to thrash it out and grind it on the morrow. But Satan fired this rick and reduced their harvest to ashes.
Whilst they wept and lamented, Satan came to them as an angel, and said, "This is the work of your Enemy the Fiend, but God has sent me to bring you into a field where you will find better corn."
They followed him, nothing doubting, and he led them for eight days, and they fainted with exhaustion and were footsore. Then he left them in an unknown land; but God was their protector, He brought them back to their harvest and restored their rick of corn, and they made bread and offered to God the first sacrifice.[1]
But enough of this apocryphal work, which contains a string of absurd tricks played by Satan on our first parents, which are invariably defeated by God; of these the specimens given above are sufficient.
A curious legend exists among the Sclavonic nations by which the existence of elves is accounted for. It is said that Adam had by his wife Eve, thirty sons and thirty daughters. God asked him, one day, the number of his children. Adam was ashamed of having so many girls, so he answered, "Thirty sons and twenty-seven daughters." But from the eye of God nothing can be concealed, and He took from among Adam's daughters the three fairest, and He made them Willis, or elves; they were good and holy, and therefore did not perish in the Deluge, but entered with Noah into the ark and were saved.
The story of Adam's penitence as told by Tabari is as follows:—
The moment that Adam fell out of Paradise and touched the ground on the mountains in the centre of Ceylon, he understood in all its magnitude the greatness of his loss and his sin. He remained stupefied with his face on the earth, and did not raise it, but allowed his tears to flow upon and soak into, the soil. For a hundred years he remained in this position and his tears formed a stream which rolled down the mountain, which still flows from Adam's Peak in the island of Ceylon, and gives their virtue to the healing plants and fragrant trees which there flourish, and are exported for medicinal purposes.
- ↑ Dillman, Das Adambuch des Morgenlandes; Göttingen, 1853. This book is not to be confounded with the Testament of Adam.
