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 ne cessity 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." 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 medieval 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. Eschylus 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 |