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showers fall of drops of copper, which are swept together, is a fable. 11 Megasthenês states — what is more open to belief, since the same is
The dancing virgins range.
And melting lyres and piercing pipes resound.
With braids of golden bays entwined
Their soft resplendent locks they bind,
And feast in bliss the genial hour:
Nor foul disease, nor wasting age,
Visit the sacred race; nor wars they wage,
Nor toil for wealth or power."
(10th Pythian ode, ll. 46 to 69, A. Moore's metrical version.)
Megasthenês had the penetration to perceive that the Greek fable of the Hyperboreans had an Indian source in the fables regarding the Uttarakurus. This word means literally the 'Kuru of the North.' "The historic origin," says P. V. de Saint-Martin, "of the Sanskrit appellation Utta- rakuru is unknown, but its acceptation never varies. In all the documents of Upavedic literature, in the great poems, in the Purâṇas, — wherever, in short, the word is found, — it pertains to the domain of poetic and mythological geogra- phy. Uttarakuru is situated in the uttermost regions of the north at the foot of the mountains which surround Mount Mêru, far beyond the habitable worlds It is the abode of demigods and holy Ṛishis whose lives extend to several thousands of years. All access to it is forbidden to mortals. Like the Hyperborean region of Western my- thologists, this too enjoys the happy privilege of an eternal spring, equally exempt from excess of cold and excess of heat, and there the sorrows of the soul and the pains of the body are alike unknown. ... It is clear enough that this land of the blest is not of our world.
"In their intercourse with the Indians after the expedi- tion of Alexander, the Greeks became acquainted with these fictions of Brâhmaṇic poetry, as well as with a good many other stories which made them look upon India as a land of prodigies. Megasthenês, like Ktêsias before him, had collected a great number of such stories, and either from his memoirs or from contemporary narratives, such as that of Dêimachos, the fable of the Uttarakurus had spread to the West, since, from what Pliny tells us (vi. 17, p. 316) one Amômêtus had composed a treatise re- garding them analogous to that of Hecatæus regarding the Hyperboreans. It is certainly from this treatise of Amô- mêtus that Pliny borrows the two lines which he devotes to his Attacoræ, 'that a girdle of mountains warmed with
