Not until yesterday did men encompass the earth. But their minds were
always more adventurous than their feet, and from the beginning,
almost, the sense of remote horizons was in them. Fantastic though
its form might be, there was a divine breadth in their speculation as
to the earth and its peoples. The peasant of antiquity, who knew only
his township in Europe or his mountain canton in high Asia, had yet a
vision of continents and distant seas. His imagination explored the
waste places, ascended the high places, descended into the earth. Its
product was the geography of legend, which gave ground but slowly to
the geography of reality.
_Beyond the North Wind_
One of the earliest countries to find a place in the geography of
legend was that of the Hyperboreans. It lay on the other side of the
north wind. These people lived so far toward the pole that they were
beyond the icy blasts, and beyond all contacts of war or commerce with
the peoples of the south. Only the priests and the poets knew of them.
The priests knew of them because of the yearly offerings sent in to the
temples of Tempe, Delphi, and Delos. These were gifts of amber, and
virgins bore them from nation to nation across the whole of Europe.
For many years the holy maidens had honor and hospitality from all the
countries along their path. When violence was done them the journeys
ceased. Not, however, the offerings. The Hyperboreans deposited these
upon the boundary of the people who adjoined them. The latter carried
them to their neighbors; and so by successive stages the tribute came
to the shrines of Apollo, whom the distant nation held in especial
honor. At last the custom fell into disuse.
No return visits were made from the south, for the way was hard. Yet
the poets had, as always, their own means of information. Homer has
nothing to say of the Hyperboreans, but Hesiod speaks of them, and
Pindar, and Æschylus, and a host of later and lesser voices. From
these authorities it appeared that the Riphæan Rocks, an imaginary
prolongation of the Ural group westward across Europe, shut the
Hyperboreans off from the south. Out of the rocks the north wind came
sweeping down over the lower latitudes, but on the farther side of the
range was summer. It was a favored land, and this a favored people.
“The muse is no stranger to their manners,” says Pindar. “The dances of
girls and the sweet melody of the lyre and pipe resound on every side,
and twining their hair with the glittering bay, they dance joyously.
There is no doom of sickness or disease for this sacred race; but they
live apart from toil and battles, undisturbed by exacting Nemesis.”
Isidore adds that when the cithara players smite their instruments the
swans fly up and sing very harmoniously.
Rightly discerning that this was no region of the earth, Herodotus
assigns its inhabitants to the realms of fable. But Hecatæus, Damastes,
Diodorus, Pliny and others credit the legend, though sometimes with a
note of doubt, as when Pliny begins, “Beyond the region of the northern
winds, there dwells, if we choose to believe it, a happy race known as
the Hyperboreans.” From their country Hercules brought the olive. They
were a pious folk, loving justice, dwelling in woods and fields, living
on the fruits of the earth and abstaining from taking even animal life.
No rude winds agitated this delicious land. Here were “the hinges upon
which the world revolves, and the extreme limits of the revolutions of
the stars.” There was but one rising of the sun for the year, and that
at the summer solstice, and but one setting, and that at the winter
solstice; and the day and night each lasted six months. In the morning
of the long day the people sowed, at midday they reaped, at sunset they
gathered the fruits of their trees; and the long night they spent in
caverns; and so their lives were passed.
They lived to be very old in the country beyond the north wind,
sometimes as much as one thousand years. But a fateful note runs
through all accounts of them. The happy Hyperboreans were wont to tire
at last of their felicity. They ended a career of feasting and an old
age sated with every luxury by leaping from a rock into the sea. At
the close of each life lay the rock and the sea.
Just where was this worshipful nation? The answers are vague and
conflicting. On the left bank of the Danube, it was first thought; on
the very verge of Asia, others said. Later its home was fixed “midway
between the two suns, at the spot where it sets to the antipodes and
rises toward us.” There were Greek writers who confused the Riphæan
Rocks with the Alps and Pyrenees, and confounded the Hyperboreans
with the Etruscans and the Gauls. Hecatæus gives them an island home
as large as Sicily, lying under the arctic pole, over against Gaul.
Here Apollo has a stately grove and a renowned temple in a city where
all the residents are harpers. This is the Britain of the bards and
druids, of whose people it was said in later time that they take their
pleasures sadly.
_At the Cardinal Points_
While the ancients peopled the rim of the earth with deformed races
and monstrous animals, their pictures of the nations that dwelt at
the cardinal points show mainly the ideal treatment. In the far east,
in the far west, in the far south, there were men like unto the
Hyperboreans of the far north. Of the Indians, the Ethiopians, and
the Iberians of early story the same report was had. They were “just”
and “blameless”--these words recur again and again--and they were
long-lived and fortunate. Thus real races took on some quality of myth.
The classic sense of equilibrium demanded this equal reverence to the
four quarters of heaven, just as it was fancied that, to balance the
Pillars of Hercules in the west, Bacchus had set up two columns “by the
farthest shore of the Ocean stream, on the remotest mountains of India,
where the Ganges pours down its white waters to the Nysæan shore.”
