The dream experience only provides the world of the dead with scenery and occupations resembling those of common life, with more rapidity of change and mysterious ease of transformation. But when tribes have migrated from one locality to another,--and in the vast reaches of prehistoric time such movements were incessant though {230} slow--the various forces of association in memory, dreaming, and tradition, would connect the dead with the places of the past. Sometimes the course of travel might have lain through mountain passes, or across a river, or from beyond the sea. A journey, or a voyage was thus suggested--Samoans said of a chief that he had "sailed"; to reach the abode of the dead might need days of travel; so shoes as well as food (p. 138) must be provided, and the fires, first kindled for the warmth of the dweller in the grave below, were continued to light him on his way. On solar analogies, such as may be found in both hemispheres, the homes of the departed were often assigned to the East or West. The brotherhood of sleep and death has always been recognised, and we still call our graveyards "cemeteries," or sleeping-places. The ancient Israelite said of his dead that he "slept with his fathers." Earth burial suggested a locality beneath the ground, vast and gloomy like some huge cave. The Mesopotamian thought of it as a city, ringed with seven walls; and even the Hebrew who pictured the underworld, Sheol, as a gigantic pit, sometimes imagined it to be approached through gates. There lay the nerveless feeble forms of the mighty ones of earth. The separate nations had their several stations allotted to them, where ghostly warriors lay dark and silent with their ghostly swords around the ghostly thrones of ghostly kings. {231} The entry of a new comer from Babylon awoke a ghostly wonder, and ghostly voices greeted him from the dead. It is a strange contrast with the pageantry of the skies, where various races, from the Australians to the Hindus and the Greeks have seen their forefathers looking down on them as stars. So inveterate is this belief that it was found necessary to obtain a certificate from the Astronomer Royal to refute the rumour that on the night on which Browning died a new star appeared in the constellation of Orion. The Milky Way could thus be interpreted as the path of Souls, and the Aurora Borealis resolved into the Dance of the Dead.