French Hellenist translated into French a Greek tale with the title Le Seigneur du Monde Souterrain, which was also translated by author Lucy Mary Jane Garnett as The Lord of the Underearth. In this tale, an old man is gathering firewood, when he stops to rest on a stump and sighs aloud ("allímono", in the original). A Black man appears and asks why the man summoned him, but the latter denies it. The Black man then asks the man if he has any daughters, and asks to bring him the eldest girl. The girl is brought to the Black man, who takes her to a lush garden. They sit for lunch and he serves her a rotten human foot, which she is to eat if she if to become the wife of the Lord of the Underearth. The girl refuses the "food" and tosses it in the ashpit. The Black man delivers her back to the old man and takes the second daughter, to whom he offers a rotten human hand. The second girl also refuses it. Lastly, he takes the youngest with him and serves her a human stomach. The girl, cunningly, asks the man to get some seasoning for her delicacy. While the Black man is away, she wraps the food in her stomach with a girdle and fools the Black man. Soon after, she lives with the Black man as her servant: he gives her some coffee laced with a sleeping potion, and she never sees her husband, the Lord of the Underearth. Some time later, her sisters realize she never returned, and ask her father to summon the Black man. It happens so: the old man tells the Black man his daughters miss their sister, and the Black man bids he brings them with him the next time. The elder sisters pay her a visit and convince her that the Black man is not her husband, but there must be someone else with her at night; she just has to pretend to drink the potion, feign sleep, and turn the key on her husband's navel, then she can see "Constantinople, Smyrna, the whole world". The girl follows her sisters' advice and feigns sleep; while the Lord of the Underearth is asleep, she turns the key on his navel and sees the whole world. Inside, she notices a woman washing her wool in the river, and shouts at her the water is carrying it off. The Lord of the Underearth wakes up and insults his wife, then orders his Black servant to pluck two of the hairs on her head, place it in basin, give bread to his wife and send her away. The Black servant follows his master orders, and banishes the girl into the wide world. The tale then continues with the girl's adventures in male disguise.Legrand, Emile. Recueil de contes populaires grecs. E. Leroux, 1881. pp. 1-10.Garnett, Lucy Mary Jane. Greek folk poesy, annotated translations from the whole cycle of Romaic folk-verse and folk-prose. London: Nutt. 1896. pp. 277-282. Richard M. Dawkins also translated the tale as Human Flesh to Eat, and named the supernatural husband "The Lord of the World Below".Dawkins, Richard McGillivray. Modern Greek folktales. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1953. pp. 91-95.
