The three elements are mingled beyond the wit of man to unravel them; so that you can hardly tell whether any given thing happened in this or that millennium, Root-Race period, or Round of Worlds, or Day of Brahma.  You are in the wild jungles of fairyland; where there are gorgeous blooms, and idylls, dreamlit, beautiful and fantastical, all in the deep midwood lonliness; and time is not, and the computations of chronology are an insult to the spirit of your surroundings.  History, in India, was kept an esoteric science, and esoteric all the ancient records remain now; and I dare say any twice-born Brahmin not Oxfordized knows far more about it than the best Max Mullers of the west, and laughs at them quietly.  Until someone will voluntarily lift that veil of esotericism, the speculations of western scholars will go for little.  Why it should be kept esoteric, one can only guess; I think if it were known, the cycles and patterns of human history would cease to be so abstruse and hidden from us:  we should know too much for our present moral or spiritual status.  As usual, our own savants are avid to dwarf all dates, and bring everything within the scope of a few thousand years; as for the native authorities, they simply try confusions with us; if you should trust them too literally, or some of them, events such as the Moslem conquest will not take place for a few centuries yet.  They do not choose that their ancient history should be known; so all things are in a hopeless muddle.

One thing to remember is this:  it is a continent, like Europe; not a country, like France.  The population is even more heterogeneous than that of Europe.  Only one sovereign, Aurangzeb —­at least for many thousands of years—­was ever even nominally master of the whole of it.  There are two main divisions, widely different:  Hindustan or Aryavarta, north of the Vindhya Mountains and the River Nerbudda; and Dakshinapatha or the Deccan, the peninsular part to the south.  The former is the land of the Aryans; the people of the latter are mainly non-Aryan—­a race called the Dravidians whom, apparently, the Aryans conquered in Hindustan, and assimilated; but whom in the Deccan, though they have influenced them largely, and in part molded their religion, they never quite conquered or supplanted.  Well; never is a long day; dear knows what may have happened in the long ages of pre-history.

The Aryans came down into India through its one open door—­that in the northwest.  But when?—­Oh, from about 1400 to 1200 B.C., says western scholarship; which has spent too much ingenuity altogether over discovering the original seat of the Aryans, and their primal civilization.  After Sir William Jones and others had introduce Sanskrit to western notice, and its affinity had been discovered to that whole chain of languages which is sometimes called Indo-European, the theory long held that Sanskrit was the parent of all these tongues, and that all their speakers