Zuhra is the maiden of the moon in Lak folklore, the heroine of the Daghestani version of a legend told across the Caucasus and the Turkic world. An orphan girl, driven out at night by a cruel stepmother to fetch water, weeps under the full moon and begs to be taken from her misery; the Moon takes pity and draws her up with her shoulder-yoke and pails still on her, and there she remains, her figure and her buckets seen in the shadows of the lunar disc. Her name, of Arabic origin and elsewhere borne by the planet Venus, marks the tale's passage through Islamic naming, but its substance is the older etiology of the moon's markings, told among the Laks alongside the rival account of the sun's blow.