Page 428 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

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THE CELTIC DAWN

1090-1020 B.C.

r | the south marched the mountains of the Caucasus.

From sea to sea they marched, from the Black Sea to the Caspian.
Their peaks reached up grey against the blue of the sky, and they
were crowned with eternal snow, as eternal as the mountains
themselves, as the great rolling plains, as the people of the plains.

The people had always lived on the plains. Their farmlands
stretched along the valleys of the great sluggish rivers, and up the
streams into the foothills. Between the rivers were the grasslands,

where the herdsmen wandered with their immense herds of cattle
and horses. But herdsmen and farmers were one people, had
been one people since time began, and the barrows that lay thick

over the plains covered the bones of their common ancestors.
As befitted an ancient people, they had long traditions. In
the morning of their race, sang the bards, they had sent out their

sons to the north and the south, the east and the west. To the ends
of the earth they had gone, and where they came they had ruled.
There was a time when a young man of their people could travel

from the Yanisei to the Rhine, from the Indus to the Baltic, from
the Mediterranean to the White Sea, and travel among kinsfolk
all the way.

But those days were gone. Their kin had married among
their subjects, had forgotten their common language, had quar­
reled among themselves and lost their coherence, lost even the
memory that their ancestors were of the steppes. Foreign nations

now bordered their grazing grounds.
The borders were uneasy. The kings and councils of nobles

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