[FN#511] The student of Hinduism will remember the Nαga-Kings and
Queens (Melusines and Echidnζ) who guard the earth-treasures in
Naga-land. The first appearance of the snake in literature is in
Egyptian hieroglyphs, where he forms the letters f and t, and
acts as a determinative in the shape of a Cobra di Capello
(Coluber Naja) with expanded hood.
[FN#512] In token that he was safe.
[FN#513] "Akhir al-Zamαn." As old men praise past times, so prophets prefer to represent themselves as the last. The early Christians caused much scandal amongst the orderly law-loving Romans by their wild and mistaken predictions of the end of the world being at hand. The catastrophe is a fact for each man under the form of death; but the world has endured for untold ages and there is no apparent cause why it should not endure as many more. The "latter days," as the religious dicta of most "revelations" assure us, will be richer in sinners than in sanctity: hence "End of Time" is a facetious Arab title for a villain of superior quality. My Somali escort applied it to one thus distinguished: in 1875, I heard at Aden that he ended life by the spear as we had all predicted.
[FN#514] Jahannam and the other six Hells are personified as feminine; and (woman-like) they are somewhat addicted to prolix speechification.
[FN#515] These puerile exaggerations are fondly intended to act as nurses frighten naughty children.
[FN#516] Alluding to an oft-quoted saying "Lau lα-ka, etc. Without thee (O Mohammed) We (Allah) had not created the spheres," which may have been suggested by "Before Abraham was, I am" (John viii. 58); and by Gate xci. of Zoroastrianism "O Zardusht for thy sake I have created the world" (Dabistan i. 344). The sentiment is by no means "Shi'ah," as my learned friend Prof. Aloys Springer supposes. In his Mohammed (p. 220) we find an extract from a sectarian poet, "For thee we dispread the earth; for thee we caused the waters to flow; for thee we vaulted the heavens." As Baron Alfred von Kremer, another learned and experienced Orientalist, reminds me, the "Shi'ahs" have always shown a decided tendency to this kind of apotheosis and have deified or quasi-deified Ali and the Imams. But the formula is first found in the highly orthodox Burdah poem of Al-Busiri:—
"But for him (Lau lα-hu) the world had never come out of nothingness."
Hence it has been widely diffused. See Les Aventures de Kamrup (pp. 146-7) and Les uvres de Wali (pp. 51-52), by M. Garcin de Tassy and the Dabistan (vol. i. pp. 2-3).
[FN#517] Arab. "Sνmiyα" from the Pers., a word apparently built on the model of "Kαmiyα" = alchemy, and applied, I have said, to fascination, minor miracles and white magic generally like the Hindu "Indrajal." The common term for Alchemy is Ilm al-Kαf (the K-science) because it is not safe to speak of it openly as Alchemy.
[FN#518] Mare Tenebrarum = Sea of Darknesses; usually applied to the "mournful and misty Atlantic."