Ixxxvi ETHNOGRAPHIC SKETCH. 



into the fire, and K'mukamtch, regretting to have arrived too late, man- 

 aged, however, to withdraw from her back the baby, and to rescue it. He 

 wept as he carried the cliihl off in his arms. But where should he jjlace it! 

 It" he j)laced it on his forehead it would look quite ugly, thought he; there- 

 fore he placed it on his knee and went home. He complained that he had 

 an ulcer upon his knee, and asked his daughter to open it, for it pained him 

 excrucialingly. She spread a sheet under the knee and another over it, to 

 squeeze the ulcer open He exclaimed: "It hurts me terribly! Go easy! 

 Be careful!" Then she replied: "What is the matter with you? Some- 

 thing like hair comes out in a hunch from the core. Why does it look like 

 hair!" And when the baby appeai'ed on the surface and began to cry she 

 said: "What have you been doing! I have suspected you for quite a 

 while before!" And the babe cried and cried, until the "father" proposed to 

 give a name to him. None was found to answei", for the child cried on and 

 on. Then he proposed to call it Aishilam'nash ("the one secreted about the 

 body"). This stopped its cries somewhat, but not entirely; so he proposed 

 the name Aishish, and then it became restful and quiet. So the child grew 

 up with this name, then lived in the company of K'mukamtch, became an 

 expert in making shirts, and when gambling won all the stakes, even from 

 his father, who became jealous on account of his superiority.* 



This is the extent of the myth so far as needed for our purpose. The 

 jealousy of the grim and demoniac K'mukamtch against his moi'e popular 

 son forms the subject of a considerable number of Aishish myths, which 

 are highly imaginative and interesting. By various stratagems ba.sed on 

 low cunning he brings his son into perilous positions, from which he is res- 

 cued only with the utmost difficulty by others, or is perishing in the attempt 

 to save himself. Meantime he is robbed of his garments by liis "father." 

 These constant persecutions finally force Aishish to revenge himself upon 

 his father, who is killed by him repeatedly, but not by any means so often 

 as he is killed himself 



•The connection of the mythic pyre of self sacrifice with the daicn is not only 

 based on similarity of nature, but also on etymological grounds; for the verb ni'lka, 

 it dawm, with slight vocalic change turns into nelka, ncl/a, fo be on fire. Cf. the 

 Latin avrora, which is a derivative of nrere, to burn, and Appendix VI to Grammar, 

 pp. TOO. 707. 



