In his True History Lucian relates what he is at pains to point out is a fictitious voyage to the moon and to various isles of the outer seas. Grotesque half-human beings people his narrative. There are grape vines, the upper parts of which have the shape of women, and these entwine themselves about his men. There are Hippogypi, or men carried upon vultures; Onoscileas, or ass-legged women, with long robes and a free manner of harlotry; Bucephali, or men with bulls’ heads and horns and lowing voices; Schorodomachi, or garlic-fighters; Psyllotoxotæ, or flea-archers; Acroconopes, or gnat-riders; cloud-centaurs, nut-eaters, pirates riding dolphins that neigh like horses, and a variety of other fantastic creatures. The Samosatan wrote, he says, “about such things as neither are nor ever can be.”

Yet races of men very much like these were long supposed to live upon earth. Their descriptions are in the ancient histories, their habitats are defined in the classic geographies, their effigies are upon mediæval maps. As late as the century after Columbus, travelers were still coming upon them, and repeating the interrogatory of The Tempest, “What have we here, a man or a fish?” Perhaps twoscore of these imaginary tribes are better documented, and not so long ago were better known, than most of the tribes of real men and women upon the earth; the documents are on dusty shelves of the larger libraries.

Some of the singular folk entered literature by the double gates of mistaken etymology and literal acceptance of figurative language. In the lineaments of others one discerns races that are still upon earth, but divested of the masks of fable. In the rest one sees the creative fancy of man following its natural bent—cartooning humanity by exaggerating a limb or feature or by eliminating it; borrowing something from the brute; making men taller or shorter, or longer-lived or shorter-lived, than reality; fashioning the moon calves, the Calibans; setting up a realm in which paradox is law. Thus mankind gave itself new and interesting neighbors.

Singular Speech

Men judge one another by the testimony of the ear as well as of the eye; and the speech of all these peoples, no less than their anatomy, proclaimed the law of paradox. Sometimes the surprise was in hearing Indian or Greek or Arab words from lips that seemed bestial rather than human. Often no words came at all, but only unintelligible animal sounds. This, indeed, was to be expected from races whose bodies varied from the normal; but the list of prodigious folk is lengthened by the addition of other men who, while looking like ordinary mortals, were not quite human in their speech.

There were nations which used dumb-barter because they had no language. There were tribes in Ethiopia which, as Pliny says, “have to employ gesture by nodding the head and moving the limbs instead of speech.” On the Atlantic seaboard were troglodytes that “have no articulate voice, but only utter a kind of squeaking noise.” “Like the screeching of bats,” says Herodotus of the same people. Another tribe of troglodytes, according to John Lok, “have no speech, but rather a grinning and chattering.” The Arabians dwell in caves and have shrill, boyish voices, declares Jordanus. In the eastern mountains of Ind, says Tauron, are the Choromandæ, a forest folk with hairy bodies, canine teeth, and sea-green eyes who “screech in a frightful manner.” Kazwini speaks of hairy little men in Ramni with a speech like the chirping of birds. Carpini names among the peoples of Ind the dog-faced men who speak two words in human wise and bark for the third. There were people with a small hole in place of the mouth, whose conversation was a whistling. Among the isles of Maundeville is one “clept Traconda, where the Folk be as Beasts and unreasonable, and dwell in Caves; and they eat Flesh of Serpents, and they eat but little; and they speak Nought, but they hiss as Serpents do.” In a desert beyond paradise this authority says there are wild men “that be hideous to look on, for they be horned and they speak Nought, but they grunt as Pigs.” However, there was speech in that country, for “Popinjays speak of their own Nature and say ‘Salve’ to Men that go through the Deserts.”

