larger ones dwell the heads of
families, while the smaller ones shelter their kinsfolk and followers,
for this is a patriarchal world, and the housefather gives the law to
his household. The people are mostly a comely folk, tall and
clean-limbed, and rather fair of skin, with well-cut features and
straight noses; but among them are not a few squat and ugly men and
women, flat-nosed and nearly black in colour, who were once the free
dwellers in this land, and now have become slaves or serfs to their
Aryan conquerors. Around the village are fields where bullocks are
dragging rough ploughs; and beyond these are woods and moors in which
lurk wild men, and beyond these are the lands of other Aryan tribes.
Life in the village is simple and rude, but not uneventful, for the
village is part of a tribe, and tribes are constantly fighting with
one another, as well as with the dark-skinned men who often try to
drive back the Aryans, sometimes in small forays and sometimes in
massed hordes. But the world in which the village is interested is a
small one, and hardly extends beyond the bounds of the land where its
tribe dwells. It knows something of the land of the Five Rivers, in
one corner of which it lives, and something even of the lands to the
north of it, and to the west as far as the mountains and deserts,
where live men of its own kind and tongue; but beyond these limits it
has no knowledge. Only a few bold spirits have travelled eastward
across the high slope that divides the land of the Five Rivers from
the strange and mysterious countries around the great rivers Ganga and
Yamuna, the unknown land of deep forests and swarming dark-skinned
men.

In the matter of religion these Aryans care a good deal about charms
and spells, black and white magic, for preventing or curing all kinds
of diseases or mishaps, for winning success in love and war and trade
and husbandry, for bringing harm upon enemies or rivals--charms which
a few centuries later will be dressed up in Rigvedic style, stuffed
out with imitations of Rigvedic hymns, and published under the name of
Atharva veda, "the lore of the Atharvans," by wizards who claim to
belong to the old priestly clans of Atharvan and Angiras. But we have
not yet come so far, and as yet all that these people can tell us is a
great deal about their black and white magic, in which they are hugely
interested, and a fair amount about certain valiant men of olden times
who are now worshipped b