Many are the impressive stories connected with the myth of the soul’s transit over water--be it a River or a Sea of Death. In the dark days which followed the overthrow of the Western Empire, when all the civilization of its remoter territories had melted away, there grew up among the fishermen of Northern Gaul a wild belief that the Channel opposite them was the mortal river, and that the shores of this island were the asylum of dark ghosts. The myth went, that in the villages of the Gaulish coast the fishermen were summoned by rotation to perform the dreadful task of ferrying over the departed spirits. At night a knocking was heard on their doors, a signal of their duties, and when they approached the beach they saw boats lying deep in the water as though heavily freighted, but yet to _their_ eyes empty. Each stepping in, took his rudder, and then by an unfelt wind the boat was wafted in one night across a distance which, rowing and sailing, they could ordinarily compass scarcely in eight. Arrived at the opposite shore (our coast), they heard names called over, and voices answering as if by rota, and they felt their boats becoming light. Then when all the ghosts had landed they were wafted back to Gaul.[133] The belief in the passage by the soul over a ‘Bridge’ which is the bridge over the River of Death is as universal almost as the notion of that River of Death itself. Many creeds see that bridge in the Milky Way. The Vedic hymns do so. They call the Milky Way by many names, of which the most common is the path of Yama, the way to the house of Yama, and Yama is the ruler of the Dead--‘a narrow path,’ as we have already quoted. ‘A narrow path, an ancient one, stretches thither,[134] a path untrodden by men, a path I know of.’ The Persians, too, knew the bridge under the name of Kinvad or Chinvad. And from the Persians the Mohammedans get the same notion, which is embodied in the Koran. There the Bridge of Death is called Es-Sirat. It is finer than a hair and sharper than the edge of a sword, along which, nevertheless, the soul of the good Moslem will be snatched across like lightning or like the wind; but the wicked man or the unbeliever will fall headlong thence into an abyss of fire beneath. The Norsemen had their Bridge of Souls in the Gjallarbrû, ‘The Resounding Bridge,’ over which Balder had to ride.[135] And when we read the mediæval accounts of journeys to the other world, to Purgatory or Hell, in almost every one we find that the passage over a Bridge--the Brig’ o’ Dread of the ballad--is a part of the journey.