As the Earth reels through the Dark, and on her journey spins like a sleeping top, we only notice the changing of the seasons while she swings round her great orbit, and the swift passage of flying nights and days. It is only when one is quite alone in the far wilderness that one begins to feel the Earth in motion, and after sunset to watch her shadow climb the {125} eastern sky. To roll one's bed down beside the waning camp fire, to turn in and smoke the evening pipe, to lie looking up at the stars, is to know that one is only a speck of loose dust on a flying sphere, flung eastward at a thousand miles an hour, yet held down by the pull of the Earth's weight safe from being whirled away into space. Loose adventurers like me, loose air, dust, water, and loose tribes of men are all being flung with the surface, pulled by the centre of the Earth, and drifted about all the time without our knowing why. Of course the weaker tribes have been flung eastward so far as there was land, and stay where they were thrown in China, Indo-China, Burma, and Bengal. Only the stronger races have thrust against the motion of the planet. These dark-haired sallow Asiatics, Scythian, Hun, Tartar and the rest were bred in regions of strong sunlight, filling their native steppes until they were overcrowded. They were harmless shepherds and herders who did a little hunting. But for the Dun pony we might not have heard much about them. When they tamed the pony the savages became barbarians, the little scattered tribes were welded into formidable hordes. And then they swarmed like locusts eating up the world under {126} some ruthless Caan, a Genghis, a Timour, burning all civilization, trampling out the embers of human reason. And in their wake came twilight--the Dark Ages. [Sidenote: Pack horse trails] History is a jade. She has a glad eye for soldiers and sportsmen whose business is destruction, but turns a sour face from lousy pilgrims to the shrines of Faith, poor craftsmen and scholars burdened with the tools of Progress, drab merchants who carry Culture in their packs, and all the messengers of civilization. Of these her annals are curt and negligent. She has plenty of gossip about Kings more or less human as advertised by scribes more or less venal; but keeps no chronicle of the pack trails on which the little Dun ponies carried all that made civilization to the camps of the barbarian and the savage. She told us nothing about the hundreds of opulent cities which now lie dead and buried in the Mongolian deserts. One does not like to speak ill of a lady, but her sense of truth is always moderate. Adventure is not officially authorized as one of the Muses, but she is as truthful as History, and a deal more amusing as a guide. [Sidenote: Dragon beast]