, from the bronze original now in the
Louvre. The latter museum and the British Museum possess
several other figures of the same demon.

The genii of fevers and madness crept in silently everywhere, insidious
and traitorous as they were. The plague alternately slumbered or made
furious onslaughts among crowded populations. Imps haunted the houses,
goblins wandered about the water's edge, ghouls lay in wait for
travellers in unfrequented places, and the dead quitting their tombs in
the night stole stealthily among the living to satiate themselves with
their blood. The material shapes attributed to these murderous beings
were supposed to convey to the eye their perverse and ferocious
characters. They were represented as composite creatures in whom the
body of a man would be joined grotesquely to the limbs of animals in the
most unexpected combinations. They worked in as best they could, birds'
claws, fishes' scales, a bull's tail, several pairs of wings, the head
of a lion, vulture, hyaena, or wolf; when they left the creature a human
head, they made it as hideous and distorted as possible. The South-West
Wind was distinguished from all the rest by the multiplicity of the
incongruous elements of which his person was composed. His dog-like body
was supported upon two legs terminating in eagle's claws; in addition to
his arms, which were furnished with sharp talons, he had four outspread
wings, two of which fell behind him, while the other two rose up and
surrounded his head; he had a scorpion's tail, a human face with large
goggle-eyes, bushy eyebrows, fleshless cheeks, and retreating lips,
showing a formidable row of threatening teeth, while from his flattened
skull protruded the horns of a goat: the entire combination was so
hideous, that it even alarmed the god and put him to flight, when he was
unexpectedly confronted with his own portrait. There was no lack of
good genii to combat this deformed and vicious band. They too
were represented as monsters, but monsters of a fine and noble
bearing,--griffins, winged lions, lion-headed men, and more especially
those splendid human-headed bulls, those "lamassi" crowned with mitres,
whose gigantic statues kept watch before the palace and temple gates.
Between these two races hostility was constantly displayed: restrained
at one point, it broke out afresh at another, and the evil genii,
invariably beaten, as invariably refused to accept their defeat. Man,
less securely