m in the
well. In this extremity he prayed to the gods to extricate him, and by
their favor he made his escape."[94] This myth may, perhaps, be the
germ from which have sprung the numerous folk-tales about the
desertion of a younger brother in some pit or chasm, into which his
brothers have lowered him.[95]

It may seem more difficult to account for the willingness of Norka's
three sisters to aid in his destruction--unless, indeed, the whole
story be considered to be mythological, as its Indian equivalents
undoubtedly are. But in many versions of the same tale the difficulty
does not arise. The princesses of the copper, silver, and golden
realms, are usually represented as united by no ties of consanguinity
with the snake or other monster whom the hero comes to kill. In the
story of "Usuinya,"[96] for instance, there appears to be no
relationship between these fair maidens and the "Usuinya-Bird," which
steals the golden apples from a monarch's garden and is killed by his
youngest son Ivan. That monster is not so much a bird as a flying
dragon. "This Usuinya-bird is a twelve-headed snake," says one of the
fair maidens. And presently it arrives--its wings stretching afar,
while along the ground trail its moustaches [_usui_, whence its name].
In a variant of the same story in another collection,[97] the part of
Norka is played by a white wolf. In that of Ivan Suchenko[98] it is
divided among three snakes who have stolen as many princesses. For the
snake is much given to abduction, especially when he appears under the
terrible form of "Koshchei, the Deathless."

Koshchei is merely one of the many incarnations of the dark spirit
which takes so many monstrous shapes in the folk-tales of the class
with which we are now dealing. Sometimes he is described as altogether
serpent-like in form; sometimes he seems to be of a mixed nature,
partly human and partly ophidian, but in some of the stories he is
apparently framed after the fashion of a man. His name is by some
mythologists derived from _kost'_, a bone whence comes a verb
signifying to become ossified, petrified, or frozen; either because he
is bony of limb, or because he produces an effect akin to freezing or
petrifaction.[99]

He is called "Immortal" or "The Deathless,"[100] because of his
superiority to the ordinary laws of existence. Sometimes, like Baldur,
he cannot be killed except by one substance; sometimes his
"death"--that is, the object with which his life is i