Neither classical nor mediæval relators mention the device which has given a South African tribe its name, and rumors of which may have provided a basis for fable. Merolla, who went to the Congo in 1682, heard that the Hottentots “have not the gift of human voice, but understand each other by a sort of hissing tone and motion of the lips.” This is the Hottentot “click” which the Portuguese called a kind of stammering and the Dutch likened to the turkey’s gobble. It is made by applying the tongue to the roof of the mouth, the teeth, or the gums, and suddenly drawing it back. There are four of these clicks—the dental, like the smack of a kiss; the palatal, like the tap of a woodpecker; the cerebral, like the pop of a cork; and the lateral, like the quack of a duck.

The Dog-headed People

The Amazon and pygmy, and certain tribes of the satyrs, had speech entirely human. Because in them credulity has won unlooked-for triumphs over skepticism, these three peoples, best known of the races of legend, are reserved for separate treatment later. The men of another race vie with the Amazons as figures in plastic art, although only in its more grotesque manifestations. The Cynocephali, or dog-headed people, writes Ctesias, are a swarthy and extremely just people living in the mountains of northern India at the sources of the Hyparkhos. The tribe numbers about one hundred and twenty thousand persons and pays tribute to the King of the Indians.

These people have the heads of dogs, but with larger teeth, and the bodies of men; and they have dog claws. They cannot use human speech, although they understand it. They converse with one another by barking, and with other people by barking and the sign language. They practice no arts but live by the chase, using the bow and spear; and they can outrun wild animals. Their staple food is raw flesh, which, however, they roast in the sun. They rear numbers of sheep, goats, and asses and drink the milk and whey of the ewes. They are fond of the fruit of the siptakhora, the tree that produces amber. The surplus fruit they dry and pack in hampers as the Greeks pack raisins. Every year they freight rafts with the hampers and with two hundred and sixty talents weight of amber, and a like weight of a pigment which they make from a purple flower. This they convey as tribute to the Indian king. They ship other raft-loads of the same commodities to their neighbors, receiving bread and flour in return and a cloth made from a stuff grown on trees (cotton). They also sell arms to other peoples.

The dog-headed people are troglodytes, sleeping on a litter of straw or leaves spread in caves. The women bathe once a month, the men not at all, merely washing their hands; but thrice a month they anoint themselves with butter. They are clad in skins and the richest have cotton raiment. Some of them live to be two hundred years old.

The inhabitants of the Andaman Islands, says Marco Polo, are a savage race “having heads, eyes and teeth resembling those of the canine species”; and they kill and eat strangers. Odoric is equally uncomplimentary, but Ibn Batuta, always sensitive to female charm, says their naked wives are of exquisite beauty. Carpini speaks of India’s dog-faced men. Even Greenland has a similar legend as to an older race of barbarians who had magic, but not the bow and arrow. These were men with dog paws. They disappeared in battle with the Eskimos, or from natural causes, since “the world was too small to hold both races.” Myths of dog descent are found among the Aleuts, Dog-ribs, and Ojibwas in North America, as well as in Madagascar, Java, the Nicobars, New Guinea, Indo-China, and even Europe. In North America the wild dog (coyote) frequently figures as the creator of mankind.

Sunamukha is the Indian name of the Cynocephali, and a manuscript of the Prabhâsakhanda recites that this people lives on the Indus. What Ctesias has set down seems to be an account of an actual race, a tribe of black aborigines.

When Hayton, the intrepid traveler-king of Armenia, paid a visit in the thirteenth century to Batu, the Mongol prince, he brought back a related and still stranger story. Beyond Cathay, a journey of two years and two months from Nakin, was a country where the women had the human shape and speech, but the men were like hairy dogs and had no speech. These dog-men repelled all strangers from their land, and supported themselves and their wives by the chase, the men eating flesh raw, the women cooking it. When children were born, the males had the shape of dogs, the females that of women. The Chinese Encyclopedia also has a tale of the Kingdom of Dogs, and it was a Chinese traveler who broke up this curious commonwealth. The women wished to escape from it and gave him little sticks, asking him, when he went back to his native land, to drop one of these every ten li. They got away by the trail he marked.

