" Genesis i. 6.
[37] Genesis vii. 11.
[38] See Kelly, Indo-European Folk-Lore, p 120; who states
also that in Bengal the Garrows burn their dead in a small
boat, placed on top of the funeral-pile.
In their character of cows, also, the clouds were regarded as
psychopomps; and hence it is still a popular superstition that
a cow breaking into the yard foretokens a death in the family.
[39] The sun-god Freyr had a cloud-ship called Skithblathnir,
which is thus described in Dasent's Prose Edda: "She is so
great, that all the AEsir, with their weapons and war-gear,
may find room on board her"; but "when there is no need of
faring on the sea in her, she is made. . . . with so much
craft that Freyr may fold her together like a cloth, and keep
her in his bag." This same virtue was possessed by the fairy
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.
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