Chief of the former group are the angels, good and bad; and the jinn, or genii, whom Islam took over from the ancient paganism of Arabia. The angels are God’s attendants, and have some functions entirely independent of natural phenomena. Thus the two stones which mark a Moslem’s grave show the stations of the angels who are to examine him; and the tuft of hair on his shaven head is (like the Jewish sidelocks) to enable the Angel Gabriel to bear the man to heaven. Yet the angels are in many instances personified parts of nature, guardians of the land, spirits of wind or fire or water, who are obviously the descendants and the heirs of the ancient local gods.[56] Thus the wicked angels are supposed to have descended on Mount Hermon, and to have sworn their oaths there--a belief which adds considerably to the importance of the great mountain in Syrian estimation. The jinn are the demons of the desert, lordly and terrible to all who have not the charm which masters them, obedient as little children to those who have it. They are the inhabitants of those whirling sandstorms which sweep across the waste. Some superstitions of this kind may be connected with the former dangers from wild beasts, which used to haunt the jungles of lower Jordan and swarm up to the inland territories after an invasion had depopulated them. Even now there may be seen in Palestine an occasional wolf or leopard, to say nothing of the jackals which every traveller is sure to see. Some of the fauna of Palestine are in themselves so strange as to suggest unearthly affinities. The jerboa, for instance, the jumping mouse of the desert, merits Browning’s description of him, when in _Saul_ he says, “there are none such as he for a wonder, half bird and half mouse.” The lizards, too, seem anything but ordinary respectable law-abiding animals as they twinkle to and fro among the ruins of old buildings. It is said that Mohammed refused to eat lizards, considering that they were the metamorphosed spirits of Israelites.