This cast of thought did not die with the ancients. The epithets,
“just” and “blameless,” reappear in the writings of eighteenth-century
philosophers when they speak of the Chinese. A little later the
beautiful and artless natives of the South Seas laid upon the thought
of more sophisticated lands a spell that endures. Now, as always, the
four points of the compass are points of fable, and the primitive
worship that was paid them lurks in the magic with which the number
four is invested. The rising and setting of the sun fixed two of these
points and the course of the Nile northward through Egypt may have
fixed the other two.
“All evil comes from the northeast,” say the Japanese. Thoreau usually
walked southwest. “Eastward,” he said, “I go only by force; but
westward I go free.” Tartar tent doors, as Marco Polo notes, face
south. The mythical Irish voyages were toward the west. In the thought
of many races witchcraft is of the north. In Norse mythology hell-way
is always downward and northward. When cutting black hellebore the
hedge doctors of Greece faced eastward and cursed. “Altars should
regard the east,” said Vitruvius. Thither the Mohammedan turns in
prayer. The manifestations of God are in the west, says the Talmud. The
Babylonian temples lay due east and west so that the rising sun would
illumine their altars at the equinoxes. Some of the Egyptian temples
were so planned that this would happen only on Midsummer Day. The
older Christian churches lie east and west, although some of them are
oriented to permit the rising sun to gild their altars on the day of
the saint whose name they bear. The west was the seat of darkness and
hence the rose-window was placed high in the cathedral’s western wall
to illumine the benighted, with the bell-towers flanking it to summon
them to Christ. The eastern side with its altar and the southern with
walls and windows consecrated to saints and martyrs were both sacred.
But the northern, or Black Side, was Satan’s, and effigies of unclean
beasts and sculptured allegories of lascivious deeds proclaimed it.
The cities of ancient Yucatan had gates toward each of the cardinal
points. With the Aztecs all the world directions were significant--the
north standing for emptiness, the east for sterility, the west for
fertility, the south for good fortune. In the symbolism of the Navahos,
white, the dawn color, stands for the east; blue, the sky color, for
the south; yellow, the sunset color, for the west; and black, the
curtain of night, for the north. The Pueblo Indians assigned the north
to the air, the west to water, the south to fire, and the east to earth
and the seeds of life. In old Chinese writings the men of the north
are called brave, the men of the south wise, the men of the east kind
and friendly, the men of the west upright and honest. Over the four
cardinal points the old Brahman gods presided.
Thus by a primitive law of the mind illusion lurks in every corner of
the heaven. It lies deepest in the track of the sun. From east to west
go the great wanderers--Hercules, Ulysses, and the rest--and solar
myths thicken along their path through legendary lands. The east and
west dominate the thoughts of men with their eternal spectacles of
sunrise and sunset. Whatever commerce, geography, or political history
may teach them, the east is still the region of the morning sunlight
and the west of the evening shadow. Though their steps turn westward,
men’s thoughts drift eastward. Though the east be hunger-bitten and
poverty-stricken and its subjugated millions seem to count but little,
it is still the gorgeous east, “the dancing-place of the dawn.”
Beyond the curtains of the west lie the realms of repose: “If sunrise,”
says Max Müller, “inspired the first prayers, called forth the first
sacrificial flames, sunset was the other time when again the whole
frame of man would tremble. The shadows of night approach, the
irresistible power of sleep grasps man in the midst of his pleasures,
his friends depart, and in his loneliness his thoughts turn again to
higher powers. When the day departs the poet bewails the untimely death
of his bright friend; nay, he sees in its short career the likeness of
his own life. Perhaps, when he has fallen asleep, his sun may never
rise again, and thus the place to which the setting sun withdraws in
the far west rises before his mind as the abode where he himself would
go after death.”
Though the westward journeys of the sun are but a seeming, their trail
lies broad across the spiritual life of mankind.
_On the Mountains_
Half of history has been written in the passes of the mountains. What
lies above these deep saddles of the ranges belongs in the main to
legend. Not much, even now, is known of the mountain tops, for men do
not dwell there. Antiquity seldom went up to see. The high places of
old sacrifice were hilltops, not mountain peaks.
Men have been content to travel the valleys and, where necessity
impelled, to cross the passes. The steeps overhead seemed fit abode for
the elder gods, for giants and dwarfs and griffins, for dragons whose
breath was the avalanche, for ghosts whose voice was the echo, for the
carnal revels of Satan and his witches; sometimes, also--since legend
is its own law--for cities of enchantment, invisible and beautiful.
Most famous mountain of classic story was the Atlas; the most fabulous
locality, even in Africa, is the superlative of Pliny. Its summit
reached beyond the clouds and well nigh approached the very orb of the
moon. Rugged and precipitous on the side of the ocean to which it gave
a name, it fell by a gentler slope on the side toward Africa, and dense
groves covered its flanks where streams flashed and fruits abounded.
But in the daytime men were never seen there. All was silent like the
dreadful stillness of the desert. A religious horror stole over those
who drew near. At night, fires innumerable gleamed upon its sides. “It
is then,” says Pliny, “the scene of the gambols of the Ægipans and the
Satyr crew, while it re-echoes with the notes of the flute and the
pipe, and the clash of drums and cymbals.”
