But the Morning Sun told the hermit that he was mistaken:
"I'm not the mightiest of the Creator's works," quoth the Sun. "You see yon cloudlet yonder. Well, soon that little weasel will get to be as big as a camel, then as a whale, then it'll spread all over the sky and will hide my face from the earth I love so well. That Cloud is mightier than I am."
Then the hermit waited on top of the hill until he saw the Cloud expand itself in the most fantastic shapes, and when it had covered up the face of the Morning Sun, the hermit stretched out his hands and offered to it his daughter in marriage. The Cloud, however, answered just as the Moon and the Sun had done, and it proposed the Simoon as a suitor to his daughter.
"Wait a bit," said the Cloud, "and you will see the might of the Simoon, that, howling, rises and not only drives us whithersoever he will, but scatters us in the four corners of the Earth."
No sooner had the Cloud done speaking than the Wind arose, lifting up clouds of dust from the earth. It seemed to cast the sand upwards in the face of the sky, and against the clouds; and the waters above dropped down in big tears, or fled from the wrath of the Wind.
Then the hermit stretched his hands towards the Simoon, and begged him, as the mightiest of the Creator's works, to marry his daughter.
But the Wind, howling, told him to turn his eyes towards a high mountain, the snowy summit of which was faintly seen far off in the distance. "That Mountain," said he, "is mightier by far than myself."
The hermit then went into the cavern and told his daughter that, as it was impossible to find a suitor for her in the desert, he was going on a journey, from which he would only return on the morrow.
"And will you bring me a husband when you come back?" she asked, merrily.
"I trust so, with God's grace," quoth the Hermit, "and one well worthy of you, my beloved daughter."