the clouds?[[479]] And probably the old Arabic idol called Zâʾidatu,[[480]] i.e. ‘the Multiplieress,’ has the same mythological signification as the synonymous term Joseph in Hebrew, and may therefore be regarded as a goddess of Rain. Can the least doubt be felt, that ‘the Multiplier,’ the son of the cloud, must be the rain, as wine is called the daughter of the grape,[[481]] and the fruit the son of the tree,[[482]] and as bread is called in Arabic jâbiru-bnu ḥabbata, like ‘Strengthener, son of Mrs. Grain?’[[483]] Moreover, while these latter views are natural, but not spread abroad everywhere, the idea that the rain is the child of the cloud is universal. We meet it among the Greeks, for Pindar sings:
... ἕστιν δ’ οὐρανίων ὑδάτων
ὀμβρίων, παίδων Νεφέλας (Olymp. XI. 2, 3),—
just like the Arabs. The poet Moḥammed b. ʿAbd al-Malik said, when a violent shower of rain delayed the arrival of his friend al-Ḥasan b. Wahab, ‘I know not how to express my complaint against one heaven which keeps back from me another heaven (the friend), unless indeed I utter curse and blessing together: Let the former become childless, and the latter live long.’[[484]] The cloudy heaven was to lose his children—i.e. the rain was to cease.
Lastu adrî mâ ḏâ aḳûlu wa-ashkû * min samâʾin taʿûḳunî ʿan samâʾï
Ġayra annî adʿû ʿala tilka bi-th-thuk- * lî wa-adʿû lihâḏihi bi-l-baḳâʾi.