The Angel gives Seth three kernels from the fruit of the Tree.  Seth returns home and finds his father dead.  He buries him in the valley of Hebron, and places the three grains under his tongue.  A triple shoot springs up of Cedar, Cypress, and Pine, symbolising the three Persons of the Trinity.  The three eventually unite into one stem, and this tree survives in various forms, and through various adventures in connection with the Scripture History, till it is found at the bottom of the Pool of Bethesda, to which it had imparted healing Virtue, and is taken thence to form the Cross on which Our Lord suffered.

The English version quoted above is from a MS. of the 14th century in the Bodleian, published by Dr. Morris in his collection of Legends of the Holy Rood.  I have modernised the spelling of the lines quoted, without altering the words.  The French citation is from a MS. in the Vienna Library, from which extracts are given by Sign.  Adolfo Mussafia in his curious and learned tract (Sulla Legenda del Legno della Croce, Vienna, 1870), which gives a full account of the fundamental legend and its numerous variations.  The examination of these two works, particularly Sign.  Mussafia’s, gives an astonishing impression of the copiousness with which such Christian Mythology, as it may fairly be called, was diffused and multiplied.  There are in the paper referred to notices of between fifty and sixty different works (not MSS. or copies of works merely) containing this legend in various European languages.

(Santarem, III. 380, II. 348; Ouseley, I. 359 seqq. and 391; Herodotus, VII. 31; Pliny, XII. 5; Chardin, VII. 410, VIII. 44 and 426; Fabricius, Vet.  Test.  Pseud. I. 80 seqq.; Cathay, p. 365; Beal’s Fah-Hian, 72 and 78; Pelerins Bouddhistes, II. 292; Della Valle, II. 276-277.)

[Illustration:  Chinar, or Oriental Plane]

He who injured the holy tree of Bostam, we are told, perished the same day:  a general belief in regard to those Trees of Grace, of which we have already seen instances in regard to the sacred trees of Zoroaster and the Oak of Hebron.  We find the same belief in Eastern Africa, where certain trees, regarded by the natives with superstitious reverence, which they express by driving in votive nails and suspending rags, are known to the European residents by the vulgar name of Devil Trees.  Burton relates a case of the verification of the superstition in the death of an English merchant who had cut down such a tree, and of four members of his household.  It is the old story which Ovid tells; and the tree which Erisichthon felled was a Dirakht-i-Fazl: 

    “Vittae mediam, memoresque tabellae
  Sertaque cingebant, voti argumenta potentis.”
      (Metamorph. VIII. 744.)

Though the coincidence with our text of Hamd Allah’s Dry Tree is very striking, I am not prepared to lay stress on it as an argument for the geographical determination of Marco’s Arbre Sec.  His use of the title more than once to characterise the whole frontier of Khorasan can hardly have been a mere whim of his own:  and possibly some explanation of that circumstance will yet be elicited from the Persian historians or geographers of the Mongol era.