about four thousand stadia high: “Neither the earth produces me, nor the heavens, but only the wings of fire.” His food consists of the manna of heaven and the dew of the earth. His excrement is a worm, whose excrement in turn is the cinnamon used by kings and princes.152 Enoch, who saw the phœnix birds when he was translated, describes them as flying creatures, wonderful and strange in appearance, with the feet and tails of lions, and the heads of crocodiles; their appearance is of a purple color like the rainbow; their size nine hundred measures. Their wings are like those of angels, each having twelve, and they attend the chariot of the sun and go with him, bringing heat and dew as they are ordered by God. In the morning when the sun starts on his daily course, the phoenixes and the chalkidri154 sing, and every bird flaps its wings, rejoicing the Giver of light, and they sing a song at the command of the Lord155
Among reptiles the salamander and the shamir are the most marvellous. The salamander originates from a fire of myrtle wood156 which has been kept burning for seven years steadily by means of magic arts. Not bigger than a mouse, it yet is invested with peculiar properties. One who smears himself with its blood is invulnerable,157 and the web woven by it is a talisman against fire.158 The people who lived at the deluge boasted that, were a fire flood to come, they would protect themselves with the blood of the salamander.159
King Hezekiah owes his life to the salamander. His wicked father, King Ahaz, had delivered him to the fires of Moloch, and he would have been burnt, had his mother not painted him with the blood of the salamander, so that the fire could do him no harm.160
