VEDIC INDIA.

I.

CHAPTER I.

THE WONDERLAND OF THE EAST.

And I saw the blue holy Ganges, the eternally radiant Himalaya, the gigantic banyan-forests, with their wide leafy avenues, in which the clever elephants and the white-robed pilgrims peacefully wander; strangely dreamy flowers gazed at me, with mysterious meaning; golden, wondrous birds burst into glad, wild song; glittering sunbeams and the sweetly silly laugh-of-apes teased me playfully; and from distant pagodas came the pious strains of praying priests.

ONLY a poet's day-dream; but how telling each feature of the fanciful picture; and how each quaintly worded sentence lifts you out of the screechy, glary reality of steam whistle and electric light, till the few perfect lines, like the richly patterned flying-rug of Oriental story, land you in the very midst of that world of mystery and enchantment, of gorgeousness and twilight, restful at once and exciting, which the name INDIA has always represented to the Western mind.

1 Heine (prose works).

2. Another world; a world in itself. That is what India pre-eminently is, and therein lies the charm. The word has been said and repeated times out of number, yet seldom with a full realization of the literalness and extent of its truth. Not even an attentive survey of the map is sufficient to impress it on the mind anything but vaguely. Comparison and a few figures are needed to create a clear and definite perception. Nothing less will convince us that we have to do not with a country, but with a continent, and that we can no more speak of the climate, the people, the language of India, in the singular, than of those of Europe—which it very nearly equals in size. For a line drawn from the mouths of the Indus to those of the Ganges gives the distance between Bayonne (on the Atlantic coast by the Pyrenees) and Constantinople; while another, stretched from the northernmost angle, just where the Indus turns southwards, to Cape Comorin, equals in length that from Arkhangelsk on the White Sea to Naples. Nor would. the latter line take in, by a great deal, the entire length of the Isle of Ceylon, which is itself not very much smaller than Ireland. Were we to include the extreme Northeast (Assam) and the Indian lands east of the mouths of the Ganges and the Indian Ocean —(Burma, Siam, etc.)—we should obtain even more imposing parallels; but we are not concerned in the present work with more than the great western peninsula,―nor, strictly speaking, with the whole of that; since the beginnings of political and social life and the spiritual development in religion and philosophy, that are to be our theme, were perfected almost en

tirely within the northern half of it. This at various periods received divers expressive and significant native names, but it is found convenient, in our own time, to gather it under the general appellation of HINDUSTÂN, roughly bordered in the south by the VINDHYA MOUNTAINS, a chain of several ridges, which stretches across the continent and divides it into two pretty even halves. All that lies south of the Vindhyas is no less sweepingly designated as DEKHAN.' For general purposes this simple division, though somewhat arbitrary, does excellently well. Even after a careful survey of these proportions, it comes home to us with something of a shock when we are told that the population of India (the western peninsula alone) amounted in 1872, on the showing of the census taken that year, to over 250,000,000 (not including Burma), or about one sixth of the entire human race.

3. But extent and numbers do not alone, nor even chiefly, go to produce the imposing impression we associate with the name of India. It is the various features of its physical geography, and especially its mountain scenery, that make of it a vision of glory and majesty. Some countries, like Babylonia and Egypt, are what their rivers make them. India-physically and intellectually-is the creation of her HIMALAYA. Never was wall of separation more towering, more impassable, raised by nature. Scarcely an opening along the immense extent of this, the most compact and highest range in the world, yields a passage to either the rude winds or ruder peoples "South Country," corrupted from “Dakshinapâti.”

of the North. For ages Erân and Turân might roam and fight, and settle and migrate, across and athwart that vast table-land of Central Asia, itself the loftiest terrace on the face of the earth--and all their random waves broke against the stupendous, impervious barrier.' Whatever conquering or civilizing swarms made their way at various times into the land of the Indus, reached it through a few gaps in the lesser chains of the Northwest, the HINDU-KUSH and the SULEIMAN MOUNTAINS, the passes that became celebrated in history under the names of KHAÏBAR, KURAM, and BHOLÂN. The ruggedness and small number of even these breaks made such occurrences difficult and far between, while the waters which surrounded the lower half of the continent, being those of an ocean rather than of inland seas, for many centuries served purposes of isolation far more than of intercourse. So the great North beyond the mountains remained a region of mystery and awe, from which the oldest native peoples vaguely fancied their ancestors to have come down at some time, so that some of their descendant tribes were wont, even till very lately, to bury their dead with the feet turned northwards, ready for the journey to the old home, where they were to find their final rest.

4. Travellers agree that no mountain scenery— not that of the Alps, nor any in the Caucasus, the Andes, or other famed highlands of the world—is

1 The level of this table-land is itself, on a rough average, 10,000 feet above the sea, and the Himâlaya wall rises 10,000 feet above that, not including such exceptional giants as Mt. Everest, Dhawalagiri and some others, whose peaks tower up to nearly as many feet more. (Mt. Everest-29,002 ft.)