The legend of a mountain of nightly tumult and illumination recurs
in Arab and Christian chronicle. Solinus repeats it. The mountain is
Felfel in the Sahara, says an Arab author of the twelfth century,
and genii hold court in towns on its slopes whence the people have
fled. Ibn Khordadbeh places the realm of nocturnal revel in the
Southern Ocean. Argensola, writing of the Moluccas in the sixteenth
century, reports that for ages “cries, whistles, and roarings” had
been heard from a mountain in Banda. The spot is inhabited by devils,
he concludes. Sindbad tells of an island, called Kasil, where nightly
resounds the drumbeat of rebellious djinns. So was Prospero’s isle full
of noises, but these were “sound, and sweet airs that give delight and
hurt not.”
[Illustration: _The Steeps Overhead Seemed Fit Abode for Giants and
Dwarfs and Griffins--for Cities of Enchantment_]
It may be that the Atlas story grew out of the habits of the Kabyles
who tenant the mountain’s recesses. During the heat of the day they
would retire to their dwellings, coming out at night to dance about the
village fires to the music of drums. Similar legends among the Indians
of South America of strange lights seen upon the mountains appear to
have a basis of fact. Sir Martin Conway tells of a village where the
bells were rung and the people flocked to church in dreadful fear
because, after sunset, the peak of Illampu glowed red like fire and
the end of the world seemed at hand. In Venezuela Im Thurn beheld a
mountain strangely luminous at night. Humboldt saw a similar spectacle
in Venezuela and guessed it might be the burning of hydrogen gases. In
Colombia, Zahm saw brilliant lights along the crest of the Cordilleras,
and judged it was an electric phenomenon, the summits acting as a vast
condenser from which electricity escaped by a silent glow or brush
discharge--St. Elmo’s fire. Here, perhaps, is the key to the Old World
story.
The Mountains of the Moon, which lift their snowy peaks on the line of
the equator in East Africa not far from the springs of the Nile, bear
a myth-engendering name. It was given them by Ptolemy, who perhaps
translated it from native words of the same meaning. Lying within the
sphere of Arabic mediæval geography, Eastern fable enveloped them.
One story was that whoever looked upon them was drawn to them as by a
magnetic influence and only death would release him. According to an
Arab compiler, “a certain king sent an expedition to discover the Nile
sources, and they reached the copper mountains, and when the sun rose,
the rays reflected were so strong that they were burnt.”
To the early Greeks the Caucasus was the end of the world; beyond
it was naught but the Ocean Stream. Æschylus describes it in his
_Prometheus Bound_ as the loftiest of mountains and speaks of its
“star-neighboring summits.” Here he pictures the fire-stealing Titan as
chained to a rock with a vulture at his vitals. Herodotus repeats that
these peaks are higher than any other. No Roman general ever passed
them. And they stood for things dreaded and unknown--the sanguinary
Amazons, fugitive and barbaric tribes of Israel, and the sinister
nations of Gog and Magog. These are perhaps the mountains of Aaf of
Malay tradition, which run their ramparts of green chrysolite clear
about the earth and the encompassing sea.
The high places of American Indian tradition lay in the west. The
plains savages and some of the forest tribes looked upon the Rocky
Mountains as the boundary of the known world. These peaks held up the
sky; the spirits of the storm haunted them, and stone giants, and
huge-bellied anthropophagi. Into this west ran the underground trail
to the land of the dead. In South Dakota was the Hill of Little Devils,
malignant pygmies with unduly large heads, of whose arrows the prairie
tribes stood in awe.
There were seven sacred mountains in the land of the Navahos--four at
the cardinal points, and three at the center; and legend gave each its
own color, jewels, birds, and plants. One mountain was fastened to the
earth with a lightning flash, another with a stone knife, another with
a sunbeam, a fourth with a rainbow. Almost in the Greek spirit the
Indians of Guiana chanted the glories of “Roraima of the red rocks,
wrapped in clouds, ever-fertile source of streams.” White jaguars and
white eagles were upon it, a magic circle surrounded it, and demons
guarded its sanctuary.
Whenever the Kirghiz pass by Mustaghata, loftiest of the Pamirs, they
fall upon their knees in prayer, for threescore and ten saints live
there. Sven Hedin, who made four attempts to ascend it, repeats its
legends. One story tells of a holy man who, climbing it, found on its
slopes a garden with plum trees where old men in white garments were
walking. He plucked and ate the fruit. One of the graybeards told him
it was well he had done so, for had he despised the fruit, as they had
done, it would have been his fate to stay, as they must, walking up and
down the garden till time was no more. Then a rider on a white horse
dashed into the garden, and seizing the holy man, galloped with him
down the mountain side, leaving him in the valley, dazed and with only
a confused memory of what he had seen. Another story tells of forty
giant horsemen who swept down the mountain and routed a Chinese army.
On the summit of Mustaghata, to which neither Sven Hedin, nor the holy
man, nor the graybeards could climb, the Kirghiz say is the ancient
city of Janaidar, built in a golden age when everyone was happy and men
were at peace. Its inhabitants had no intercourse afterward with the
peoples below, and all the ills and woes of life are stranger to them.
Their groves bear fruit the year around, their flowers are unfading,
their women never grow old. Cold, darkness, and death are alike unknown
to them. The ramparts of Mustaghata are one of the seats of the realm
of eternal youth.
