Aryenis

“ For, as all Blue Sakaeland knew, this was our wedding day, and we were riding from the banquet in Kyrlos’s palace at Miletis to Paulos’s house, or rather to our house, since the previous day it had been formally made over to Aryenis and me, Paulos having taken up his residence at Miletis.
“Since you are leaving Kyrlos, child,” he had said to Aryenis, “it is only right that I should come and live with him, and take up life again as it was when we were both young men and found each other all-sufficient. Life ends mostly as it begins.” ”

“ Whether red-gold-haired Aryenis and her grave-eyed father, stalwart Henga and his Sake bowmen, Philos and his pretty wife and blue-eyed baby, crippled Paulos, the fiendish Shamans and the murderous brown Sakae are real living people, I cannot pretend to say, any more than I can tell whether pine-fringed Aornos, the snow-peaks of Saghar Mor, or the gloomy Shaman citadel, with its red-hot trapdoor, exist outside Lake’s brain. ”

“ We were dumb, as always, when Aryenis reproved us. I’ve never seen two unattached men lie down to be kicked so meekly as did Wrexham and Forsyth once she announced—not in words, of course—her intention of ruling the place as long as she honoured us with her presence. I, myself, having for many years been under a masterful elder sister who took me over at the age of three when my mother died, had long since learnt the folly of pretending to have a will of my own, [122] except when I could get out of range, and, of course, situated as we were, we could not get out of range of Aryenis. ”

“ He’s a good leader in war, and popular with everybody under him. A good musician, and—though he’s shy about it—somewhat of a poet.”
“You’re fortunate in having a man like that under you,” said I. “Aryenis was telling me that he helps you a good deal.”
“Yes. He’s getting more and more my right-hand man. Under Kyrlos and myself most of the preparations for this war have been made by him. He’s got a good head on his shoulders, which does not always go with the more showy qualities.”
Then he turned to Aryenis.
“Will you finish the evening for us with that little song of Andros’s? ”

“ I helped Aryenis from her mare, and we went up the grey stone steps to the open door with the firelight gleaming in the hall. She checked on the threshold, and I remembered just in time that it is ill fortune for a bride to cross the doorway of her home for the first time on foot. I picked her up in my arms and carried her into the hall, and as I put her down our lips met in the first kiss in our own home, in the firelit hall with the carved timbers, the half-seen trophies, the gleaming wood of floor and chair and settle. ”

“ Strapping country women, passing in groups from shop to shop, bareheaded in the sunlight, with their tight cloth bodices and short full skirts; town dwellers with finer clothes; here a lady in the simpler, straighter dress such as Aryenis wore, with a servant behind her; there a couple of soldiers in steel caps, bows slung behind them, chaffing good-naturedly a buxom matron with an unruly donkey.
And over all a vivid blue sky, and beyond, the great snow-peaks of Saghar Mor—blue shadowed white—that seemed to fill the northern sky. ”

“ Healthy scraps are off for the moment. As the learned used to say in the war, ‘the front has stabilized.’ In other words, we are sitting on three sides of the Shaman city—huge great walls and a devil of a ditch. The fourth side is sheer mountain near the gate where we found Aryenis. Kyrlos had two shots at assaulting the place, but they took tea with us over it. ”

“ It isn’t only women that want to be told and shown the things they know. Men also sometimes. You see a man may come—probably will come—to disbelieve the things he knows, or thought he knew, unless he’s shown them clearly and repeatedly.”
“And then, O Harilek?”
“And then, Shahzadi, good-bye to happiness. Will you say good-bye to it?”
“Never!” said Aryenis, decisively. “I shall always show you the things you know. I shall just keep your eyes and ears, your mind and your every sense, so full of them that you’ll never have an instant to think of anything or any one except them and me. ”

