Volume II Part 29 (2/2)

But he answered, ”Art thou not as my mother, and my brother as a father to me? Speak to me thus no more, and never will I tell any man what a word thou hast said.”

Then she cast dust on her head, and went to her husband, saying, ”Thy brother would have lain with me; slay him or I die”.

Then the elder brother was like a panther of the south, and he sharpened his knife, and lay in wait behind the door. And when the sun set, Bitiou came driving his cattle; but the cow that walked before them all said to him, ”There stands thine elder brother with his knife drawn to slay thee”.

Then he saw the feet of his brother under the door, and he fled, his brother following him; and he cried to Ra, and Ra heard him, and between him and his brother made a great water flow full of crocodiles.

Now in the morning the younger brother told the elder all the truth, and he mutilated himself, and cast it into the water, and the _calmar_ fish devoured it. And he said, ”I go to the Valley of Acacias” (possibly a mystic name for the next world), ”and in an acacia tree I shall place my heart; and if men cut the tree, and my heart falls, thou shalt seek it for seven years, and lay it in a vessel of water. Then shall I live again and requite the evil that hath been done unto me. And the sign that evil hath befallen me shall be when the cup of beer in thy hand is suddenly turbid and troubled.”

Then the elder brother cast dust on his head and besmeared his face, and went home and slew his wicked wife.

Now the younger brother dwelt in the Valley of Acacias, and all the G.o.ds came by that way, and they pitied his loneliness, and Chnum made for him a wife.* And the seven Hathors came and prophesied, saying, ”_She shall die an ill death and a violent_”. And Bitiou loved her, and told her the secret of his life, and that he should die when his heart fell from the acacia tree.

* Chnum is the artificer among the G.o.ds.

Now, a lock of the woman's hair fell into the river, and it floated to the place where Pharaoh's washermen were at work. And the sweet lock perfumed all the raiment of Pharaoh, and the washermen knew not wherefore, and they were rebuked. Then Pharaoh's chief washerman went to the water and found the hair of the wife of Bitiou; and Pharaoh's magicians went to him and said, ”Our lord, thou must marry the woman from whose head this tress of hair hath floated hither”. And Pharaoh hearkened unto them, and he sent messengers even to the Valley of Acacias, and they came unto the wife of Bitiou. And she said, ”First you must slay my husband”; and she showed them the acacia tree, and they out the flower that held the heart of Bitiou, and he died.

Then it so befel that the brother of Bitiou held in his hand a cup of beer, and, lo! the beer was troubled. And he said, ”Alas, my brother!”

and he sought his brother's heart, and he found it in the berry of the acacia. Then he laid it in a cup of fresh water, and Bitiou drank of it, and his heart went into his own place, and lived again.

Then said Bitiou, ”Lo! I shall become the bull, even Apis” (Hapi); and they led him to the king, and all men rejoiced that Apis was found. But the bull went into the chamber of the king's women, and he spake to the woman that had been the wife of Bitiou. And she was afraid, and said to Pharaoh, ”Wilt thou swear to give me my heart's desire?” and he swore it with an oath. And she said, ”Slay that bull that I may eat his liver”.

Then felt Pharaoh sick for sorrow, yet for his oath's sake he let slay the bull. And there fell of his blood two quarts on either side of the son of Pharaoh, and thence grew two persea trees, great and fair, and offerings were made to the trees, as they had been G.o.ds.

Then the wife of Pharaoh went forth in her chariot, and the tree spake to her, saying, ”I am Bitiou”. And she let cut down that tree, and a chip leaped into her mouth, and she conceived and bare a son. And that child was Bitiou; and when he came to full age and was prince of that land, he called together the councillors of the king, and accused the woman, and they slew her. And he sent for his elder brother, and made him a prince in the land of Egypt.

We now propose to show, not only that the incidents of this tale--far more ancient than historic India as it is--are common in the _marchen_ of many countries, but that they are inextricably entangled and intertwisted with the chief plots of popular tales. There are few of the main cycles of popular tales which do not contain, as essential parts of their machinery, one or more of the ideas and situations of this legend.

There is thus at least a presumption that these cycles of story may have been in existence in the reign of Rameses II., and for an indefinite period earlier; while, if they were not, and if they are made of borrowed materials, it may have been from the Egypt of an unknown antiquity, not from much later Indian sources, that they were adapted.

The incidents will now be a.n.a.lysed and compared with those of _marchen_ in general.

To this end let us examine the incidents in the ancient Egyptian tale of _The Two Brothers_. These incidents are:--

(1) The _spretae injuria formae_ of the wedded woman, who, having offered herself in vain to a man, her brother-in-law, accuses him of being her a.s.sailant. This incident, of course, occurs in Homer, in the tale of Bellerophon, before we know anything of historic India. This, moreover, seems one of the notions (M. Cosquin admits, with Benfey, that there are such notions) which are ”universally human,” and _might_ be invented anywhere.

(2) The Egyptian Hippolytus is warned of his danger by his cow, which speaks with human voice. Every one will recognise the ram which warns Phrixus and h.e.l.le in the Jason legend.* In the Albanian _marchen_,**

a _dog_, not a cow nor a ram, gives warning of the danger. Animals, in short, often warn of danger by spoken messages, as the fish does in the Brahmanic deluge-myth, and the dog in a deluge-myth from North America.

* The authority cited by the scholiast (Apoll. Rhod., Argon., i. 256) is Hecatseus. Scholiast on Iliad, vii. 86, quotes Philostepha.n.u.s.

** Von Hahn, i. 65.

(3) The accused brother is pursued by his kinsman, and about to be slain, when Ra, at his prayer, casts between him and the avenger a stream full of crocodiles. This incident is at least not very unlike one of the most widely diffused of all incidents of story--the _flight_ in which the runaways cause magical rivers or lakes suddenly to cut off the pursuer. This narrative of the flight and the obstacles is found in Scotch, Gaelic, j.a.panese (no water obstacle), Zulu, Russian, Samoan, and in ”The Red Horse of the Delawares,” a story from Dacotah, as well as in India and elsewhere.* The difference is, that in the Egyptian _conte_, as it has reached us in literary form, the fugitive appeals to Ra to help him, instead of magically making a river by throwing water or a bottle behind him, as is customary. It may be conjectured that the subst.i.tution of divine intervention in response to prayer for magical self-help is the change made by a priestly scribe in the traditional version.**

* See Folk-Lore Journal, April, 1886, review of _Houston's Popular Stories_, for examples of the magic used in the flight.

** Maspero, Contes, p. 13, note 1.

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