Page 529 - Lokmanya Tilak Samagra (khand 2)

310 SAMAGRA TILAK - 2 • THE ARCTIC HOME
not so great as to produce a winter of ten months, and this
requires us again to assume the submergence of this land
after the invasion of Angra Mainyu. Unfortunately there is no
geological evidence forth-coming to support the upheaval and
submergence of this land in the order mentioned above. But
even if such evidence were forthcoming, the explanation
would still fail to account why the inhabitants of Yima's Vara
in the Airyana Va~jo regarded a year as a single day, a descrip-
tion, which is true only at the North Pole. All attempts to locate
the primitive Airyana Va~jo in a region other than the
circum-polar country must, therefore, be aba.adoned. The names
of mythical rivers and countries may have been transferred in
later times to real terrestrial rivers and provinces; but if we were
to settle the position of the primitive rivers or countries by a
reference to these new names we can as well locate the Airyana
Vaejo between the Himalaya, and the Vindhya mountains in
India, for in later Sanskrit literature the land lying between
these two mountains is called the Aryavarta or the abode of
the Aryans. The mistake committed by Darmesteter and Spie-
gel is of the same kind. Instead of determining the position of
the Airyana Vaejo from the fact that a winter of ten months is
s:lld to have been introduced therein by Angra Mainyu, and
that a year seemed only as a day to the inhabitants thereof, they
have tried to guess it from the uncertain data furnished by the
names of rivers in Iran, though they were aware of the fact
that these names were originally the names of mythical rivers
and were attached to the real rivers in Iran only in later times,
when a branch of the Aryan race went over to and settled in that
country. Naturally enough this introduced greater confusion
into the account of the Airyana Vaejo instead of elucidating it,
and scholars tried to get out of it by supposing that the whole
account is either mythical, or is, at best, a confused reminiscence
of the ancient Iranian home. The recent scientific discoveries
have, however, proved the correctness of the Avestic traditions,
and in the light thrown upon the subject by the new materials
there is no course left but to reject the erroneous speculations
of those Zend scholars that make the Airyana Vaejo the east-
em boundary of ancient Iran.
But the most important part of the second Fargard is the warn-
ing conveyed by Ahura Mazda to Yima that fatal winters were