“ Not over-given to speech, but we found him well worth listening to when he opened his mouth. I turned to him again:
“We are not of those who fight for fighting’s sake, nor for profit after the manner of the mercenaries of old times. We have seen years of war wherein thousands of men died every day.” (Kyrlos opened his eyes at this.) “But under certain conditions we might join with you. Will you first tell us somewhat concerning this coming war of which you speak? Is it against the Shamans who took Aryenis captive? We gathered from her that they are an evil people and stirrers-up of strife.” ”

“ It would take a particularly unpleasant type to think of chaining a live girl to a dead man for the vultures to play with while he sat and looked on from the upper storey.” He spat into the fireplace. “Gives one a bad taste in one’s mouth, doesn’t it? I shall look forward to meeting the chief Shaman.”
Forsyth was silent, and I could see that he was pondering over something. At last he spoke.
“Whatever these people are, they aren’t Greeks for all that Aryenis and her father and some of their friends speak Greek. ”

“ The higher consciousness is choice, and the most solemn and impressive symbol for physical pain and religious dread is found in the sensation of choking. The last head reveals to us the boundless region of comparative mythology. Here we read the unconscious literature of the Aryans, the sacred books of the race. It has the same physical basis as the terms for mental operations. The cardinal fact of the Aryan's simple existence was the ever-ending, ever-beginning struggle of the bright sun, eternal type of his own lot. ”

“ But why may not the pro-ethnic Aryans, as well as the savages, have had at one stage of their development a fear of dead kindred?"—a question arising simply from the fact that Mr. Jevons cannot bring himself to believe that the ancient Aryans ever borrowed any of the savage practices of the peoples they conquered. But, so far as I am concerned, I have never suggested that the Aryans have been wholesale borrowers of all the nasty and unpleasant customs and beliefs which are now found to survive amongst the nations who speak an Aryan language. ”

“ So, as Professor Max Müller tells us, the descendants of the ancient Aryans, "when they search for a name for what is most exalted and yet most dear to every one of us, when they wish to express both awe and love, the infinite and the finite, they can do but what their old fathers did when gazing up to the eternal sky, and feeling the presence of a Being as far as far, and as near as near can be ”

“ Even without the fact of the existence, now, of such restrictions among the modern successors of the ancient Aryans in India, it would have been almost certain that they also were addicted to similar customs. It is certain that the notion of such usages was familiar enough to some at least of the tribes that preceded the Aryans in India. It is quite a mistake to look upon all these tribes as far below the Aryans in culture. Both the Kolarians and the Dravidians were probably quite the equals of the Aryans in social organisation. ”

“ To return to my theory of the development of Dionysus into a totem, or of his inheritance of the rites of a totem, Mr. Frazer says, ‘Of course this is possible, but it is not yet certain that Aryans ever had totemism.’ {84d} Now, in writing of the mouse, I had taken care to observe that, in origin, the mouse as a totem need not have been Aryan, but adopted. People who think that the Aryans did not pass through a stage of totemism, female kin, and so forth, can always fall back (to account for apparent survivals of such things among Aryans) on ‘Pre-Aryan conquered peoples,’ such as the Picts. ”

“ We have found anomalies among Aryans. We have seen the gens an odd, decaying institution. We have seen Greek families claim descent from various animals, said to be Zeus in disguise. We have found them tracing kinship and deriving names from the mother. We have found stocks with animal and vegetable names. We have found half-brothers and sisters marrying. We have noted prohibition to marry anyone of the same family name. All these institutions are odd, anomalous, decaying things among Aryans, and the more civilised the Aryans the more they decay. ”

“ If the Aryans, as some think, roamed the wide steppes of Russia or Central Asia with their flocks and herds before they plunged into the gloom of the European forests, they may have worshipped the god of the blue or cloudy firmament and the flashing thunderbolt long before they thought of associating him with the blasted oaks in their new home. ”

“ The terms under these beads enable us to plant Aryan civilisation deeper, showing as they do a more profound grasp of what is in the best sense culture. They prove the truth of the maxim—"Nil in intellectu nisi prius in sensu." Whatever may be the psychologist's verdict on the scholastic question of primum cognitum and primum appellatum, these primitive concepts tell us that the Aryans reached the abstract through the concrete, and moved in a world of quick sensations. ”

