________________
THE HERITAGE OF ARYAN PEOPLES 143 In his work on Oriental religions, Samuel Johnson gives a picture of the highlands in which this early race had its home.
“Those” (he writes) "who have penetrated into these mountain ranges, report that the silent abysses of the midnight sky, with its intensely burning stars, and the colossal peaks lifting their white masses beyond storms, impress the imagination with such a sense of fathomless mystery and eternal repose as no other region on earth can suggest. The mean altitude of these summits of Himalayas, the Home of Snow, is loftier than that of any other mountain system in the world, and their mighty faces, unapproachable by man, overlook vast belts of forest which he has not ventured to explore. From one point, Hooker saw twenty snow-peaks, each over twenty thousand feet in height, whose white ridge of frosted silver stretched over the whole horizon for one hundred and six degrees. Here are splendours and glooms, unutterable powers, impenetrable reserves, correspondent to the spiritual nature in whose earlier education they bore an essential part. ... The dawn and the decline of day, and the starlit night that united in its splendour an unseen sun returning on a path behind a veil, and fire in all its mysterious forms from the spark that lighted the simple oblation and the flame that rose from the domestic hearth, to that central orb in which the prescience of their active instinct saw, so long ago, an all-productive Cosmic