Though its name is but the Latin word for “bald,” a grim Swiss legend
has it that Mount Pilatus is the burial place of the Roman viceroy who
surrendered Jesus to the mob. When he took his own life, neither the
Tiber nor the Rhone, into which in succession his body was flung, would
contain it. Evil and sordid spirits raised such storms that it was
carried farther. An uncanonical book of the thirteenth century recites
that it was dropped at last “into a well surrounded by mountains,
where, according to some accounts, certain diabolic machinations and
ebullitions are still seen.” This spot was identified with a marshy
pool near the summit of Pilatus.
Throughout the Middle Ages it was believed that if anyone threw a stone
in this little lake, a tempest would follow. Once a year Pilate left
it and sat on a rock arrayed in scarlet. Whoever beheld him died in a
twelvemonth. The fearful burghers of Lucerne made an ordinance that no
one should approach the pool unless one of their number went with him
to see that he cast no stone. At length, in 1585, Johann Mueller, state
pastor of Lucerne, climbed the mountain with a party of friends, flung
stones into the water, and derisively challenged the evil spirit to
come forth. Nothing happened, and the legend lapsed.
_In the Desert_
The desert holds the green surprise of the oases, the promise of
mysteries beyond its veil, and, as men have thought, the memory of
wonderful things that were. Tradition broods over it, legends of
caravans that never came back, of armies swallowed up in its silences,
of vast cities buried in the sand. Where there is so little for the eye
to see, the most haunting things are those the ear has heard--music
that steals from the under edges of the dunes; voices, mocking or
beguiling, which call to caravan stragglers; the crash of ghostly drums
and the clash of arms heard afar.
Any survey of the deserts of history reveals the stuff of wonder. There
each man’s hand is turned against his brother, and yet in every tent
all are safe; masked tribesmen roam the waste; stealthy slave columns
cross it by abandoned routes; hereditary clans of dancing girls supply
the streets of women in the environing lands; hermits wither in rocky
cells and militant fanatics range the plateaus; the bustard and the
wild camel show along the uncertain skyline, and remnants of forgotten
peoples rove below it. These are momentous details; legend has done
much with less to work upon. It needs only that thirsty wayfarers
shall have, as sometimes they do, the sudden vision of lakes of water
shimmering in the distance, with palms fringing them and temples
mirrored in them. Realities of an instant only, their passing leaves a
sense of wonder that expects, and invents.
Much of the tradition of the waste places has been set down by Marco
the Venetian in his account of the passage of the desert of Lop. It
is asserted as a well-known fact, he recites, that here is the abode
of evil spirits “which amuse travelers to their destruction with most
extraordinary illusions.” During the daytime, if men fall behind the
caravan, or are overtaken by sleep so that the column has passed a hill
and is out of sight, they hear voices calling their names in tones to
which they are accustomed. Following these, they are lured from the
direct road and perish alone. At night men seem to hear the march of
a large cavalcade on one side or the other of the road. Again they
follow, in the belief that the camel bells are of their own party; the
daybreak finds them pursuing strange paths alone. Day or night, evil
spirits take the shape of their companions and seek to decoy them from
the proper route. Ghostly bodies of armed men seem to rush upon them,
and in the terror of flight they lose the way.
“Marvelous indeed,” concludes Marco, “and almost passing belief are the
stories related of these spirits of the desert, which are said at times
to fill the air with the sounds of all kinds of musical instruments,
and also of drums and the clash of arms, obliging the travelers to
close their line of march and to proceed in more compact order.”
This is such a recital as one would rather have expected concerning
the desert of ancient Egypt. There were the graves of the dead, and
report had it that their spirits, doomed to a miserable existence in an
inhospitable land, developed into predatory demons who meant no good to
the traveler.
Stories still current in Asia, however, have the flavor of Marco’s
report of seven centuries ago. Doughty tells of the fantasy they have
at Teyma of a neighboring spectral oasis, often beheld by the Bedouins.
Slaves and horses issue from the enchanted appearance of palms; “but
all fadeth soon if a man approach them.”
In the little desert of Reig Rawan at the foot of the heights of
Kohistan the wind-blown sands sweep through the rocky fissures with
a sound that is like the music of an æolian harp accompanied by the
distant beating of drums. These wild harmonies of the wind in open
spaces are the source of many strange tales. In Reig Rawan they are
fabled to be the martial strains of armies which have been swallowed up
in the sands, but march on to unknown destinies.
The kingdom of Prester John has been mapped in Asia, in Africa, and in
the imagination of men. In the latter domain lies the Gravelly Sea, a
desert phenomenon which Maundeville describes: “It is all Gravel and
Sand, without any Drop of Water, and it ebbeth and floweth in great
waves as other Seas do, and it is never still nor at Peace, in any
Manner of Season. And no Man may pass that Sea by Ship, nor by any
Manner of Craft, and therefore may no Man know what Land is beyond that
Sea. And albeit that it have no Water, yet Men find therein and on the
Banks full good Fishes of other Manner of Nature and Shape, than Men
find in any other Sea, and they be of right good Taste and delicious
for Man’s Meat.”
