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In his cups they all passed, confusedly, before him; the hermaphrodites whispered to the rose-breathers the secrets of impossible love; the griffons bore to him women with magical eyes; the Albanians danced with elastic feet; he heard the shrill call of the Psyllians, luring the serpents to death; the column of Panchaia unveiled its mysteries; the Hyperboreans the reason of their fear of life, and on the wings of the chimera he set out again in search of that continent which haunted antiquity and which lay beyond the sea.
"Little One, it is some cloud-city you are thinking of, some dream-land, or isle of Long Ago, which you will never see again. I beg you to forget these wild fancies." But still the child dreamed on. Once she heard the glad song of the Hyperboreans:
It may be that the beginnings of such ideas go back to the time when the Greeks and the Hindus were living together, though it is still more likely that both the Greeks and the Indians were affected by a movement originating in the north, which brought to both of them a new view of the soul. The Delian legend of the Hyperboreans may be thought to point in this direction.
Heraclides Ponticus, who lived not long after these times, in his book upon the Soul, relates that a certain report came from the west, that an army, proceeding from the Hyperboreans, had taken a Greek city called Rome, seated somewhere upon the great sea.
At length he climbed into his car, and bade his swan team fly with him to the country of the Hyperboreans beyond the far-off northern mountains. Forthwith they obeyed; and through the pure regions of the upper air they bore him, winging their way ever northward.
I am inclined to sing hymns of praise to the Hyperboreans who have helped you in this admirable work. What you say of the specific difference in vertical line and of the increased number of biological epochs is full of interest and wisdom. No wonder you rebel against the idea that the Baltic contains microscopic animals identical with those of the chalk!
Growling in guttural Teutsoh what little articulate meaning they had: spending, of the inarticulate, a proportion in games, of chance, probably too in drinking beer; yet having an immense overplus which they do not so spend, but endeavor to utter in such working as there may be. So have the Hyperboreans lived from of old.
In the oak-woods of Britain the Druids held their followers; Odin and Freya maintained their godships in Gaul and Germany and among the Hyperboreans; Egypt was satisfied with her crocodiles and Anubis; the Persians were yet devoted to Ormuzd and Ahriman, holding them in equal honor; in hope of the Nirvana, the Hindoos moved on patient as ever in the rayless paths of Brahm; the beautiful Greek mind, in pauses of philosophy, still sang the heroic gods of Homer; while in Rome nothing was so common and cheap as gods.
However, an indistinct rumour of the fall of Rome seems at once to have reached Greece: for Herakleides of Pontus, who lived about that time, speaks in his book 'On the Spirit, of a rumour from the west that an army had come from the Hyperboreans and had sacked a Greek colony called Rome, which stood somewhere in that direction, near the great ocean.
"I come from a land in the sun-bright deep, Where golden gardens glow, Where the winds of the north, becalmed in sleep, Their conch shells never blow." On the south side of the earth, close to the stream of Ocean, dwelt a people happy and virtuous as the Hyperboreans. They were named the Aethiopians.
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