hair, lamenting her dead husband and followed by the virgins who had
escaped with her. Their songs and dances, while seeking the body of
Osiris, were strangely plaintive and touching, and the girls accompanied
the dance by waving black Byssus scarfs in wonderfully graceful curves.
Neither were the youths idle; they busied themselves in making a costly
coffin for the vanished corpse of the god, accompanying their work with
dances and the sound of castanets. When this was finished they joined
the maidens in the train of the lamenting Isis and wandered on the shore
with them, singing and searching.

"Suddenly a low song rose from some invisible lips. It swelled louder
and louder and announced, that the body of the god had been transported
by the currents of the Mediterranean to Gebal in distant Phoenicia. This
singing voice thrilled to my very heart; Neithotep's son, who was my
companion, called it 'the wind of rumor.'

"When Isis heard the glad news, she threw off her mourning garments and
sang a song of triumphant rejoicing, accompanied by the voices of her
beautiful followers. Rumor had not lied; the goddess really found the
sarcophagus and the dead body of her husband on the northern shore of the
lake.

[It is natural, that Isis should find the body of her husband in the
north. The connection between Phoenicia and Egypt in this myth, as
it has been handed down to us by Plutarch, is very remarkable. We
consider the explanation of the close affinity between the Isis and
Osiris and the Adonis myths to be in the fact, that Egyptians and
Phoenicians lived together on the shores of the Delta where the
latter had planted their colonies. Plutarch's story of the finding
of Osiris' dead body is very charming. Isis and Osiris. Ed. Parth.