an instant turned to stone. I alone was preserved.'"

In the foregoing tale we doubtless have reference to the destruction
of Baku, on the Caspian (though to sail from Balsora to Baku is
impossible), and the driving away into India, by the Arabs under Caliph
Omar, of all who refused to renounce fire-worship and adopt the creed
of the Koran. The turning of the refractory inhabitants into stone is
probably the Arabian storyteller's figurative manner of referring to the
finding of dead bodies in a mummified condition.

It is known that the Egyptians made use of bitumen, in some form, in
the preservation of their dead, a fact with which the Arabians were
familiar. As the Magi held the four elements of earth, air, fire, and
water to be sacred, they feared to either bury, burn, sink, or expose
to air the corrupting bodies of their deceased. Therefore, it was their
practice to envelop the corpse in a coating of wax or bitumen, so as
to hermetically seal it from immediate contact with either of the four
sacred elements. Hence the idea of all the bodies of the Magi left at
Baku being turned to stone, while only the true believer in Mohammed
remained in the flesh.

Marco Polo, the famous traveler of the thirteenth century, makes
reference to the burning jets of the Caucasus, and those fires are known
to the Russians as continuing in existence since the army of Peter the
Great wrested the regions about the Caspian from the modern Persians.
The record of those flaming jets of natural gas is thus brought down in
an unbroken chain of evidence from remote antiquity to the present day,
and they are still burning.

Numerous Greek and Latin writers testify to the known existence of