24 OUR HERITAGE THE SEA 



It is true that intrepid explorers, wandering life in 

 hand over and through these desolate fastnesses, do 

 occasionally come across traces of an extinct civiliza- 

 tion, filling the mind with wonder as to what manner 

 of men they were who thus fought with the sternest 

 conditions of Nature, and existed amid such terribly 

 deterrent surroundings. And the conclusion must in- 

 evitably be arrived at, that climatic conditions there 

 must for some unknown reason or another have been 

 better in those far-off, long-forgotten days. But the 

 life must, in any case, have been barely tolerable, com- 

 pelling the hardy hordes who raised those long for- 

 gotten cities to migrate ever westward to the fairer 

 and more favoured lands nearer the sea. Even in 

 what we are taught to believe was the cradle of the 

 human race, Armenia, Northern Arabia, and even 

 some parts of Persia, we now find so terrible a con- 

 dition of things climatically that we cannot conceal 

 our wonder at human beings managing to exist there 

 at all. 



As we go farther East, matters grow worse, and we 

 see that only nomadic life is possible, a condition of 

 affairs precluding civilization and keeping the scattered 

 tribes inevitably down to a level of barbarism. The 

 record of explorers like Sven Hedin, who have managed 

 to travel about those truly terrible regions, fill us with 

 amazement at man's endurance, as well as wistful 

 wonder as to what could have been the conditions 

 under which the large aggregations of human beings 

 whose traces he found could have lived. In short, we 

 are driven to the conclusions, first, that in the days of 

 those ancient civilizations which we are compelled to 

 believe did once exist in Middle Asia, the climatic 



