The silent mountains standing calmly beneath the skies of blue, while the ages come and go, always command the reverence of the human heart. With forests around their feet, the gray peaks reach upward to dim and ashen heights, where the white snow lies unpolluted by the foot of man. Their frost-crowns gleam in the sunlight of noon, or change to tints of opal and crimson light beneath the farewell fires of the setting sun. No wonder, then, that in the fables of all people the gods are enthroned on wondrous heights. The old Assyrian kings wrote upon their strange tablets of “the world mountain,” which, although rooted in hades, still supported the heavens with all their starry hosts. The world was bound to it with a rope, like that with which the sea was churned in the later Hindū legend, for the lost ambrosia of the gods,[[114]] or like the golden cord of Homer with which Zeus proposed to suspend the nether earth, after binding the cord about Olympus.[[115]] This mythical mountain was the abode of the gods, and it was this of which the Babylonian king said:
“I will exalt my throne above the stars of God;
I will sit upon the mount of the congregation in the sides of the north;
I will be like the Most High.”[[116]]
It was between the “Twin Mountains” that the sun passed in its rising and setting, and the rocky gates were guarded by the “scorpion men,” whose heads were at the portals of heaven, and their feet in hell beneath.[[117]]
In the mythology of the Hindūs, Mount Meru rises in her solitary grandeur in the very centre of the earth to the height of sixty-four thousand miles; and there on her sun-kissed crown, amidst gardens of fabulous beauty, and flowers that never of winter hear—where the skies are of rose and pearl, and the dreamlike harmonies of far-off voices are borne upon the air, we find the heaven of Indra, the abode of the gods.[[118]]
Among the Greeks the gates of Olympus open to receive the imperial throng, when
“The gods with Jove assume their thrones of gold.”
When the chambers of the east were opened, and floods of light were poured upon the peak, the Greek poet dreamt that:
“The sounding hinges ring on either side,