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The Demon Is At Last Conquered By The King’s Son
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6. The word translated “night-growing rice” is Rát-vashá-ke-dhán; and the ayah’s description of this rice is given in the story. In this description she spoke of it as cháwal, the common word for uncooked rice, and said the Rakshas wished to drink its kánjí-pání (rice-water). As it is a fairy plant I am afraid it is hopeless trying to find its botanical name. Unluckily, Dr. George King says vashá is not rice at all. This is what he wrote to me on the subject: ” Vashá is, I suppose, the same as vasaka, and in that case is Justitia Adhatoda, a straggling shrub common over the whole of India [very unlike the Rát-vashá-ke-dhán] and which was in the Sanscrit as it is in the native pharmacopias. It is not a kind of rice, but belongs to the natural order of Acanthaceæ (the family to which Acanthus and Thunbergia belong).” This night-growing rice may be compared to the day-growing rice in paragraph 2, p. 288, of the notes to this story.
7. Compare with the paper boat the rolled-up burdock leaf given to the hero by the dwarf in the seventh Esthonian tale quoted by Gubernatis ( Zoological Mythology, vol. I. p. 155): whenever this hero wishes to cross water he unrolls his burdock-leaf. Gubernatis compares this leaf to the lotus-leaf on which the Hindús represented their god as floating in the midst of the waters ( ibid. ).
8. With the great wind that comes from the demon, compare the following Swedish account of a giant in Thorpe’s Northern Mythology, vol. II. p. 85. He asks his road of a lad, who directs him: then “he went off as in a whirlwind, and the lad now discovered, to his no small astonishment, that his forefinger with which he had pointed out the way had followed along with the giant.” In the old Scandinavian belief the Giant Hræsvelgr sat at the end of heaven in an eagle’s garb (arna ham). From the motion of his wings came the wind which passed over men ( ib. vol. I. p. 8). It must be mentioned also that “in the German popular tales the devil is frequently made to step into the place of the giants” ( ib. vol. I. p. 234), and that Stöpke or Stepke is in Lower Saxony an appellation of the devil or of the whirlwind, from which proceed the fogs which spread over the land ( ib. p. 235). The devil sits in the whirlwind and rushes howling and raging through the air (Mark Sagen, ib. p. 377). The whirlwind is also ascribed to witches. If a knife be cast into it, the witch will be wounded and become visible (Schreiber’s Taschenbuch, 1839, p. 323; ib. vol. I. p. 235). Mr. Ralston, in his Songs of the Russian People, p. 382, says the Russian peasant attributes whirlwinds to the mad dances in which the devil celebrates his marriage with a witch, and at p. 155 of the same book tells us how the malicious demon Lyeshy not only makes use of the whirlwind as a travelling conveyance for himself and a means of turning intruders out of quarters he had selected for his own refuge, but sends home in it people to whom he is grateful. In Ireland we find a wind blowing from hell. King Loegaire tells Patrick, “I perceived the wind cold, icy, like a two-ridged spear, which almost took our hair from our heads and passed through us to the ground. I questioned Benén as to this wind. Said Benén to me, ‘This is the wind of hell which has opened before Cúchulainn.'”
Lebar na huidre, p. 113 a. This “wind of hell” makes one think of the sweet-scented wind from the mid-day regions, and the evil-scented wind from the north, which in old Persian religious belief blew to meet pure and wicked souls after death (Tylor’s Primitive Culture, vol. II. pp. 98, 99). Mr. Tylor mentions also the Fanti negroes’ belief that the men and animals they sacrifice to the local fetish are carried away in a whirlwind imperceptibly to the worshippers ( ib. p. 378).