What lies beyond it? Mezzoramia, it may be, if it is accepted that
Prester John was an Abyssinian. This is an earthly paradise, situated
somewhere in Africa. Only one road leads to it, and the road is hard to
find and easy to lose again. No man ever found this secret highway save
Gaudentio di Lucca. He traveled it to its end, and for twenty years
lived behind the desert’s curtains in a country of every felicity.
Fables of the waste tell of cities on which some sudden curse has
fallen and turned their people into stone. The sand has not covered
them with the decent pity of its mantle. They lie open to the air. The
sunshine falls on their silent market places and only the wind wanders
in their streets. The stony figures of the men and women that once
lived there stand where the curse had found them, disquieting things in
their semblance to statuary and their ancient caricature of humanity.
The map on which Anthony Jenkinson recorded his travels in Tartary
makes note of a petrified city in the plains of Central Asia.
Garcilasso de la Vega, Inca historian, tells a like tale of
petrification based on a numerous group of stone images. The Museum
Metallicum of Aldrovandi pictures an assemblage of men, sheep, and
camels converted into stone. The Arabs have a story of a petrified camp
at Hamam Meskouteen in Numidia, where they assert that stony tents
are pitched and stony sheep dot the plain. Most circumstantial of all
such legends is that of Ras Sem, an extensive petrified village in the
Cyrenaica. It was surmised that this might be the region of the Gorgons
of classic story, whose frightful glance turned everything into stone.
This village figures in old travel books, one of them dating as far
back as 1594, and Sir Kenelm Digby may have had access to these when
he printed in the _Mercurius Politicus_ his travel tale of a petrified
city in northern Africa. The Tripolitan ambassador in London asserted
that a thousand persons had seen the wonders of Ras Sem. It was a large
town of circular outline, with streets and shops and a central palace.
The olive and the palm stood in the courtyards, but the trees had been
turned into a cinder-colored stone. There were men also in different
postures. Some were plying their trade and occupations in the bazaars
or holding fabrics and breadstuffs in their hands, as if to attract
the passer-by. There were women suckling their children or kneeling at
the kneading trough. In the palace a man was lying on a bed of state,
and guards armed with pike and spear stood at the door. The tenants of
the palace, and the men and women without--they, too, were of the same
bluish stone. The heads of some were wanting and others of the Silent
People had lost a leg or an arm.
There were camels, oxen, asses, horses, and sheep in the market place,
there were large birds perched on the walls, and in the houses there
were dogs, cats, and even mice--and all these, like their masters and
hosts, were petrified. The pieces of money which had been brought
thence were “of the bigness of an English shilling, charged with a
horse’s head on one side and with some unknown characters on the other.”
The quotation is from Shaw’s _Travels in Barbary_. The writer tells of
an inquiry into these stories by order of the French court made some
time before by M. Le Maire, consul at Tripoli. The Turkish janizaries
who gathered the tribute would not bring him the body of an adult
person from Ras Sem, alleging it would be cumbersome to carry. But for
a thousand dollars they did bring the body of a little child. They
declared they had run the risk of being strangled by their companions
for having delivered to an infidel the mortal remains of one of their
unfortunate Mohammedan brethren, as they deemed these people to be.
What they brought was the statue of a small Cupid taken from the ruins
of Leptus.
The consul sent other persons, but none could find a trace of walls,
buildings, animals, or utensils where Ras Sem was said to be. They
did find one thing he could not explain. This was what seemed to be
tiny loaves of petrified bread; but Shaw declares these were fossil
echinites of the discoid kind. Little pools of “heavy and ponderous
water” were also come upon, which the wind had uncovered. This,
continues Shaw, “may be the petrifying fluid which has contributed to
the conversion of the palm trees into stone.” He thinks the country of
the Gorgons was farther west.
From any one of several causes the fable of stony cities might arise.
While sand does not petrify, it does preserve; and sometimes, with
the winds for its artisans, it has wrought its own architecture and
sculpture in the living rock, repeating in the infinite chances of its
labors the outlines of minarets and templed columns, and other contours
in which fantasy may find the forms of bygone worshipers. There seem
to have been cases where peoples of a higher culture have built their
cities in the desert, and have passed; and a ruder race, coming later
upon the scene, mistook their statuary for the breathing handiwork of
nature stricken into stillness and stone.
The typical desert legends are of splendid cities that the sands have
covered. There is truth under them, as there are ruins under the sand;
how much truth and how many ruins is a secret the desert yields but
grudgingly. In a series of striking passages the Jewish Scriptures have
sketched these dead capitals of the waste with their jackal tenants.
The Arab deems them the home of evil spirits and hastens by. The nomads
of Central Asia speak of opulent cities which sandstorms have blotted
out in a night and of treasure to be found in them if one digs for it
under a fortunate star. But there are unearthly chances to be faced,
and treasure-seekers will not invite them by venturing many days’
march from the desert’s rim. One legend tells of the vanished city of
Ho-lao-lo-kia and the princes who came from many lands to excavate the
site. “But every time they try to dig the sand away a violent wind
arises, setting up whirlwinds of smoke and a thick mist, which sweeps
away the path and leads the workmen astray into the desert.”