The One-Eyed Arimaspians

Lying between the gold-guarding griffins and the cannibal Issedones was the country of the one-eyed Arimaspians. They first appear in a poem of Aristeas of Proconesus, a semi-mythical person who made a northward journey, as his verses declare, in a mood of “bacchic fury.” Herodotus bases his account on these, but cannot persuade himself that there is a race of men born with one eye who in all else resemble the rest of mankind. Arimaspi, he says, is a word of Scythic origin, a compound of arima (one) and spou (eye).

There Herodotus drops the legend, and after it has thriven in the tales of the fabulists for some thousands of years, modern criticism takes it up again from the same angle. It is suggested that, after all, Arimaspi never meant one-eyed, and that the race, the tradition of whose deformed aspect arose from a mistaken translation of its name, is still in existence in the Russian tribe known as the Tsheremis, which occupies the left bank of the Middle Volga. This is near enough to the Ural gold districts to meet the general topography of the legend.

Strabo also describes a one-eyed nation, the Monomatti, with the ears of dogs, bristling hair, and shaggy breasts.

Folk That Live on Odors

The folk that live on odors dwell, says Megasthenes, near the sources of the Ganges. They have no mouths, hence their name of Astomi. Their bodies are rough and hairy and they clothe themselves with a down plucked from trees—silk or cotton. They use neither meat nor drink and subsist only by breathing and by inhaling scents. When they start on a long journey they lay in a supply of odoriferous roots, flowers, and apples. But, says Pliny, “an odor which is a little more powerful than usual easily destroys them.” Pope’s “die of a rose in aromatic pain” may define such a fate.

According to other ancient writers the Astomi also supported life by sniffing at raw meat, and their susceptibility to rank smells made it hard to keep them alive in camp. In Ethiopia Pliny places a people that “have the mouth grown together, and being destitute of nostrils, breathe through one passage only, imbibing their drink through it by means of a hollow stalk of the oat, which there grows spontaneously and supplies them with its grain for food.” Maundeville removes the Astomi to an island and gives them the stature of pygmies and a hissing speech.

The Noseless Nations

There were several noseless nations. The flexible-footed Scyritae, says Megasthenes, had only two breathing orifices above the mouth; and he sketches pygmies similarly made. Maundeville improves on the sketch: “And in another Ile be Folk that have the Face all flat, all plain, without Nose and without Mouth.” In contrast still another island had “Folk of foul Fashion and Shape that have the lip above the Mouth so great that when they sleep in the Sun they cover all the Face with that lip.” Megasthenes had named and described these seventeen centuries before. They were the Amycteres, with upper lips projecting far beyond the lower—an omnivorous people, fond of raw meat, and short lived. Tudela tells of desert-ranging, infidel Turks who worship the wind, eschew bread and cooked meats, and, lacking noses, breathe through two small holes. The Noseless People of the Eskimo shore are evil spirits that drag fishermen to gloomy abodes under the sea.

To men with the bold Roman profile, the Levantine contour, or the scimitar-shaped visage of the Sephardic Jew, Tartary’s small-nosed, flat-faced peoples would indeed present a countenance very like a plane surface. The scanty hair of the same peoples may be responsible for the ancient notion of bald northern nations. The Eskimo legend suggests a skeleton tenanted by a demon.

Large-eared Races

An Indian race called the Enotocoitæ had ears hanging down to their feet—“great Ears and long that hang down to their Knees” is for once the more restrained phrase of Maundeville. The philosophers who had told Megasthenes of so many interesting folk told him also of these. They could sleep upon their ears as upon a rug, or under them as under a canopy, or inside them as in a sleeping bag. These appendages were like winnowing fans, Tzetzes puts it. Their owners were so strong they could pluck up trees. So could the elephant, which also has flapping ears and a prolonged upper lip—the pattern, it would seem, for at least two fables.

