of life impossible in the plains.  The Kafirs, inhabiting the high Hindu Kush Mountains of Badakshan, and apparently of Pelasgic, early Greek, or Persian origin, have a religion blended of paganism, Zoroastrianism and Brahmanism.[1405] One intruding faith has been unable to dislodge the previous incumbent, so the three have combined.  The great historical destiny of the small, barren, isolated Judean plateau was to hold aloof the chaste religion of the desert-bred Jews from the sensuous agricultural gods of the Canaanites; to conserve and fix it; if need be, to narrow it to a provincial tribal faith, to stamp it with exclusiveness, conservatism, and formalism, as its adherents with bigotry,[1406] for this is always the effect of geographical seclusion.  But when all these limitations of Judaism are acknowledged, the fact remains that that segregated mountain environment performed the inestimable service for the world of keeping pure and undefiled the first and last great gift of the desert, a monotheistic faith.

Buddhism, once the official religion of Korea but disestablished three centuries ago, has taken refuge in the Diamond Mountains, far from the main roads; there a dull, moribund form of the faith dozes on in the monasteries and monastic shrines of these secluded highlands.[1407] Driven out of India, Buddhism survives only in the Himalayan border of the country among the local Tibeto-Burman peoples, and in Ceylon, whose mountain city of Kandy is its stronghold.  The persecuted Waldenses, a heretic sect who fled in 1178 from the cities of France to the Alps, took refuge in the remote valleys of the Pellice, Chisone, and Augrogne some thirty miles southwest of Turin.  There, protected equally against attack and modification, the Waldenses have maintained the old tenets and organization of their religion.[1408]

[Sidenote:  Conservatism of mountain peoples.]

The mountain-dweller is essentially conservative.  There is little in his environment to stimulate him to change, and little reaches him from the outside world.  The “spirit of the times” is generally the spirit of a past time, when it has penetrated to his remote upland.  He is strangely indifferent to what goes on in the great outstretched plains below him.  What filters in to him from the outside has little suggestion for him, because it does not accord with the established order which he has always known.  Hence innovation is distasteful to him.  This repugnance to change reaches its clearest expression, perhaps, in the development and preservation of national costumes. Tracht, which is crystallized style in dress, appears nowhere so widespread and so abundantly differentiated as in mountain districts.  In Switzerland, every canton has its distinctive costume which has come down from a remote past.  The peasants of Norway, of the German and Austrian Alps, of the Basque settlements in the Pyrenees, of mountain-bound Alsace and Bohemia, give local color to the landscape by the picturesqueness of their national dress.