eterate apotheosis of the North? Would you understand the old
Hindoos, you must turn the map of India very nearly upside down, so as
to get Peshawar at the bottom, and the Andaman Islands exactly at the
top. And then, history lies all before you, right side up, and you get
your intellectual bearings, and take in the early situation, at a
glance. Entering, like those old nomads, through the Khaibar, you find
yourself suddenly in the Land of Streams: and as you drift along, you
go, simply because you must, straight on, down the River "ganging on"
(_Ganga_) towards the rising sun, "ahead," (which is the Sanskrit term
for East,) all under the colossal wall of Hills, the home of Snow, where
the gods live, on your left (_uttara_, the North, the heights;) while on
the South, (the _right_ hand, _dakshina_, the Deccan) you are debarred,
not by Highlands, but by two not less peremptory rebutters: first, by
the Desert, _Marusthali_, the home of death: and then again, a little
farther on, by the Forest of the South: the vast, mysterious,
impenetrable Wood, of which the Ramayana preserves for us the pioneering
record and original idea, with its spell of the Unknown and the
Adventure (like the Westward Ho! of a later age) with its Ogres and its
Sprites, its sandal trees and lonely lotus-tarns, its armies of ugly
little ape-like men, and its legendary Lanka (Ceylon) lost in a kind of
halo of shell-born pearls, and gems, and their Ten-headed Devil King,
Rawana, away, away, at the very end of all: so distant, as to be little
more than mythical, little better than a dream. No! Those who wish to
see things with the eyes of old Hindoos must not begin, as we did, and
do still, with Ceylon, and the adjacent coasts of Coromandel and
Malabar. That is the wrong, the _other_ end: it is like starting
English history from "the peak in Darien."

But our particular concern, in these pages, is with the Desert. The
conventional notion of a desert, as a colourless and empty flat of sand,
is curiously unlike the thing itself, which is a constantly changing,
kaleidoscopic sea of colour, made up of rainbow stripes, black, golden,
red, dazzling white, and blue, with every kind of lights and shadows,
strange hazes, transparencies, and gleams. True, the ground you actually
tread upon is bare: but it is clothed with raiment woven by that magic
artist, Distance, out of cloud and heat and air and sky. And so, when
these old Hindoo people came to make a closer ac