Page:Sagas from the Far East; or, Kalmouk and Mongolian traditionary tales.djvu/14

x to any earlier dwelling-place or country outside their Bhâratavarsha. It is true, that the sanctity they ascribe to the north country, and the mysterious allusions to the sacred mountain-country of Meerû, the dwelling of the gods in the far, far north, over the Himâlajas, is calculated to mislead for a moment with the suggestion that they point to a possible immigration from that north, but a closer observation shows that that very sacred regard more probably arose from the very fact of its being an unknown country; while the effect of the majestic and inaccessible heights, with their glorious colouring and their peculiar natural productions, was enough to suggest them the seat of a superior and divine race of beings.

The fact that Sanskrit, the ancient tongue of the Aryan Indians, is so closely allied to the languages of so many western nations, establishes with certainty the identity of origin of these people, and lays on us the burden of deciding whether the Aryan Indians migrated to India as the allied peoples migrated to their countries from a common aboriginal home, or whether that aboriginal home was India, and all the allied peoples migrated from it, the Indians alone remaining at home.

Reason points to the adoption of the former of these two solutions. In the first place, it is altogether unlikely that in the case of a great migration all should have migrated rigidly in one direction. It is only