English literature -- History and criticism; Literature -- Anecdotes; Litterateurs
Abraham is said to have been jealous of his wives, and built an
enchanted city for them. He built an iron city and put them in. The
walls were so high and dark, the sun could not be seen in it. He gave
them a bowl full of pearls and jewels, which sent forth a light in this
dark city equal to the sun. Noah, it seems, when in the ark, had no
other light than jewels and pearls. Abraham, in travelling to Egypt,
brought with him a chest. At the custom-house the officers exacted the
duties. Abraham would have readily paid, but desired they would not open
the chest. They first insisted on the duty for clothes, which Abraham
consented to pay; but then they thought, by his ready acquiescence, that
it might be gold. Abraham consents to pay for gold. They now suspected
it might be silk. Abraham was willing to pay for silk, or more costly
pearls; and Abraham generously consented to pay as if the chest
contained the most valuable of things. It was then they resolved to open
and examine the chest; and, behold, as soon as that chest was opened,
that great lustre of human beauty broke out which made such a noise in
the land of Egypt; it was Sarah herself! The jealous Abraham, to conceal
her beauty, had locked her up in this chest.
The whole creation in these rabbinical fancies is strangely gigantic and
vast. The works of eastern nations are full of these descriptions; and
Hesiod's Theogony, and Milton's battles of angels, are puny in
comparison with these rabbinical heroes, or rabbinical things. Mountains
are hurled, with all their woods, with great ease, and creatures start
into existence too terrible for our conceptions. The winged monster in
the "Arabian Nights," called the Roc, is evidently one of the creatures
of rabbinical fancy; it would sometimes, when very hungry, seize and fly
away with an elephant. Captain Cook found a bird's nest in an island
near New Holland, built with sticks on the ground, six-and-twenty feet
in circumference, and near three feet in height. But of the rabbinical
birds, fish, and animals, it is not probable any circumnavigator will
ever trace even the slightest vestige or resemblance.
One of their birds, when it spreads its wings, blots out the sun. An egg
from another fell out of its nest, and the white thereof broke and glued
about three hundred cedar-trees, and overflowed a village. One of them
stands up to the lower joint of the leg in a river, and some mariners,
imagining the water was not deep, were hastening to bathe, when a voice
from heaven said--"Step not in there, for seven years ago there a
carpenter dropped his axe, and it hath not yet reached the bottom."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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