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On the Translation of Myths Between the Old And: Nights

This view is to an extent strengthened by Wák Wák being the home of the lovely maiden captured by Hasan (in the charming story of Hasan of El Basrah in the Arabian Nights), after she had divested herself of her bird skin, and to which he had to make so weary a pilgrimage from island to island, and sea to sea, in search of her after her escape from him. It is evident that among the wonders related by navigators of islands so remote and unfrequented, not the least would be the superavian loveliness of the Birds of Paradise, and from the exaggerated narratives of travellers may have * The Agave Americane, which substance has as many uses among the Mexicans as the bamboo (the iron of China) among the Chinese, or the camel among nomads.

OLD AND NEW WORLD MYTHS. arisen the beautiful fable incorporated in the Arabian Nights, as well as that other recorded by Eesa or Moosa the son of El Mubarak Es Serafee. * "Here, too, is a tree that bears fruit like women with bodies, eyes, limbs, &c. like those of women; they have beautiful faces, and are suspended by the hair; they come forth from integuments like large leathern bags; and when they feel the air and the sun they cry out 'Wák Wák' until their hair is cut, and when it is cut they die; and the people of these islands understand their cry, and augur ill from it." This, after all, is not more absurd than the story of the origin of the barnacle duck, extant and believed in Europe until within the last century or so. El Edrisi, who, in common with the geographers of the period, believed in a great antarctic continent, after describing Sofala with its mines of gold, abundance of iron, &c., jumps at once to the mainland of Wák Wák, which he describes as possessing two towns situated on a great gulf (Carpentaria?), and a savage population.† The two small towns may very well have been encampments of the aborigines, or trading stations of Malay merchants.