"Now at the sight of this miracle the gardener knew that the
dervish was a holy man, beloved of Allah, and straightway offered
him a melon.
"`Not so,' answered Hadji Abdul-Aziz; `keep what thou hast, thou
wicked man. May thy melons become as hard as thy heart, and thy
field as barren as thy soul!'
"And straightway it came to pass that the melons were changed into
these blocks of stone, and the grass into this sand, and never
since has anything grown thereon."
In this story, and in myriads like it, we have a survival of that
early conception of the universe in which so many of the leading
moral and religious truths of the great sacred books of the world
are imbedded.
All ancient sacred lore abounds in such mythical explanations of
remarkable appearances in nature, and these are most frequently
prompted by mountains, rocks, and boulders seemingly misplaced.
In India we have such typical examples among the Brahmans as the
mountain-peak which Durgu threw at Parvati; and among the Buddhists
the stone which Devadatti hurled at Buddha.
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