Ctesias describes a people who could blanket the upper parts of their bodies with their ears. These were the Pandore, a mountain race who lived to be two hundred years old, yet were destined evidently to become extinct, for they numbered only thirty thousand persons and the women bore children but once. The infants were hoary-headed at birth, but at thirty the hair began to turn black, and at sixty no white hairs were left. Five thousand bowmen and spearmen of the tribe followed the Indian king. There was even a Scandinavian tribe with all-enveloping ears, if Pliny had it right.

Headless Peoples

To the west of the Troglodytes in distant mountains of Ind, says Ctesias, live tribesmen who are without necks and have eyes in their shoulders. In the north of Africa, says Pliny, are the Blemmyes who “are said to have no heads, their mouths and eyes being seated in their breasts.” These were also called the Acephalites. Maundeville shifts their habitat. They occupy one of fifty-four great isles under the jurisdiction of the king of Dondun. This island is somewhere toward the south of Asia. In it dwell “Folk of foul Stature and of cursed Nature that have no Heads. And their Eyes be in their Shoulders, and their Mouths be round shapen, like an Horse-shoe amidst their Breasts.” The Arabian Nights locates these same people in the City of Brass. Abu Mohammed, hight Lazybones, in quest of his wife, who has been carried thither by a Marid, “heard a noise of cries and found himself in the midst of a multitude of folk whose eyes were in their breasts.” They gave him the news he sought and volunteered, “Now we be brethren of the white serpent.” The Eskimos speak of a headless people living in the moon and in remote regions of the earth.

Here is a story of a curious race domiciled by various writers in various parts of the Old World, and yet lacking details to give it verisimilitude. These are supplied by Sir Walter Raleigh in his report on the wonders of Guiana. The headless people are Indians of the tribe of Ewaipanoma living in a district near the Orinoco. He has seen none of them, but “every childe in the provinces” affirms the story. Their eyes are in their shoulders, their mouths in the middle of their breasts, “and a long traine of haire groweth backward between their shoulders.” A chief’s son whom they had made a prisoner told Raleigh they were “the most mighty men of all the land, and use bowes, arrowes, and clubbes thrice as big as any of Guiana.” This confirms, concludes Raleigh, what was written of them by “Mandevile, whose reports were holden for fables many yeeres.”

In the interior of Guiana Sir Walter had a trading transaction with a nation of kindred appearance. He bartered jew’s-harps for fowls at a town of five hundred houses, where he found Indians plentifully provisioned with venison, fowls, and wine. He asked their chief “whence hee had those Hennes.” The answer was that they were brought from a mountain less than a mile away, “where were many Indians, yea so many as grasse on the ground, and that these men had the points of their shoulders higher than the Crownes of their heads, and had so many Hennes as was wonderful; and if wee would have any wee should send them Jewes harpes, for they would give for every one two Hennes. Wee tooke an Indian, and gave him five hundred Harpes; the Hennes were so many that hee brought us, as were not to be numbered.” Raleigh wanted to visit these mountain Acephali, but was warned that they were in their drunken feasts and would kill him.

One may explain the headless peoples about as one will. The Tartar tribes north of India certainly have short necks. Thus Pliny on the African Acephalites: “On the invasion of the Persians the Blemmyes were in the habit of falling on one knee and bowing the head to the breast, by which means, without injury to themselves, they afforded a passage to the horses of the enemy.” Buffon accepts and interprets the Raleigh tale. “This monstrous deformity cannot be natural,” he says. “It is probable that savages, who are so pleased in disfiguring nature by flattening, rounding, and lengthening the head, might likewise contrive to sink it into the shoulders. These fantasies might arise from an idea that, by rendering themselves deformed, they became more dreadful to their enemies.” This passage would have interested Sir Walter.

