It is never very easy, to understand the Past that really is a past: and the age of Forests, like that of chivalry, is gone. But in the case of ancient India, the chief obstacle to understanding arises from our bad habit of always looking at the map with the North side up. Why this inveterate apotheosis of the North? Would you understand the old Hindoos, you must turn the map of India very nearly upside down, so as to get Peshawar at the bottom, and the Andaman Islands exactly at the top. And then, history lies all before you, right side up, and you get your intellectual bearings, and take in the early situation, at a glance. Entering, like those old nomads, through the Khaibar, you find yourself suddenly in the Land of Streams: and as you drift along, you go, simply because you must, straight on, down the River "ganging on" (_Ganga_) towards the rising sun, "ahead," (which is the Sanskrit term for East,) all under the colossal wall of Hills, the home of Snow, where the gods live, on your left (_uttara_, the North, the heights;) while on the South, (the _right_ hand, _dakshina_, the Deccan) you are debarred, not by Highlands, but by two not less peremptory rebutters: first, by the Desert, _Marusthali_, the home of death: and then again, a little farther on, by the Forest of the South: the vast, mysterious, impenetrable Wood, of which the Ramayana preserves for us the pioneering record and original idea, with its spell of the Unknown and the Adventure (like the Westward Ho! of a later age) with its Ogres and its Sprites, its sandal trees and lonely lotus-tarns, its armies of ugly little ape-like men, and its legendary Lanka (Ceylon) lost in a kind of halo of shell-born pearls, and gems, and their Ten-headed Devil King, Rawana, away, away, at the very end of all: so distant, as to be little more than mythical, little better than a dream. No! Those who wish to see things with the eyes of old Hindoos must not begin, as we did, and do still, with Ceylon, and the adjacent coasts of Coromandel and Malabar. That is the wrong, the _other_ end: it is like starting English history from "the peak in Darien."