hat these seeming monsters
and giants are but the familiar forms which we know so well, those of
houses and trees, men and their herds, actively stirring beneath us,
clearly revealed as the things of every day.

It is thus that the land of Russia appears to us when the mists of
prehistoric time first begin to lift. Half-formed figures appear,
rising, vanishing, showing large through the vapor; stirring,
interwoven, endlessly coming and going; a phantasmagoria which it is
impossible more than half to understand. At that early date the great
Russian plain seems to have been the home of unnumbered tribes of varied
race and origin, made up of men doubtless full of hopes and aspirations
like ourselves, yet whose story we fail to read on the blurred page of
history, and concerning whom we must rest content with knowing a few of
the names.

Yet progressive civilizations had long existed in the countries to the
south, Egypt and Assyria, Greece and Persia. History was actively being
made there, but it had not penetrated the mist-laden North. The Greeks
founded colonies on the northern shores of the Black Sea, but they
troubled themselves little about the seething tribes with whom they came
there into contact. The land they called Scythia, and its people
Scythians, but the latter were scarcely known until about 500 B.C., when
Darius, the great Persian king, crossed the Danube and invaded their
country. He found life there in abundance, and more warlike activity
than he relished, for the fierce nomads drove him and his army in terror
from their soil, and only fortune and a bridge of boats saved them from
perishing.

It was this event that first gave the people of old Russia a place on
the page of history. Herodotus, the charming old historian and
story-teller, wrote down for us all he could learn about them, though
what he says has probably as much fancy in it as fact.

We are told that these broad levels were formerly inhabited by a people
called the Cimmerians, who were driven out by the Scythians and went--it
is hard to tell whither. A shadow of their name survives in the Crimea,
and some believe that they were the ancestors of the Cymri, the Celts of
the West.

The Scythians, who thus came into history like a cloud of war, made the
god of war their chief deity. The temples which they built to this deity
were of the simplest, being great heaps of fagots, which were added to
every year as they rotted away under the rains.