Half-men

There were people in the Philippines whose bodies suffered temporary subtraction at the other extremity. These were the asuangs—men who had acquired powers of sorcery by eating human livers. When they willed it their persons divided at the waist line, the lower part remaining behind and the upper growing wings and long nails and a horrible black tongue, and flying away on vampire errands. An orifice in the armpit contained an oil which rendered this human bat invisible. If salt was cast on his abandoned half he could not assemble himself on his return. Wak-wak was one of his names. The reality behind this grim fiction was the learned counselor, called the asuang, whom each datto had at his court before the Spaniards came. His evil repute is a Spanish slander.

If there were men whose stature had been reduced as by a transverse sweep of the knife, there were others whose appearance was as if they had been sliced. These were the half-men of Moslem legend called the Shikh and the Nesnas, each with a single arm, leg, and eye, as though one man had been split in twain. The Zulus had the same story, perhaps from Moslem sources. They tell of half-men discovering a Zulu girl in a cave and thinking her two persons. When they discovered their error they exclaimed: “The thing is pretty! But, oh, the two legs!” The fable may have sprung from figurative speech, in which men of backward culture are described as only half-men.

Diminutive Husbands

American Eskimo legends tell of a tribe called Ardnainiq living far to the northwest, whereof the men, small as children and covered with hair, were carried around in the hoods of their wives, who were of normal size. The detail oddly parallels Darwin’s statement that he had found a female crustacean of the common cirripedial character, “and in two valves of her shell she had two little pockets, in each of which she kept a little husband.”

Eel-like Men

A race of eel-like men, says Julius Scaliger, dwell in Malabar. They have the serpent’s form, are eight feet long, and, while of horrible aspect, are harmless unless provoked. They will “stand bolt upright for hours together, gazing on the boyes at their sportes, never offring to hurte any of them.” In the upright posture they lose the likeness of serpents and “spread themselves into such a corpulent breadthe, that had they feet they would seeme to be men.” This is a tale brought to Europe by the Portuguese; and at a time when it was debated whether the serpent assumed a human form in tempting Eve, it was thought this might be the creature whose body Satan borrowed.

The tale is based in part on the cobra’s power to dilate its neck into a broad hood. Back of it are Buddhist traditions of the Nagas, a race of serpents that lived in dragon palaces under the earth. There were naga-kings, and naga-maidens who assumed human form, had their mortal lovers, and became the founders of dynasties. The original inhabitants of the Andamans were reputed to have been of this race, and according to a popular belief their descendants were oviparous. The interpretation of this legend is complicated by the surmise that the Nagas were actually an ancient, non-Aryan people whose emblem was the cobra.

Strangely Footed Folk

Certain races the ancients classified and named according to their means of getting over the ground. With his instinct for balanced statement Pliny unearths a passage from Eudoxus which says that “in the southern parts of India” the men have feet a cubit in length, “while those of the women are so remarkably small that they are called Struthopodes.” The word may mean either “sparrow-footed” or “ostrich-footed.” In the context it probably means the former; the dames with diminutive feet hopped around as sparrows do. It may be they were Chinese women.

Near the Indian troglodytes, according to Ctesias, dwelt the Monocoli, who had only one leg, but were able to leap with surprising agility. These people were also called the Sciapodes, which means “making a shadow with the foot.” It was their custom in the time of extreme heat to lie on their backs and shield themselves from the sun, each under the shade of his own foot. A later century knew the shadow-footed folk as the men with parasol feet. Maundeville places them in Ethiopia. In Armenia, or bordering upon it, the Mongols found another one-legged nation, but with different structure. Its citizens had only one arm also, which was attached to the middle of the breast, but they had two gaits. Hopping, they covered ground with remarkable speed, and when tired of hopping the men and women whirled themselves around like cartwheels.

When the Norsemen were exploring America, they encountered a Uniped, or one-legged man, who launched a lethal arrow at Thorwald Ericson, as he sat at the boat helm. The dying leader drew it out and exclaimed, “There is fat around my paunch; we have hit upon a faithful country, and yet we are not like to get much profit by it.”

