remote antiquity the waters of the deluge flooded the district, and when they retired the places where they had been made their appearance covered with sand. . . . This is why these deserts are called the 'Sandy Sea,' which indicates that they were not always covered with sand and gravel."[1]
In the Russian legends, a "golden ship sails across the heavenly sea; it breaks into fragments, which neither princes nor people can put together again,"--reminding one of Humpty-Dumpty, in the nursery-song, who, when he fell from his elevated position on the wall--
"Not all the king's horses,
Nor all the king's men,
Can ever make whole again."
In another Russian legend, Perun, the thunder-god, destroys the devils with stone hammers. On Ilya's day, the peasants offer him a roasted animal, which is cut up and scattered over the fields,[2] just as we have seen the great dragon or serpent cut to pieces and scattered over the world.
Mr. Christy found at Bou-Merzoug, on the plateau of the Atlas, in Northern Africa, in a bare, deserted, stony place among the mountains, a collection of fifteen hundred tombs, made of rude limestone slabs, set up with one slab to form a roof, so as to make perfect dolmens--closed chambers--where the bodies were packed in.
"Tradition says that a wicked people lived there, and for their sins stones were rained upon them from heaven; so they built these chambers to creep into."[3]
In addition to the legend of "Phaëton," already given, Ovid derived from the legends of his race another story,
[1. Tylor's "Early Mankind," p. 328.
2. Poor, "Sanskrit Literature," p. 400.
3. Tylor's "Early Mankind," p. 222.]