ALLUSIONS IN SACRED BOOKS OF THE EAST. 



189 



being the same — a condition peculiar to the polar regions. As 

 we have seen, the Vendidad Sadah or Liturgy pointed out that 

 the proportion of ten months winter to two months summer 

 was incorrect, as far as they knew, for their own climate. But 

 the proportion was, as they knew, dependent, to some extent, 

 on the latitude or the surroundings of a locality, and so might 

 hold good for Iran-Ve# within the limits of permissible 

 exaggeration. But nowhere between Sogdiana and the Arabian 

 Sea was there to be perceived any difference in the number of 

 days in a year, in the number of times that the sun and moon 

 and stars rise and set. It was so wholly unintelligible to later 

 writers that we know of no comment or explanation, even 

 where the passage from the Vendidad is freely paraphrased. 



But it cannot be mere chance, mere invention, which gives 

 two independent astronomical conditions, true for the polar 

 regions, and true only for them.* 



Two deductions, therefore, we must make : — 



First, that Iran-Ve# was a real and not a mythical place. 

 Primarily it was situated within the Arctic Circle of the 

 earth. 



" They say the Lion and the Lizard keep 

 The courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep," 



but in this, they say wrong. The present guardians of the Var 

 of Jamshed are most certainly not the lion or the lizard, but 

 perhaps the seal and the polar bear. 



And secondly, if Iran-Ye^ was an actual place, so Jamshed 

 or Yim was really a man, for some man must have observed 

 these astronomical facts thus preserved by his successors. How 

 he or his ancestors reached a spot so far north as to be within the 



* Of course it is only at the very pole itself that the year and the day 

 coincide in length, and even for the pole the description of the stars and 

 moon rising and setting once in the year is not correct, for the moon 

 rises thirteen times, the stars not at all. But the mis-statement is after 

 all, from the observer's point of view, but slight. That which must have 

 greatly impressed the wanderers who first penetrated far within the 

 Arctic Circle was the fact that the number of the days in the year varied. 

 Till they reached that region, from one sunrise to the next, or from one 

 sunset to the next, was an invariable measure of time. After they passed 

 the Arctic Circle, the further they got north, the more monstrous became 

 the length of the midsummer day, the more monstrous the length of the 

 midwinter night, until it would require no great imagination to conclude 

 that a place might be reached where the summer was all day, the winter 

 all night, each of them half the year. Lititudes of 25° to 45° would 

 never suggest that such a condition of things could occur anywhere. 