A passage from an antique Indian script, describing a city which
perished two thousand years ago, may stand for a silhouette of the
buried cities of Iran and of Turkestan, as legend has pictured them:
“The temples and the palaces of Anuradhapura are numberless, and their
golden cupolas and pavilions shimmer in the sun. In the streets are
crowds of soldiers armed with bows and arrows. Elephants, horses,
chariots, and countless multitudes pass in a continual turmoil. There
are jugglers, dancers, and musicians from many lands, whose timbals
gleam with golden ornaments.”
It is more than conjecture that in these ancient lands not only cities
but states have disappeared under the sand. Gradually they have yielded
to their fate, as the desert has moved upon them through periodic
cycles of deficient rainfall. It may be that sometimes destruction came
with almost its fabled swiftness. MacGregor saw the sands in the very
act of billowing over the walls and rolling through the streets of
the Persian town of Yazd. Much may have happened, must have happened,
in forgotten times in the great space of fifteen hundred miles of
longitude and four hundred miles of latitude comprised in the Lop
basin; and many and circumstantial are the legends thereof.
In the Gobi Desert Sven Hedin discovered one of these buried
cities--God-accursed he calls it--over which the wind had flung the
sands, only to sweep them away and leave the site bare to the sun
after uncounted centuries had passed. Its walls had once been washed
by a powerful stream along which millstones turned under the shade of
luxuriant groves. There were apricot trees in the gardens, and mulberry
trees where the silkworm fed and spun its cocoon. There were bazaars
loud with the tumult of craftsmen. This was the city of Takla-makan.
What the explorer found was a dead forest, and ruins several miles
across. The timbers of hundreds of houses were still standing,
chalk-white poplar wood brittle as glass. Among them were fragments of
images in gypsum, showing the Buddha and praying women with faces of
the Aryan type, all executed with refinement of taste; and there were
even figures of boats rocking on the waves of vanished seas.
“At what period,” asks its discoverer, “was this mysterious city
inhabited? When did its last crop of russet apricots ripen in the sun?
When did the sour green leaves of its poplars yellow for their last
fall? When was the trickling hum of its millwheels silenced forever?
When did its despairing people finally abandon their dwellings to the
ravenous maw of the desert king? Who were the people who lived here?
What was the tongue they spoke? Whence came the unknown inhabitants of
this Tadmor in the wilderness? How long did their city flourish, and
whither did they go when they saw that within its walls they could no
longer have a safe abiding place?”
Passing the ruins of other cities, the nomad has asked himself these
and stranger questions. And out of the answers which his superstition
and fancy have suggested has been woven the myth of the desert.
_In the Forest_
Men can lose their way in the deep forest, easily become confused
there, and make it a proverb that friends are not to be met in a wood.
There races that have passed out of the primitive culture do not feel
at home. Through successive stages of their history the forest was held
to be sacred, then enchanted, then ill-omened and haunted.
In the beginning men worshiped trees and groves. Pan, with his
attendant fauns and satyrs, presided in the forest. The hamadryads
lived in trees, and died with them; and they might contract marriages
with mortal youths. Sometimes the tree had its own soul, sometimes
it was possessed by a spirit which had entered it, sometimes it was
the symbol, sometimes the sanctuary, of a god. Deity dwelt in the
oak of Dodona. Diana in Autun was a midday demon of the forests
and crossroads. In the tabooed grove near Marseilles the trees were
stained with sacrificial blood, the flames burned without consuming the
boscage, and even the priests dared not venture there at midnight or
midday. The sacred bo tree is still worshiped in India. The mistletoe
is magical above all other objects. Savages hang offerings upon trees,
and in the same spirit the gypsy spits when he passes under them.
The wood spirits of the primitive mythologies became at length the
stuff of folklore and travel tale--degenerate Pans and dryads that
wanderers saw sometimes in the shadows of trees. The Old Man of the
Woods, lame, hairy, green-eyed, ranges many countries and is most
clearly pictured in the tales of the Brazilian Indians and the eastern
Slavs. A mocker, misleader, and seducer, he cast a spell of terror
upon the forest. In the wild women of Russian story it had still other
perturbing tenants. These were good-looking creatures with shaggy
bodies, square heads, and long hair. Sometimes they came into the
villages to borrow kneading troughs, but it was dangerous to meet them
in their own domain, for they turned the solitary intruder round and
round until he lost his way. They were fond of music and might invite
lads and lasses to dance with them; whistling, however, they could not
endure. Polish tales picture them as tall, thin-faced, sensual females,
with disheveled hair and garments in constant disarray. When groups of
them encountered human beings they tickled the adults to death and took
the youths with them for their lovers; wherefore young people never
went singly to the woods. In Swedish tradition this was the terrible
Skogfrau, or Woman of the Thicket.
These beings personified the mystery of forest shadows and what
Ruskin called the mediæval dread of thick foliage. “Forest in every
semicivilized land,” says Belloc, “is ever a word of fear.” There
the knights of old tale had adventure with giants and dwarfs and
spell-weaving witches, and there the younger sons of folklore followed
lonely paths with beasts and birds to counsel them. As the enchanted
woods of romance with their goblin glooms and talking trees faded from
the minds of men, in their place appeared the real terrors of thickets
where robbers, banished men, and fugitive peoples beset the ways with
danger. The conception of forests as sanctuaries of peace is modern.
