Page 322 - Lokmanya Tilak Samagra (khand 2)

LONG DAY AND LONG NIGHT 107
predict the certain appearance of the dawn after a lapse of some
hours in such caseS. But the lameness of this excuse becomes at
once · evident when we see that the Vedic calender was, at this
'time, so much advanced that even the question of the equation
·of the solar and the lunar year was solved with sufficient accur-
acy. S:lya-pa's explanation of winter nights causing misgiving
about the coming dawn must, therefore, be rejected · as . unsatis-
·factory. It was not the long winter-night that the Vedic bards
were afraid of in former ages. It was something else, something
very long, so long that, though you knew it would not last per
manently, yet by its very length; it tired your patience and made
you long for, eagerly long for, the'coming dawn. In short, it was
the long night of the Arctic region, and the word purd shows
that it was a story of former ages, which the Vedic bards knew
by tradition. I have shown elsewhere that the Taittirtya Samhita
must be assigned to the Krittika period. We may, therefore,
·safely conclude that at about 2500 B. C. there was a tradition
current amongst the Vedic people to the effect ·that in former
times, or rather in the former age, the priests grew so impatient
'or the length of the night, the yonder boundary of which was
not known, that they fervently prayed to their deities to guide
them safely to the other end of that tiresome darkness. This
description of the night is inappropriate unless we take it to refer
to the long and continuous Arctic night.
Let us now see if the ~ig-Veda contains any direct reference
to the long day, the long night, or to the Circum-Polar calendar,
besides the expressions about long darkness or the difficulty of
reaching the other boundary of the endless night noticed above.
We have . seen before that the ~ig-Vedic calendar is a calendar
of 360 days, with an intercalary month, which can neither be
_Polar nor Circum-Polar. But side by side with it the ~ig-Veda
preserves the descriptions of days and nights, which are not
applicable to the cis-Arctic days, unless we put an artificia
.construction upon the passages containing these descriptions.
Day and night is spoken of as a couple in the Vedic literature,
and is denoted by a compound word in the dual number. Thus
we have U~hdsa-naktd (I, 122, 2) Dawn and Night; Nakto~hdsd
( 1~ 142; 7) Night and Dawn; or simply U~hdsau (I, 188, 6) the
two Dawns; all meaning a couple. pf Day and Night. The word