A stranger steps ashore in Egypt and is led to an altar to have his throat cut for a god — that is the shape the record keeps under this address. Its one witness wired to text is Apollodorus's Library (a Greek mythography compiled in the 1st–2nd century CE), inside the long recital of Heracles' labours. Egypt, the text says, "was then ruled by Busiris," "a son of Poseidon" by Lysianassa, "daughter of Epaphus"; and this king made it his practice to "sacrifice strangers on an altar of Zeus" in obedience to "a certain oracle."

The oracle had a cause. When "Egypt was visited with dearth for nine years", "a learned seer" who had "come from Cyprus" declared that the famine would lift only if the land "slaughtered a stranger man in honour of Zeus every year". Busiris took the counsel and its giver together, "slaughtering the seer himself" first and then going on to "slaughter the strangers who landed." The custom held until a stranger came who could not be held: Heracles too "was seized and haled to the altars," but he "burst his bonds" and "slew both Busiris and his son".

The apparatus does not pretend the tale is sober history. A note in the edition of Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941), the Scottish classicist whose translation carries these pages, records that Herodotus "scouts the story" as "alien to the spirit of Egyptian religion", even while Frazer musters Egyptian evidence that foreign, red-haired men were once burned as victims. Stith Thompson (1885–1976), the American folklorist whose index gives this shape its number, files a Japanese authority beside the Greek that our shelf has not yet wired to text. If a country can be fed only by killing whoever wanders into it, what does it imagine its gods are hungry for?