I will take from The Nights, as a specimen of the true Persian romance, “The Queen of the Serpents” (vol. v. 298), the subject of Lane’s Carlylean denunciation.  The first gorgeous picture is the Session of the Snakes which, like their Indian congeners the Naga kings and queens, have human heads and reptile bodies, an Egyptian myth that engendered the “old serpent” of Genesis.  The Sultanah welcomes Hasib Karim al-Din, the hapless lad who had been left in a cavern to die by the greedy woodcutters; and, in order to tell him her tale, introduces the “Adventures of Bulukiya”:  the latter is an Israelite converted by editor and scribe to Mohammedanism; but we can detect under his assumed faith the older creed.  Solomon is not buried by authentic history “beyond the Seven (mystic) Seas,” but at Jerusalem or Tiberias; and his seal-ring suggests the Jam-i-Jam, the crystal cup of the great King Jamshid.  The descent of the Archangel Gabriel, so familiar to Al-Islam, is the manifestation of Bahman, the First Intelligence, the mightiest of the Angels who enabled Zarathustra-Zoroaster to walk like Bulukiya over the Dalati or Caspian Sea. [FN#249] Amongst the sights shown to Bulukiya, as he traverses the Seven Oceans, is a battle royal between the believing and the unbelieving Jinns, true Magian dualism, the eternal duello of the Two Roots or antagonistic Principles, Good and Evil, Hormuzd and Ahriman, which Milton has debased into a common-place modern combat fought also with cannon.  Sakhr the Jinni is Eshem chief of the Divs, and Kaf, the encircling mountain, is a later edition of Persian Alborz.  So in the Mantak al-Tayr (Colloquy of the Flyers) the Birds, emblems of souls, seeking the presence of the gigantic feathered biped Simurgh, their god, traverse seven Seas (according to others seven Wadys) of Search, of Love, of Knowledge, of Competence, of Unity, of Stupefaction, and of Altruism (i.e. annihilation of self), the several stages of contemplative life.  At last, standing upon the mysterious island of the Simurgh and “casting a clandestine glance at him they saw thirty birds[FN#250] in him; and when they turned their eyes to themselves the thirty birds seemed one Simurgh:  they saw in themselves the entire Simurgh; they saw in the Simurgh the thirty birds entirely.”  Therefore they arrived at the solution of the problem “We and Thou;” that is, the identity of God and Man; they were for ever annihilated in the Simurgh and the shade vanished in the sun (Ibid. iii. 250).  The wild ideas concerning Khalit and Malit (vol. v. 319) are again Guebre.  “From the seed of Kayomars (the androgyne, like pre-Adamite man) sprang a tree shaped like two human beings and thence proceeded Meshia and Meshianah, first man and woman, progenitors of mankind;” who, though created for “Shidistan, Light-land,” were seduced by Ahriman.  This “two-man-tree” is evidently the duality of Physis and Anti-physis, Nature and her counterpart, the battle between Mihr, Izad or Mithra with his Surush