[Illustration: _The Enchanted Woods of Romance with Their Goblin Glooms
and Talking Trees Faded from the Minds of Men_]
_Under the Ground_
The cellar strain that is in human nature betrays itself in the
satisfaction men take in roaring songs and drinking bitter liquors
in rat-haunted sunken spaces. If groves were God’s first temples,
grottoes were men’s first dwellings. They came out of caves, and in
flight sometimes they return to them. For their extremity mother earth
has provided a rocky roof, a bedchamber, a storeroom, and a fireplace.
Wherefore they deem no habitation complete until they have dug a cave
under it.
“Men,” said the Caribs, “should avoid places which are enlightened
neither by the sun nor by the moon.” Yet there are races whose legends
have dug a cellar under the entire earth; if its surface is the floor
of one world, it is the roof of another. Beneath it are the happy
hunting grounds of the Indian. According to Cherokee myth the living
can descend thereto if, after fasting, they follow back the streams to
their springs and have one of the underground folk to guide them, for
the springs are doorways to the world below. There one finds people,
animals, and plants about as they are above, but the seasons are
different, for are not the springs warmer than the air in winter, and
cooler in summer? Navaho legend makes the surface of the earth the top
story of a structure five stories high. Beginning as ants, beetles,
dragonflies, locusts, and bats, mankind climbed from one story to
another, or rather was expelled from each, usually for sexual sin.
The gods’ land, or Elysium, of the Celts was commonly placed upon far
islands of the west, but sometimes in the hollow hills called Sid. Here
were fair meadows and stately palaces and musical trees and a beautiful
people whose berry diet kept them ever young; in the song of the magic
birds of this underworld there were seven years of joy and oblivion.
These people were the Tuatha Dé Danann. Giraldus Cambrensis describes
a like people, but of fairy stature, dwelling underground, swearing
no oaths, forswearing human ambition and inconstancy, and subsisting
on milk and saffron. Yet the Nagas of Hindoo story and the gnomes of
European folk-tale may be true historical races.
With his keen sense of an earthly origin primitive man was deeply
interested in burrowing creatures--in the scarab with his little round
ball that symbolized the sun in Egypt; in the beetle of the South
American pampas, which symbolized the Creator; in the rats and mice
which various tribes worshiped; in the runway of the armadillo which
in Brazil was an entrance to the land of shades; in the tunnel of the
mole, and the cities of the marmot. This underground world of tiny
animals figures large in the folklore of early peoples, shaping their
genealogies, influencing their councils, intervening in their affairs
for good and ill, at times deciding their destinies.
There was sorcery underground. Life came from it with each recurring
spring. The dead were laid there, and far beneath were the abodes of
their spirits. In the caverns were witches who had some command over
life and death. There also were the haunts of necromancers, and though
their dens were squalid, all the riches of the world were around them.
Legend became sumptuous and prodigal when it left the surface of the
earth and plunged into the darkness under it.
The story of Aladdin’s descent into this realm carries nearly all the
elements of subterranean myth. His false uncle, the African magician,
conducted him to a valley between mountains near a large Chinese town.
When he muttered a spell the earth opened, and the lad went down a
stone staircase into a palace where were brazen cisterns brimming with
gold and silver. Beyond in a terraced garden was a magic lamp. Securing
the latter and starting back, the youth paused to look at the fruits
that hung from trees in the garden. These were of various hues, and
though he did not know it, they were precious stones. Aladdin would
have wished they were figs or grapes or pomegranates; but he filled his
purse with them and crammed them in his bosom.
Because the youth was slow in passing up the lamp, the magician who
was waiting without lowered the stone over the staircase, and Aladdin
was left in darkness. But a genie of frightful aspect appeared when he
chanced to rub a ring his false uncle had given him. The apparition was
a slave of the ring, and with it began the cycle of deeds and gifts
that won the Chinese gamin a princess and a throne.
One element is missing in this descent, type otherwise of a thousand
others. That is women. There were beautiful enchantresses as well as
foul witches under the ground. They figure in a characteristic story of
India told by Hiouen Thsiang. A good-natured fellow, versed in magic
formulas, entered a cavern with thirteen companions. They came to a
walled city with towers and lookouts of gold, silver, and lapis-lazuli.
Young, laughing maidens greeted them at the outer gates, and at the
inner gates were two slave girls each holding a golden vessel full
of flowers and scents. Before the men went farther, these told them
they must bathe in the tank that stood there, anoint themselves with
perfumes, and crown themselves with flowers. But they must wait awhile
before they bathed; only the master of magic could immerse at once.
Of course the thirteen ignored the warning, and when they entered the
tank they became confused. They were found afterward, says the Chinese
author, “sitting in the middle of a rice-field distant from this
due north, over a level country, about thirty or forty li,” with no
recollection of how they got there.
The sorceress and enchantress motives are developed into drama in
the great myth of Tannhäuser. This minnesinger of the Middle Ages
was riding through the dusk toward Wartburg, where minstrels were to
compete for a prize, when he saw a glimmering figure on the slopes of
the mountain called the Hörselberg. White arms were stretched to him
in the gesture that is always more eloquent than words, and, leaving
his charger, he followed the woman. Flowers bloomed in her footsteps,
nymphs attended her, and a rosy light lay on the path as she led the
knight to a cavern’s mouth and thence to her palace in the heart of the
mountain. There for seven years he was the willing slave of the pagan
Goddess of Love, and partner in the revels of her court.
