[34] My little
daughter is anxious to know whether it is necessary to take a
balloon in order to get to the place where God lives, or
whether the same end can be accomplished by going to the
horizon and crawling up the sky;[35] the Mohammedan of old was
working at the same problem when he called the rainbow the
bridge Es-Sirat, over which souls must pass on their way to
heaven. According to the ancient Jew, the sky was a solid
plate, hammered out by the gods, and spread over the earth in
order to keep up the ocean overhead;[36] but the plate was
full of little windows, which were opened whenever it became
necessary to let the rain come through.[37] With equal
plausibility the Greek represented the rainy sky as a sieve in
which the daughters of Danaos were vainly trying to draw
water; while to the Hindu the rain-clouds were celestial
cattle milked by the wind-god. In primitive Aryan lore, the
sky itself was a blue sea, and the clouds were ships sailing
over it; and an English legend tells how one of these ships
once caught its anchor on a gravestone in the churchyard, to
the great astonishment of the people who were coming out of
church. Charon's ferry-boat was one of these vessels, and
another was Odin's golden ship, in which the souls of slain
heroes were conveyed to Valhalla.
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