Ural-batyr (English) in: Europe – Ural
And the old man said: “We bear Death
Ourselves to all the living,
Whose death hour’s struck already.
And whatever rooks and thickets
Game may try to skulk and hide in,
All the same we come and find them,
Thrusting our knives into them.
But to chase a human being,
Knife him dead and eat his body
There is someone to be born yet,
And no Death can yet undo us.
This land Death has never haunted,
But the country whence we come from,
But the land of our forefathers
Death would constantly revisit,
Till one day a dread-dev [3] came there,
Made away a lot of people,
Eating them all young and living,
And the land was flushed by waters,
With no single spot of dry ground.
Those whose lives were spared would hasten
To forsake the land for ever,
Leaving Death behind them raging,
For there was no soul to ruin.
Death thought no one could escape Him
And did not behold your parents
Flee away and hide in this land,
In the land unseen, unheard-of,
Where the foot of man stepped never,
Where pursuit would be unlikely,
Where was scarce both fur and feather
At the time we settled down here,
And the ground was damp and sodden
From the pools and swamps all over.”
Ural said: “O father, tell me:
Can a person seek and trace Death,
Can one find and liquidate Him?”
Answered Yanbirthe: “This Evil
Is invisible to man’s eye,
And unnoticed is His motion.
There’s but one thing that can ruin Him:
In the country of the dev-shah [4]
Babbling spurts a spring of magic.
Any man that tastes its water,
So they say, becomes immortal
And to Death will not be subject.”
That was what Yanbirthe said about Death.
Footnotes:
[3] Dev – a popular creature of the epic legends and fairy tales of the Middle and Central East – an ugly, huge, hairy, fabulously strong monster that can fly in the air and is capable of magic.
[4] Shah – (the title of) a ruler in the East, especially in Iran.
(a.i) Bashkir — (a.ii) Шафиков (Shafikov) (2003) — (a.iii) Secondary sources
Flood Stories 