ity was besieged by Nebuchadnezzar, and during the horrors of
its capture and the whole of the seventy sad years that followed. When
he awoke, it was to meet the prophet Jeremiah returning from the
captivity, and he entered the restored city with him in triumph. But the
seventy years had seemed to him but a few hours; nor had he known
anything of what passed while he slumbered. Mohammed in the Koran
mentions a story referred by the commentators to Ezra. He is represented
as passing by a village (said to mean Jerusalem) when it was desolate,
and saying: "How will God revive this after its death?" And God made him
die for a hundred years. Then He raised him and asked: "How long hast
thou tarried?" Said the man: "I have tarried a day, or some part of a
day." But God said: "Nay, thou hast tarried a hundred years. Look at thy
food and drink, they are not spoiled; and look at thine ass; for we will
make thee a sign to men. And look at the bones, how we scatter them and
then clothe them with flesh." And when it was made manifest to him, he
said: "I know that God is mighty over all."[140]

Mohammed probably was unconscious that this is to all intents and
purposes the same story as that of the Seven Sleepers, to which he
refers in the chapter on the Cave. Some of the phrases he uses are,
indeed, identical. As usually told, this legend speaks of seven youths
of Ephesus who had fled from the persecutions of the heathen emperor
Decius, and taken refuge in a cave, where they slept for upwards of
three hundred years. In Mohammed's time, however, it should be noted,
the number of the sleepers was undetermined; they were credited with a
dog who slept with them, like Ezra's ass; and Mohammed's notion of the
time they slept was only one hundred years. One of the wild tribes on
the northern frontier of Afghanistan is said to tell the following story
concerning a cavern in the Hirak Valley, known as the cave of the Seven
Sleepers. A king bearing the suspicious name of Dakianus, deceived by
the devil, set himself up as a god. Six of his servants, however, having
reason to think that his claim was unfounded, fled from him and fell in
with a shepherd, who agreed to throw in his lot with theirs and to guide
them to a cavern where they might all hide. The shepherd's dog followed
his master; but the six fugitives insisted on his being driven back lest
he should betray their whereabouts. The shepherd begged that he might go
with them, as he had be