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.”

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.

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.