being originally Ana's messengers, they once "secretly plotted a wicked deed," rose against the heavenly powers, obscured the Moon, and all but hurled him from his seat. But the Maskim are ever more feared and hated, as appears from the following description, which has become celebrated for its real poetical force: 8. "They are seven! they are seven!--Seven they are in the depths of Ocean,--seven they are, disturbers of the face of Heaven.--They arise from the depths of Ocean, from hidden lurking-places.--They spread like snares.--Male they are not, female they are not.--Wives they have not, children are not born to them.--Order they know not, nor beneficence;--prayers and supplication they hear not.--Vermin grown in the bowels of the mountains--foes of Ea--they are the throne-bearers of the gods--they sit in the roads and make them unsafe.--The fiends! the fiends!--They are seven, they are seven, seven they are! "Spirit of Heaven (_Zi-ana, Ana_), be they conjured! "Spirit of Earth (_Zi-ki-a, Ea_), be they conjured!" 9. Besides these regular sets of evil spirits in sevens--seven being a mysterious and consecrated number--there are the hosts untold of demons which assail man in every possible form, which are always on the watch to do him harm, not only bodily, but moral in the way of civil broils and family dissensions; confusion is their work; it is they who "steal the child from the father's knee," who "drive the son from his father's house," who withhold from the wife the blessing of children; they have stolen days from heaven, which they have made evil days, that bring nothing but ill-luck and misfortune,--and nothing can keep them out: "They fall as rain from the sky, they spring from the earth,--they steal from house to house,--doors do not stop them,--bolts do not shut them out,--they creep in at the doors like serpents,--they blow in at the roof like winds." Various are their haunts: the tops of mountains, the pestilential marshes by the sea, but especially the desert. Diseases are among the most dreaded of this terrible band, and first among these NAMTAR or DIBBARA, the demon of Pestilence, IDPA (Fever), and a certain mysterious disease of the head, which must be insanity, of which it is said that it oppresses the head and holds it tight like a tiara (a heavy headdress) or "like a dark prison," and makes it confused, that "it is like a violent tempest; no one knows whence it comes, nor what is its object."