pavilion which the Peri Banou gave to Ahmed; the cloud which
is no bigger than a man's hand may soon overspread the whole
heaven, and shade the Sultan's army from the solar rays.

But the fact that a natural phenomenon was explained in one
way did not hinder it from being explained in a dozen other
ways. The fact that the sun was generally regarded as an
all-conquering hero did not prevent its being called an egg,
an apple, or a frog squatting on the waters, or Ixion's wheel,
or the eye of Polyphemos, or the stone of Sisyphos, which was
no sooner pushed to the zenith than it rolled down to the
horizon. So the sky was not only a crystal dome, or a
celestial ocean, but it was also the Aleian land through which
Bellerophon wandered, the country of the Lotos-eaters, or
again the realm of the Graiai beyond the twilight; and finally
it was personified and worshipped as Dyaus or Varuna, the
Vedic prototypes of the Greek Zeus and Ouranos. The clouds,
too, had many other representatives besides ships and cows. In
a future paper it will be shown that they were sometimes
regarded as angels or houris; at present it more nearly
concerns us to know that they appear, throughout all Aryan
mythology, under the form of birds. It used to be a matter of
hopeless wonder to me that Aladdin's innocent request for a
roc's egg to hang in the dome of his palace should have been
regarded as a crime worthy of punishment by the loss of the
wonderful lamp; the obscurest part of the whole affair being
perhaps the Jinni's passionate allusion to the egg as his
master: "Wretch! dost thou command me to bring thee my
master, and hang him up in the midst of this vaulted dome?"
But the incident is to some extent cleared of its mystery when