“ Of late, however, many considerations tend to prove that these Aryan nations were by no means one family; they are the product of a mixture of several races among which one has forced its language upon the others. If we call this race the Aryans proper we find that they are represented most purely in the Teutonic nations, the Saxons, Low Germans, and Scandinavians. These Aryans are a tall, blond, and dolichocephalic race. They appear as the conquerors of India, the masters of Persia, the Dorian immigrators of Greece, showing everywhere the same attributes. ”

“ In the city state of Athens, for the first time among the Aryans, there began to grow up something which an educated man of to-day would be willing to recognize as a civilization. In that clear air of a marvellous political freedom—a social atmosphere which could have condensed from none but Aryan moral ideas—the matured, age-old wisdom of Egypt and the East was absorbed by these youngsters and transformed in a few hundred years into a science, an art, and a philosophy of their own which have never been wholly surpassed. ”

“ It may be noted as curious that among the Javanese (a people so remote in blood from what we understand by Aryan) , the word ārya is commonly used as an honorary prefix to the names of men of rank; a survival of the ancient Hindu influence on the civilisation of the island.
The earliest use of Aryan in an ethnic sense is in the Inscription on the tomb of Darius, in which the king calls himself an Aryan, and of Aryan descent, whilst Ormuzd is in the Median version styled, 'God of the Aryans.'
B.C. c. ”

“ In this home-land, wherever it may have been, the Aryans lived in barbaric but not savage clans, tilling the soil and grazing their flocks and herds, workers in metal and skilled in many arts of life, a warlike folk who went forth to fight in chariots, a people able to govern and obey, to make laws and abide by them, a religious people earnest in the worship of the sun, and sky, and fire, and waters, and with pious faith in the divine spirits of their ancestors. ”

“ It is hard to draw any certain bodily picture of the primitive Aryans themselves (see page 109) , for in their course of migration and conquest they so mingled with other races, that now the nations united by Aryan speech range through the utmost varieties of white men, from the Icelander to the Hindu. The early home of the Aryans is supposed to have been in Inner Asia, perhaps in the present Turkestan, in the region of the Oxus and Yaxartes, for here the practicable way of migration for nomads with flocks and herds lies open down into Persia on the one side, and India on the other. ”

“ There can be no doubt, with regard to the question of the origin of these tales, that they were common in germ at least to the Aryan tribes before their migration. We find those germs developed in the popular traditions of the Eastern Aryans, and we find them developed in a hundred forms and shapes in every one of the nations into which the Western Aryans have shaped themselves in the course of ages. We are led, therefore, irresistibly to the conclusion, that these traditions are as much a portion of the common inheritance of our ancestors, as their language unquestionably is ”

“ All this unmistakably proves that the Aryans were the most enlightened race in the dawn of history. Such a state of civilisation, which exercises a potent influence on Indian society even to this date, could not have been attained in a day. It must have required a long course of training, and must take the nation back to the remotest antiquity. When the state of civilisation was so perfect, and when all sorts of useful sciences were regularly studied, there should be no wonder if the science of Medicine too received its share of attention. ”

“ If we are to judge of the primitive religion of the European Aryans by comparing the religions of the different branches of the stock, the highest place in their pantheon must certainly be assigned to the oak. The result, then, of our inquiry is to make it probable that, down to the time of the Roman Empire and the beginning of our era, the primitive worship of the Aryans was maintained nearly in its original form in the sacred grove at Nemi, as in the oak woods of Gaul, of Prussia, and of Scandinavia ”

“ The Aryan settler lived on excellent terms with his bright gods. He asked for protection, with an assured conviction that it would be granted. At the same time, he was deeply stirred by the glory and mystery of the earth and the heavens. Indeed, the majesty of nature so filled his mind, that when he praises any one of his Shining Gods, he can think of none other for the time being, and adores him as the supreme ruler. Verses may be quoted declaring each of the greater deities to be the One Supreme: "Neither gods nor men reach unto thee, O Indra!" ”