evil spirits to flight." Bôuiti fled aghast, but his master set to work
upon some fresh device. Zoroaster allowed him, however, no time to
complete his plans: he rose up, and undismayed by the malicious riddles
propounded to him by his adversary, advanced against him with his hands
full of stones--stones as large as a house--with which the good deity
supplied him. The mere sight of him dispersed the demons, and they
regained the gates of their hell in headlong flight, shrieking out, "How
shall we succeed in destroying him? For he is the weapon which strikes
down evil beings; he is the scourge of evil beings." His infancy
and youth were spent in constant disputation with evil spirits: ever
assailed, he ever came out victorious, and issued more perfect from each
attack. When he was thirty years old, one of the good spirits, Vôhumanô,
appeared to him, and conducted him into the presence of Ahura-mazdâ,
the Supreme Being. When invited to question the deity, Zoroaster asked,
"Which is the best of the creatures which are upon the earth?" The
answer was, that the man whose heart is pure, he excels among his
fellows. He next desired to know the names and functions of the angels,
and the nature and attributes of evil. His instruction ended, he crossed
a mountain of flames, and underwent a terrible ordeal of purification,
during which his breast was pierced with a sword, and melted lead poured
into his entrails without his suffering any pain: only after this ordeal
did he receive from the hands of Ahura-mazdâ the Book of the Law, the
Avesta, was then sent back to his native land bearing his precious
burden. At that time, Vîshtâspa, son of Aurvatâspa, was reigning over
Bactria. For ten years Zoroaster had only one disciple, his cousin
Maidhyoi-Mâonha, but after that he succeeded in converting, one
after the other, the two sons of Hvôgva, the grand vizir Jâmâspa, who
afterwards married the prophet's daughter, and Frashaoshtra, whose
daughter Hvôgvi he himself espoused; the queen, Hutaosa, was the next
convert, and afterwards, through her persuasions, the king Vîshtâspa