that civilization was first walking up and down the great river valleys
of the Old World. While the first pyramids[3] were a-building beside the
long green ribbon of the Nile and the star-gazers[4] of Mesopotamia were
reading future events from her towers of sun-dried bricks, Dravidian
tribes were cultivating the rich mud of the Ganges valley, a
slow-changing race. Did the lonely traveler, I wonder, troll the same
air then as now to ward away evil spirits from the star-lit road? Did
the Dravidian maiden do her sleek hair in the same knot at the nape of
her brown neck, and poise the earthen pot with the same grace on her
daily pilgrimage to the river?


The Aryan Brother.

"Once upon a time" Abraham pitched his tent beneath the oaks of Mamre,
and Moses shepherded his father-in-law's flocks at "the back side of the
desert." It was then that down through the grim passes of the Himalayas,
where now the British regiments convoy caravans and guard the outposts
of Empire, a people of fair skin and strange speech migrated southward
to the Land of the Five Rivers and the fat plains of the Ganges. Aryan
even as we, the Brahman entered India, singing hymns to the sun and the
dawn, bringing with him the stately Sanskrit speech, new lore of priest
and shrine, new pride of race that was to cleave society into those
horizontal strata that persist to-day in the caste system. Thus through
successions of Stone-Age men, Dravidian tribes, and Aryan invaders,
India stretches her roots deep into the past. But while there were
transpiring these


"Old, unhappy, far-off things