vii HASISADRA'S ADVENTURE 261 



their common origin. But stories, like Madeira, 

 acquire a heightened flavour with time and travel ; 

 and the version of Berosus is characterised by 

 those circumstantial improbabilities which habitu- 

 ally gather round the legend of a legend. The 

 later narrator knows the exact day of the month 

 on which the flood began. The dimensions of 

 the ship are stated with Munchausenian precision 

 at five stadia by two say, half by one-fifth of 

 an English mile. The ship runs aground among 

 the " Gordsean mountains " to the south of Lake 

 Van, in Armenia, beyond the limits of any 

 imaginable real inundation of the Euphrates 

 valley ; and, by way of climax, we have the 

 assertion, worthy of the sailor who said that he 

 had brought up one of Pharaoh's chariot wheels 

 on the fluke of his anchor in the Red Sea, that 

 pilgrims visited the locality and made amulets of 

 the bitumen which they scraped off from the 

 still extant remains of the mighty ship of 

 Xisuthros. 



Suppose that some later polyhistor, as devoid 

 of critical faculty as most of his tribe, had found 

 the version of Berosus, as well as another much 

 nearer the original story ; that, having too much 

 respect for his authorities to make up a tertium 

 quid of his own, out of the materials offered, he 

 followed a practice, common enough among an- 

 cient and, particularly, among Semitic historians, 

 of dividing both into fragments and piecing these 