The stiff-legged men, Carpini heard, lived south of the country of the Kara-Khitai, upon a great desert. They had no speech and no joints in their limbs, and when they fell down somebody had to help them up. They wore felt of camel’s hair and made wind shelters thereof. When wounded in battle they stanched the blood with grass and fled swiftly away.

A related tale is told by Rubruquis, who had it from “a certain priest of Cathaya who sat with me clothed in a red-coloured cloth.” When the friar asked him whence he had such a color, “he told me that in the east part of Cathaya there were high craggy rocks, wherein certain creatures dwell, having in all parts the shape of men, but that they bow not the knees, but leap instead of walking; which are not above one cubit long, and their whole body is covered with hair, who have their abode in caves, which no man can come unto; and they who hunt them, go to them, and carry strong drink with them, and make pits in the rocks like wells, which they fill with that strong drink. The hunters hide themselves, and then these creatures come out of their holes and taste the drink, and cry ‘chin-chin’ and drink till they are made drunk, so that they sleep there. Then the hunters come and bind them hand and foot, while they are sleeping, and afterwards open the veins in their neck and draw forth three or four drops of blood from every one, and let them go free; and that blood, as he told me, is the most precious purple.”

Megasthenes describes a race of Indians living upon a mountain called Nulo, who had their feet turned backward with the heel in front and with eight toes on each foot. Pliny places this race “beyond the other Scythian Anthropophagi in a country called Abarimon situate in a certain great valley of Mount Imaus” (Himalayas). They had great rapidity of movement and wandered about indiscriminately with the wild beasts. The fable may have originated in the Caucasus, where there is still a tradition that dæmons take the shapes of armed men, and have their feet reverted. Farther north dwelt an ox-footed race.

Classic note is made of two writhing nations. The Scyritæ of India who “have merely holes in their faces instead of nostrils” have “flexible feet like the body of the serpent,” says Megasthenes. There was also the thong-footed people or Himantopodes, residents of northern Africa, who moved with a serpentine, crawling gait. This may be a traveler’s impression of some sinuous dance of the desert.

Under the hand of Maundeville the centaurs pass out of mythology into history. The “Folk that have Horses’ Feet” are in his collection of marvelous islanders: “And they be strong and mighty and swift Runners, for they take wild Beasts with Running and eat them.” These are the Hippopodes of Pliny, tenants of a Baltic island. A related folk are the islanders permanently mounted on ostriches, with which they seem to form one body. Kazwini, who records this Arab legend, says they devour the bodies of drowned persons cast up by the sea. On another isle Sir John seems for the once to have invented a people rather than revived a legend. Here be “Folk that go always upon their Knees full marvellously. And at every Pace that they go, it seemeth that they would fall.”

In Ethiopia, “on that side of the Nile which extends along the borders of the Southern Ocean,” Pliny domiciles the Artabatitæ, who have four feet and wander about after the manner of wild beasts. Maundeville is more detailed: “And they be all skinned and feathered, and they would leap lightly from Tree to Tree.” Farther south were the Aigamuxa, theme of a Hottentot story cycle, whose eyes were in the back of their feet. Regarding human beings as zebras, they hunted them down and tore them to pieces.

Chinese marvel tales describe a race of people living somewhere in the west. They have a hole right through their bodies at the breast. When their mandarins would take the air, they thrust a stick through the aperture, and two domestics carry them so. “If the bearers are strong enough,” says Huc, “they often string on several gentlemen at once.”

In the Russian East

There was an east other than the sun-bathed lands whose fabulous peoples are in literature. It lay just beyond northern Europe, on the farther flanks of the Urals and beside the Obi. To the Russians of the Middle Ages it was a land of strange races and weird happenings. About these a body of legends grew up which in a measure parallel the classic stories, but give them backgrounds of ice and snow and add new actors and enriching details. A Russian manuscript of the fifteenth century, found at Novgorod a few years ago and entitled “The Unknown Peoples of the East,” pictures these forgotten folk. Nine different races, all called Samoyeds, are described, and six are races of marvel.

