Page:Ancient India as described by Megasthenês and Arrian.djvu/97

78 showers fall of drops of copper, which are swept together, is a fable. ** Megasthen^s states — what is more open to belief, since the same is The dancing virgias range. And melting lyres and piercing pipes resonud. With braids of golden bays entwined Their soft resplendent locks they bind, And feast in bliss the genial honr : Nor f onl disease, nor wasting age. Visit the sacred race ; nor wars they wage, Nor toil for wealth or power." (10th Pythian ode, 11. 4& to 69, A. Moore's metrical ver- sion.) Megasthen^s had the penetration to perceive that the Greek fable of the Hyperboreans had an Indian source in the fables regarding the JJbta/rakv/rus. This word means literally the * Knru of the North/ * * The historic origin, ' ' says P. V. de Saint-Martin, "of the Sanskrit appellation TJUa- rakn/ru is unknown, but its acceptation never varies. In all the documents of Upavedic literature, in the §rreat poems, in the Pur&nas, — wherever, in short, the word is found, — it pertains to the domain of poetic and mythological geogra- phy, nttarakuru is situated in the uttermost regions of the north at the foot of the mountains which surround Mount M^ru, far beyond the habitable worlds It is the abode of demigods and holy Bishis whose lives extend to several thousands of years. All access to it is forbidden to mortals. Like the Hyperborean region of Western my- thologists, this too eiyoys the happy privilege of an eternal spring, equally exempt from excess of cold and excess of heat, and there the sorrows of the soul and the pains of the body are alike unknown It is clear enough that this land of the blest is not of our world. " In their intercourse with the Indians after the expedi- tion of Alexander, the Greeks became acquainted with these fictions of Br&hmaijic poetry, as well as with a good many other stories which made them look upon India as a land of prodigies. MegasthenSs, like Ktesias before him, had collected a great number of such stories, and either from his memoirs or from contemporary narratives, such as that of DMmachos, the fable of the Uttarakurus had spread to the West, since, from what Pliny tells us (vi. 17, p. 316) one Amdm^tus had composed a treatise re- gardmg them analogous to that of Hecataaus regarding the Hyperboreans. It is certainly from this treatise of Amd- metus that Pliny borrows the two lines which he devotes to his Attacorse, * that a girdle of mountains warmed with Digitized by Google