adored in temples that upheld a cross. The Incas lacked that symbol.
But they had a Satan. They had also the expectation of a saviour,
belief in whom could alone have consoled for the advent of Pizarro.
Over what highways of sea or sky, the living Word, which Ormuzd spoke,
reached them, there has been no somnambulist of history to divine. But
in the splendour that Cuzco was, in the golden temples of the town of
gold, along the scarlet lanes where sacred peacocks strolled and girls
more sacred still--vestals whom Pizarro's soldiers raped--in that City
of the Sun, the Word re-echoed. The mystery of it, reported back to
the Holy Office, was declared an artifice of the devil.

Less mysteriously, through the obvious vehicle of cognate speech, it
reached the Norse, stirred the scalds, who repeated it in the Eddie
sagas. Loki and his inferior fiends are, as there represented, quite
as black as Ahriman and his cohorts. The conflict of good and evil is
almost as fully dire. But Odin is a colourless reflection of Ormuzd.
The aesir, the angels of the Scandinavian sky, are paler than the
izeds. The figure of Baldr, the redeemer, faints beside that of
Mithra. Valhalla, though perhaps less fatiguing than Garo-demana, was
more trite in its wassails than the latter in its hymns.

What these abstractions lacked was not the Logos but the light.
However brilliantly the Iranian sun might glow, in the sullen north
its rays were lost. The mists, obscuring it, made Valhalla dim and set
the gods in twilight. It stirred the scalds to runes but not to
inspiration. There is none in the _Eddas_. Nor was there any in the
_Nibelungen_, until the light, almost extinct, burst suddenly in the
flaming scores of Wagner.

Transformed by ages and by man, yet lifted at last from their secular
slumber, the Persian myths achieved there their Occidental apotheosis,
and, it may be, on steps of song, mounted to the ideal where Zervan
Akerene muses.

III

AMON-RA

"I am all that is, has been and shall be. No mortal has lifted my veil."

That pronouncement, graven on the statue of Isis, confounded Egypt,
condemning her mysteriously for some sin, anterior and unknown, to
ignorance of the divine, leaving her, in default of revelation, to
worship what she would, jackals, hyenas, cats, hawks, the ibis; beasts
and birds. Yet to the people, whose minds were as naked as their
bodies, and who, in addition, were slaves, there must have been
something very