12 The Diamond 



summer and winter. The serpents are distributed around the fire; 

 sheep's flesh, eagles, and capture of the stones, are the same features as 

 previously mentioned, but the dangers of the work are magnified: 

 the flesh may be devoured by the flames; the eagle, drawing too near 

 the fire, may likewise be burnt; and the captors may perish from the 

 peril of the fire and the serpents. 1 



In the Sung period (960-1278) the story was vaguely known to 

 Chou Mi. 2 In his work Ts'i tung ye yii, as quoted by Li Shi-chen, he 

 says that, according to oral accounts, diamonds come from the Western 

 Countries (Si yii) and the Uigurs; that the stones stick to the food taken 

 by eagles on the summits of high mountains, thus enter their bowels, 

 and appear in their droppings, which are searched by men for the 

 stones in the desert of Gobi, north of the Yellow River. The honest 

 author adds, "I do not know whether it is so or not." Fang I-chi, 

 the author of the Wu li siao shi, 3 who wrote in the first half of the 

 seventeenth century, criticises Chou Mi's story as erroneous and not 



1 An echo of a certain motive of the legend of the Diamond Valley seems to 

 reverberate in the Shamir legend of the Semitic peoples. The most interesting form 

 of this legend is found in Qazwlnl (Ruska, Steinbuch aus der Kosmographie, p. 16), 

 who calls the stone samur and characterizes it as the stone cutting all other stones. 

 Solomon endeavors to obtain it that the stones required for the temple might be 

 cut noiselessly. Only the eagle knows the place to find it, but the secret must 

 be elicited from the bird through a ruse. The eggs are removed from its nest, 

 enclosed in a glass bottle, and restored to their place. The returning eagle cannot 

 break the glass with its pinions, and seeks for a piece of the stone in question, which 

 he throws toward the vessel, breaking it into halves without noise. The eagle replies 

 to Solomon's query that the stone is brought from a mountain in the west, termed 

 Mount Samur, whither Solomon sends the Djinns, who get a goodly supply for him. 

 In this legend the stone samur doubtless is intended for the diamond, and the motive 

 of the eagle knowing its whereabouts is the same as in the legend of the Diamond 

 Valley. The Talmud has strangely disfigured this story which is very sensibly told 

 by Qazwlnl, and has transformed the stone shamir into a worm of the size of a barley- 

 grain, capable of splitting and engraving the hardest objects, so that the shamir 

 figures among the fabulous animals of the Talmud (L. Lewysohn, Zoologie des 

 Talmud, p. 351). The worm (and simultaneously) diamond shamir has been en- 

 trusted to the wood-cock who took it to the summit of an uninhabited mountain; 

 this is analogous to the birds or eagles bringing the diamonds up from the snake 

 valley, and it is very tempting to assume that the snakes may have given rise to the 

 curious Talmudic conception of the diamond as a worm. Lewysohn is of the opinion 

 that the word shamir conveys the notion of hardness, and, for example, denotes iron, 

 which is harder than stone, and also the diamond. — The Hebrew word shamir 

 appears in Jeremiah (xvn, 1), Ezekiel (in, 9), and Zechariah (vn, 12), and is supposed 

 to refer to the diamond ("adamant stone" in the English Bible); more probably it 

 is the emery. In the opinion of some scholars, Greek oytipis ("emery") is derived 

 from the Hebrew word. For further bibliographical data on the Shamir legend see 

 T. Zachariae, Zeitschr. Vereins filr Volkskunde, Vol. XXIV, 1914. P- 423. 



2 A celebrated and fertile author, who was born about 1230, and died before 1320 

 (see Pelliot, T'oung Pao, 1913, pp. 367, 368). 



3 Ch. 8, p. 22 (edition of Ning tsing Vang, 1884). 



