Persia was a land of extremes, and the richest part of her dominions was fated to lie beneath the early snows, and feel the severity of winter, while the central portion of the country was one vast desert, whose scorching simoons were as much to be dreaded as the snows of her northern table-lands. The early settlers of Īrān, therefore, were forced to win their bread and develop their resources by the most arduous labor, and the dreamy mythology of the Hindūs gave way in their minds to the sterner conflict between good and evil. The opposition between light and darkness became a prominent feature of their mythology, for the battles which raged in Hindū skies between Indra, the storm king, and his constant enemy, Vṛitra, became to the sons of Īrān a personal strife with the powers of nature, and instead of dreaming of a contest in the clouds, they sang of the daily battle in lives which were crowded with hardship. Hence it is that Ormazd and Ahriman, in their continual strife, form the background of the national mythology, although Persia took the sun for her emblem, and called her kings by his royal name; a flashing globe was the signal light above the imperial tent, and the golden eagle was perched upon the ensign that led the Persian troops to victory. MYTHICAL MOUNTAINS. 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]