The Caspian Sea--or by whatever name we call the great mediterranean sea which lay before them--would be naturally, almost inevitably, considered by the Aryans from their home in Bactria to bound the habitable world. The region beyond its borders would be a twilight-land like the land of Apap (the desert-king) of the Egyptians; and still farther away would lie the bright region of the sun’s proper home. And these ideas would be both literal--cosmological conceptions, as we should call them--and figurative, or at least mythical, referring to the future state of the soul. The beautiful expression of the Hebrew for that twilight western region, ‘the valley of the shadow of death,’ might be used for the Apap-land in its figurative significance, and not the less justly because there creeps in here the other notion of death as of a _descending_ to the land of shades, for the two ideas of the western heaven and the subterraneous hell were never utterly separated, but, among the Aryans at any rate, constantly acted and reacted upon one another. So with the Greeks we have as a cosmological conception--or let us say, more simply, a part of their world-theory--the encircling river Oceanus, with the dim Cimmerian land beyond; and we have the Eylsian fields and the islands of the blest for the most happy dead. And then by a natural transfer of ideas the bounding river becomes the river of death--Styx and Lethê--and is placed below the earth in the region of death. Even the Elysian fields at last suffer the same change: they too pass below the earth.
The Indian religion, too, has its river of death. ‘On the fearful road to Yama’s door,’ says a hymn, ‘is the terrible stream Vaitara_n_î, in order to cross which I sacrifice a black cow.’[98]
This river of death must be somehow crossed. The Greeks, we know, had their grim ferryman.
‘Portitor has horrendus aquas et flumina servat Terribili squalore Charon: cui plurima mento Canities inculta jacet; stant lumina flamma,’ etc.
The Indians crossed their river of death by a bridge, which was guarded by two dogs, not less terrible to evildoers than Charon and Cerberus.
‘A narrow path, an ancient one, stretches there, a path untrodden by men, a path I know of.