Satiety and an awakened conscience came together. The minstrel longed
for a breath of pure mountain air, for the tinkle of sheep bells,
for the sky of night and its stars. When Venus would not release her
thrall, he spoke the Virgin’s name--and the mountain-side opened. He
found himself again aboveground and heard the chime of church bells.
To one priest after another Tannhäuser made confession of his great
sin, but the shocked clerics dared not give him absolution, and at
length he stood before the Pope.
“Sooner shall this staff in my hand grow green and blossom,” said
the stern vicar of Heaven, “than that God should pardon thee.” With
darkness in his soul, Tannhäuser turned away. Three days afterward
the papal staff put forth buds and blossoms, and messengers were sent
in haste from Rome. They reached the Hörselberg only to learn that a
haggard wayfarer had just entered the mountain. The minstrel was never
seen again.
The golden age will issue from underground, according to a noble legend
of the mediæval time which concerns Frederick Barbarossa, head of the
Holy Roman Empire. He was not drowned in Cilicia while on crusade, as
report had it. He is sleeping in a cavernous chamber in the Kyffhäuser
Berg which rises from the emerald meadows of Thuringia. His long red
beard has grown quite through the stone table where he sits in slumber.
The good knights surround him, and once in a hundred years he rouses
himself and asks if the ravens still fly around the mountain. When the
birds of omen no longer call about the steeps he shall awake and sally
forth with his horsemen, and the peace of all men shall follow.
Thus at times has legend walked the earth, as men might cross the flat
housetops of an Eastern city, with the thought that what counted most
was just beneath its immense roof.
_Darkness_
The dark has other creatures besides the bat and owl, other spectacles
than those that pass in dreams. Sometimes in Celtic legend a mist
descended on a man, and until it lifted the towers and orchards of
elysium were all about him. There is a class of Eastern legends which
tell of men around whom a sudden shadow fell, so that they were seen no
more, or next were seen in another place. Maundeville has a tale of a
cloud which settled down upon a land and did not lift again. This was
a province called Hanyson in the kingdom of Abchaz which is next to
the kingdom of Georgia. One must travel three days to ride around the
province, and one dare not ride through it, for thick twilight covers
it. Out of the gloom the people of neighboring lands hear voices of
folk, and horses neighing, and cocks crowing.
The story is that a cursed emperor of Persia that was hight Saures
overtook a Christian host in the plain that was hight Megon and would
have destroyed it. “But anon a thick Cloud came and covered the Emperor
and all his Host. And so they endure in that Manner that they must not
go out on any Side; and so shall they evermore abide in Darkness till
the Day of Doom, by the Miracle of God. And then the Christian Men went
where liked them best. Also ye shall understand that out of that Land
of Darkness goeth out a great River that sheweth well that there be
Folk dwelling there by many Tokens; but no Man dare enter into it.”
Some report of the long Arctic night reached the Asiatic countries of
lower latitudes, and Marco Polo when he traversed them. He gives a
hearsay account of what he calls the Region of Darkness. It is distant
fourteen journeys by dog-sled across the tundras from the country of
the Tartars. The atmosphere in this twilight land is “as we find it
just about the dawn of day, when we may be said to see and not to see.”
Its people are tall and well made, but pale, stupid, and brutish, and
without prince or other governance. They have great stores of furs of
ermines, martins, and foxes. Under cover of the prevailing darkness the
Tartars raid them, plundering them of their furs and driving off their
cattle. That they may not become lost forever in the gloom, the raiders
ride mares that have young foals, and these are left on the frontiers.
When the Tartars would return, they lay the bridles on the necks of the
dams, and maternal instinct finds the homeward track.
Fable and fact ride abreast through this narrative, as horsemen through
the chill obscurity of dawn, and a great thing has come of it. Marco’s
account of the peltry of the north had more to do than aught else,
tradition says, with the founding of the Hudson Bay Company and the
opening of the northern half of the American continent.
_Distance_
The haze on all these horizon lands is the haze of distance. There are
two phrases which come to the ear with the sound of unlocking doors.
One is Once upon a Time, which children hear; it is distance measured
in years. The other is Beyond the Mountains, which plainsmen use; it
is distance measured in miles and difficulties. For either distance,
fetters fall.
Three tales may declare this as well as a thousand, and a thousand
might be told. Russian peasants speak of a land which they call
Bielovodye, and which lies, as they think, somewhere on the borders of
Mongolia in the distant east. It is a country of peace and plenty, and
nobody lives there.
Rubruquis gives just a glimpse, as of something seen afar through a
narrow window. “A Chinese priest,” he says, “told me also for truth
(which neverthelesse, I doe not believe) that there is a province
beyond Cataia, into the which, at whatsoever age a man enters, he
continueth in the same age wherein he entred.”
The widest horizons of time and space are reached in a single artless
sentence in a gypsy folk tale: “They went then further than I can
remember, till they reached the knoll of the country at the back of the
wind and the face of the sun, that was in the realm of Big Women.” The
men who made this journey skirted all the coasts of illusion.