In ancient times, there lived a beautiful nymph Amaryllis, who, together with her friends, had fun spending her time.
Every day was interesting in its own way: the girls chatted incessantly, burst into laughter, danced, decorated themselves with wreaths of flowers of fabulous beauty and listened to the melodious sounds of the pipe. Where Amaryllis ' light foot stepped, wonderful flowers with a special fragrance bloomed, filling the forest air with their fragrance. Even the birds envied the melodious voice of the young nymph when she sang, sitting on the bank of the stream. Amaryllis was very pretty.
But the beauty turned out to have a cruel heart. The charming nymph loved to captivate with her beauty a gaping shepherdess or an ordinary passerby (at that time, the gods still descended to earth to amuse themselves among mortals). And it was never destined for the poor young man who had ever seen Amaryllis to fall in love with another girl: he was dying of longing for unearthly beauty.
And the nymph laughed at the unfortunate and shared with her friends her next victory. And the number of such victims of unhappy love for the nymph grew inexorably. Guys stopped getting married, and earthly girls did not find husbands for themselves. Children stopped appearing in the white light, and people were on the verge of extinction. And the beauty still did not let up, she, as before, charmed men.
The gods saw this and decided that if they did not stop Amaryllis, soon there would not be a single person left on earth. Everyone will be in love with the young nymph and will die of longing for her.
And they called the god of autumn – the god of withering-to punish the sorceress. God came down to earth and, seeing Amaryllis, fell in love with her. The god of autumn realized that it would be difficult for him to get rid of a beautiful girl and decided to turn the nymph Amaryllis into a beautiful flower.
He took him to the remote desert of South Africa, away from people, and endowed him with deadly power – a poison that could kill anyone who dared to disrupt the wonderful creature. From now on, at the beginning of autumn, the amaryllis flower bloomed in the desert lands of Africa, which can only be admired from a distance, but it is impossible to touch it.
