Thus, these ancient Aryans stood with their backs toward the mountains and their faces toward the sea. All their prospect, all their future, seemed to be that way; when their migrations began they were undertaken in that direction--towards the west. Most important of all in the formation of a creed, their sun-god, or sun-hero,[9] was seen by many of them quenching his beams in the waters; the home of the sun is always likewise the home of souls. What more natural, nay, what so necessary, as that the Aryan paradise should lie westward beyond the sea? It has been said just now that the Indian word for desert corresponds etymologically with the European word for sea: that word must have been, in the old Aryan, something like _mara_, from which we get the Persian _mĕru_, desert, the Latin _mare_, the Teutonic (German and English) _meer_. But from identically the same root we likewise get the Sanksrit and the Zend (old Persian) _mara_, death, the Latin _mors_, the old Norse _mordh_, the German _mord_, our _murder_, all signifying originally the same thing.[10] What, then, does this imply? The word which the old Aryans used for sea they used likewise for death. How would this be possible, unless this, their first sea, were likewise the sea of death, the necessary stage upon the road to paradise? It might have been expected that such a connection of ideas would have endowed the sea with an entirely terrible character, precluding any attempt to explore its solitudes, or the lands which lay beyond. It has been already said that as a matter of experience we find that the _earthly_ paradise often comes to be realized so vividly that men lose the fear which should attach to any attempt at finding it. They were not religious, heavenward-looking men who, in Mr. Morris's poem, set out in quest of the happy land; and no doubt the bard has been guided by a true instinct, and that of all those mediæval mariners who were lost in their search after St. Brandon's isle, none knew that they had found what they were seeking--Death. The Greeks eagerly cherished delusions of the same kind; and long before they had summoned up courage sufficient to navigate the Mediterranean they had invented the myths of their western islands of the blest, to which yellow-haired Rhadamanthus was taken when expelled from Crete by his brother Minos, or of those gardens kept by the daughters of the west,[11] where decay and death could not enter. It is likely enough that for the Aryans _their_ western sea did long retain its more fearful meaning, _a death_; but that they at last gained courage to look upon it only as _the road_[12] to the land of which they had long been dreaming.