up discovers the boy and girl
in the sky-country! They invite him up there; to share in their feast,
and throw him an end of the thong by which to climb up. When the
cannibal is dangling midway between earth and heaven, they let go the
rope, and down he falls with a terrible crash. [145]

In this story the enchanted rock opened by a talismanic formula brings
us again into contact with Indo-European folk-lore. And that the
conception has in both cases been suggested by the same natural
phenomenon is rendered probable by another Zulu tale, in which the
cannibal's cave is opened by a swallow which flies in the air. Here we
have the elements of a genuine lightning-myth. We see that among these
African barbarians, as well as among our own forefathers, the clouds
have been conceived as birds carrying the lightning which can cleave
the rocks. In America we find the same notion prevalent. The Dakotahs
explain the thunder as "the sound of the cloud-bird flapping his wings,"
and the Caribs describe the lightning as a poisoned dart which the bird
blows through a hollow reed, after the Carib style of shooting. [146]
On the other hand, the Kamtchatkans know nothing of a cloud-bird, but
explain the lightning as something analogous to the flames of a volcano.
The Kamtchatkans say that when the mountain goblins have got their
stoves well heated up, they throw overboard, with true barbaric
shiftlessness, all the brands not needed for immediate use, which makes
a volcanic eruption. So when it is summer on earth, it is winter in
heaven; and the gods, after heating up their stoves, throw away their
spare kindlingwood, which makes the lightning. [147]

When treating of Indo-European solar myths, we saw the unvarying,
unresting course of the sun variously explained as due to the subjection
of Herakles to Eurystheus, to the anger of Poseidon at Odysseus, or to
the curse laid upon the Wandering Jew. The barbaric mind has worked
at the same problem; but the explanations which it has given are more
childlike and more grotesque. A Polynesian myth tells how the Sun used
to race through the sky so fast that men could not get enough daylight
to hunt game for their subsistence. By and by an inventive genius, named
Maui, conceived the idea of catching the Sun in a noose and making
him go more deliberately. He plaited ropes and made a strong net, and,
arming himself with the jawbone of his ancestress, Muri-ranga-whenua,
called together all his brethr