24 THE MIGRATIONS OF MAN. 
tainous country to the south, they wandered up the Danube 
valley, where their cattle grew fat and throve exceedingly on 
the marshy pasture lands and luscious grasses. They were now 
on the well-known historic route to Vienna, and were soon 
definitely committed to one direction.* The Transylvanian Alps, 
covered with forests (to the North), and the mountains of Bosnia, 
the Tyrol, and Switzerland (to the South), were quite impossible 
for flocks of sheep and herds of cattle, and for clumsy waggons 
with axle and wheel of one piece of wood. Thus they were 
forced to go on as far as Passau. Then our forefathers, the 
Celtic Aryans, found themselves in a dangerous and difficult 
position. To retreat was impossible, for other Aryan hordes 
were following after them. They were in the midst of an amphi- 
theatre of gigantic mountains, full of ravines, precipitous valleys, 
and probably covered by dense forests of oak and of pine. 
Demolins has given a very graphic and interesting sketch both 
of their journey and of their difficulties at this stage. 
They were no doubt a purely pastoral people, probably 
ignorant of and despising agriculture. (It must be remembered 
that in this respect they were very inferior to most modern 
savages.) But under these difficult conditions they must, per- 
force, have advanced a step higher in the scale of civilisation. 
They would separate in small parties, clearing part of the forest 
and building villages in every suitable valley. They would then 
live like modern savages, that is, cultivating a little, keeping a 
few animals, and trading a little ; they probably invented, or stole, 
herds of swine, which could live on chestnuts and acorns; their 
young men would be kept in good, hard condition by more or less 
amicable inter-village fighting ; but a sort of family feeling would 
be maintained, for the whole tribe would have to unite occasion- 
ally to drive back savage hordes of Slavs, Mongols, and other 
barbarians, who also had advanced by the Danube route. We 
will leave them there, acquiring civilisation, building lake 
villages, and sending exploring expeditions through the historic 
defile which leads to Belfort and France. 
But probably ages before they started from Central 
Asia the Mediterranean had been to some extent colonised 
by. a people of a very different type. This Mediter- 
* Demolins Les grandes Routes des peuples. 
