us in immediate observation of nature. The sandhills and downs of the Sahara are variously called by the natives kelb ‘Dog,’ kebsh ‘Ram,’ or chashm el-kelb or chashm el-kebsh ‘Dog’s nose’ or ‘Ram’s nose.’[465] But it is chiefly the clouds that gave so much food to fancy. On Arabic ground we can refer to a treatise by Abû Bekr ibn Dureyd, a linguist of an early age known to every Arabist, on the ‘Description of the Rain and the Cloud,’ which the learned Professor William Wright has published in a useful collection. In this treatise many a vivid picture is to be found which exhibits the continual working of the old mythic views.[466] Even a modern literature nearer to us may be quoted; for who knows not the classical passage in Shakespeare, where Polonius makes observations on the forms of the clouds—a series of mythical observations, which the same poet allows another of his heroes to condense into a mythological _résumé_: Sometime we see a cloud that’s dragonish; A vapour sometime like a bear or lion, A tower'd citadel, a pendent rock, A forked mountain, or blue promontory With trees upon ’t, that nod unto the world, And mock our eyes with air. _Antony and Cleopatra_, IV. 14. If the sky is a pasture, it is most natural to see in the clouds beasts feeding there. So the nomad Arab sees in the clouds herds of camels,[467] and calls a small herd of twenty or thirty camels by the same name by which he describes a broken-off fragment of cloud—al-ṣirmâ. The poet Abû Ḥibâl calls a rain-cloud dalûḥ, i.e. ‘a heavily laden camel;’[468] and according to the Arabian philologist al-Tebrîzî a cloud accompanied by thunder and lightning is called al-ḥannânâ ‘the bellowing,’ because the ancient Arabs compared a thundering cloud[469] to a camel that breaks out into loud bellowing from painful desire to reach home.[470] How full of meaning is the myth that lies hidden behind this expression ḥannânâ! The camel on a journey has gone far away from home, longs to be back again, and bellows with terrible pain: it is the Thunder.[471] And this myth was not confined to the Arabs; we find a slight trace of it among the later Jews, in the Talmûd. When it thundered, they said, ‘The clouds groan.’ Achâ b. Jaʿaḳôbh describes meteorological phenomena in the following words: ‘The lightning sparkles, _the clouds groan_ (menahamîn ʿanânê), and the rain comes’ (Berâkhôth, fol. 59. a). This mythical conception is only a variation of the more general view that thunder is a _lion’s roaring_ (Job XXXVII. 4; shâʾag is used specially of the lion), out of which grew the roaring of Jahveh, mentioned in many passages of prophecy and poetry—a result of the monotheistic transformation of mythical ideas. In Arabic hamhama is used both of the lion’s roaring and of thunder; and so also zamjara. In the work of Ibn Dureyd already quoted an Arab says of a thunder-cloud,