There were Samoyeds who shed their skins like snakes. For a month each year they stayed in the water, avoiding dry land, lest their bodies crack open. The Russian anthropologist, Professor Anutschin, whose interpretation of the narrative is followed here, says that these are natives who fish and hunt in the watery domain of the tundras, where the summer attacks of mosquitoes and horse flies give their skins a rough and bloody aspect, as if cracking before sloughing off. There were also Samoyeds like other people from the navel up, but all shaggy-haired from the navel down—in reality wearing trousers of reindeer skins with the hair outside. There were other and speechless Samoyeds with their mouths on the top of their heads. When they would eat, says the Novgorod manuscript, “they crumble the meat or fish, stick it under their fur caps and then move their shoulders up and down.” This is the account of a people whose speech the Russians did not understand, who wore the head skin of the reindeer, ears and all, for a cap, and whose sack-like garments had collars so high as to conceal their mouths.

There were also headless Samoyeds with eyes in their breasts and the mouth between the shoulders, and their diet was raw reindeer heads and bones; in warfare and the chase their weapon was an iron tube through which they drove an iron arrow by hitting it with a hammer. This, it is thought, was an early race of ironworkers who wore peaked head-caps which concealed the shoulder line and made the face of the wearer seem to be in the breast. Another explanation is that several Siberian tribes had faces painted on the leathern fronts of their garments. The descriptive phrase, “with the face upon the breast,” might easily become “headless” when translated into Russian.

Then there was a strange Samoyed race—an independent creation of Russian fantasy—the members of which died every winter and revived two months afterward, if let alone. When the fatal hour had come, they sat down and a stream of water gushed from their nostrils and froze to the ground. If a stranger came from another land and broke this icicle or removed it, the Samoyed never woke up. If he merely jarred it, the refrigerated native would open his eyes and ask, “Why, little friend, have you disfigured me?” Others were brought to life by the warmth of the spring sun. According to a German writer the day of death was November twenty-seven and revival came on the twenty-third day of the following April. It is supposed that the wooden idols scattered over the Obi country, three hundred of them on a single river island, were the basis of this curious story. Covered with ice and drifted snow, they looked human enough, and there were native reports that these were ancestral Samoyeds.

One race of Samoyeds, says the Novgorod manuscript, travels day and night with torches by underground ways and comes out upon a sea over which a strange light falls and beside which is a great fortress and a deserted city. When the stranger approaches he hears a tumult in the streets, but, entering, he sees no one and the clamor dies away. In each house, however, there are things for him to eat and drink, and other commodities. He takes what he needs, lays down money in its stead, and goes his way. Should he fail to make payment, the wares he takes with him vanish and return to the silent town. And when the stranger leaves, “then he hears again a tumult as in other inhabited cities.”

This story has the Celtic magic and might be a chapter from Malory. It is thought that the mysterious sea is Lake Koliwan in the western Altais. Granite rocks in the semblance of towers, terraces, and dismantled fortifications rise from its shores, and in the hills are the pits and galleries of a copper camp long abandoned by the Tchudi. These are the underground Samoyed ways of legend. Perhaps dumb barter was once carried on here. The radiance across the lake, if not the northern lights, may have glanced from some Russian tale, like that in which Bishop Theodor saw the earthly paradise on a mountain side with an azure light upon it.

New World Prodigies

The New World, it has been seen, had its own prodigious peoples. In Spanish America their legends are overlaid with imported material, but elsewhere there is little alien alloy. North America has traditions of stone giants, pygmies, one-eyed cannibals, hermaphrodites, flint-armored warriors, double-headed men, dog-headed tribes. There are also storm-raising mermen, phantom boatmen, underwater folk, otter-men, seal-men, pug-nosed people, skeletons that resume human shape at night, talking skulls. Many stories tell of the marriage of mortals with unearthly beings, of the living with the dead, and of the union of women with animals. The best known Indian myth has two versions, in one of which the people of the First Age had human forms but an animal nature, and took the animal guise before the real men appeared; in the other, which is of the southwest, the first people had bestial forms but a human nature, and presently laid aside their animal masks. In the latter version there was an Amazonian phase in the ascent of the primitive people. Their women seceded from society and lived with a water monster. Hunger drove them back, but they brought into the world a number of prodigious beings whom their lords had to destroy.

