, 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. Hence it
was once the Scandinavian practice to bury the dead in boats; and in
Altmark a penny is still placed in the mouth of the corpse, that it may
have the means of paying its fare to the ghostly ferryman. [38] In such
a vessel drifted the Lady of Shalott on her fatal voyage; and of similar
nature was the dusky barge, "dark as a funeral-scarf from stem to
stern," in which Arthur was received by the black-hooded queens. [39]

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.
So the sky was not only a crystal dome, or a celestial ocean, but it was
also the Aleian land through which Bellerophon wandered, the country of
the Lotos-eaters, or again the realm of the Graiai beyond the twilight;
and finally it was personified and worshipped as Dyaus or Varuna, the
Vedic prototypes of the Greek Zeus and Ouranos. The clouds, too, had
many other representatives besides ships and cows. In a future paper it
will be shown that they were sometimes regarded as angels or houris; at
present it more nearly concerns us to know that they appear, throughout
all Aryan mythology, under the form of birds. It used to be a matter of
hopeless wonder to me that Aladdin's innocent request for a roc's egg
to hang in the dome of his palace should have been regarded as a crime
worthy of punishment by the loss of the wonderful lamp; the obscurest
part of the whole aff