In the First People who had the human form but became animals the Eastern Algonquins and the Pacific tribes have a myth which ranks beside the Greek myth of the Titans that were before Zeus, and the myths of the Golden Age. Its quality is at once haunting and challenging, the more so because these dawn-folk are nowhere described. “In old times,” a Micmac Indian told Leland, “men were as animals and animals as men; how this was no one knows. But it is told that all were at first men, and as they gave themselves up to this and that desire, and to naught else, they became beasts. But before this came to pass, they could change to one or the other form; yet even as men there was always something which showed what they were.”

The story cycle of the Mewan Indians of California pictured the First People as living in great ceremonial houses and engaging in such cosmic adventures as sun-capture, fire-theft, and warfare against stone giants. How nearly human and how much animal they were the Western Indians left in doubt. When they became animals and went forth from the ceremonial house, they carried to their future haunts not only their old names, but their distinctive traits, such as Grizzly Bear’s appetite for acorns, Frog’s aptitude at water jumps and the clamorous voice of Sandhill Crane. After the transformation was effected—and only casual reasons for it are suggested—man was created. Coyote made him out of feathers, or sticks, or clay, and Lizard gave him five fingers because he had five himself and knew their value. In Popol Vuh, the Guatemalan saga, the First People were manikins that the gods carved out of wood and endowed with life; but so frivolous and irreverent were these that a flood was invoked to destroy them; “the little monkeys that live in the woods” are descended from survivors.

All over North America were stories of stone giants, and crudely archaic as are these stalking figures of legend, the myth has the elemental vigor of Norse epic. According to the Iroquois, a cannibal race—“stonish giants,” Schoolcraft calls them—who made their bodies hard by rolling in sand, overran America seventeen centuries ago, and nearly exterminated the natives. The Holder of the Heavens took giant form in order to destroy them. These are the icy-hearted Chenoos of Algonquin story who lived in northern Canada; in summer they rubbed themselves with fir balsam and rolled on the ground so that moss, leaves, and twigs adhered to them. The California Indians have tales of a cannibal rock-giant who went abroad with a rock basket on his back into which he tossed people. There was another stony Titan, tall as a pine tree but vulnerable under the heel. Only after the First People had killed him by planting sharp sticks in his path did they elect to become animals. The theory that these clanking folk typify mountains is not convincing.

Maundeville has a tale of a bodiless head, but North America is the true home of this weird legend. Glooskap, culture hero of the Eastern Algonquins, played at ball with a snapping skull. There were Indians who went all to pieces leaving only the head, which ate the other members. Everywhere stories were told of heads that pursued people and devoured them. The skull of a mother chased her children over hill and plain. In nightmare flight the heroes of Indian epic cast obstacles or attractive things behind them to delay or divert the rolling skull. Reading a new meaning into the legend, the Arapahoes used it to explain the railroad.

A Sioux story describes a duel between the Monster and the Bladder, twin sons of the Turtle. They kept striking off each other’s heads, and these flew into the sky and, falling back, adhered again to their necks. But at length Bladder pushed Monster’s body aside, and the head rebounded, and to this day it rebounds, for it is the sun, and Bladder is the sky; but only to old men or wise is this part of the story told. It may be that these tales derive from the conception of the sun and moon as traveling heads, or from the use of a skull as tribal medicine, or from the war custom of decapitation later supplanted by scalping, or even from the appearance of the tumbleweed of the western prairies, which wanders like a ball before the autumn wind.