Lives of Alcyone

arbarians from the north, Other races existed in the country,
apparently of Lemurian descent; there was a large black population
quite apart both from the brown Tlavatli majority, and from the red
Toltec race, in whose hands was usually all the power. The Toltecs
were sometimes spoken of as Nagas, and some of the darker
people were called Takshaks—a people who used poisoned arrows
with iron barbs.
The Aryans were physically larger and men, with keen eyes
and aquiline noses, not unlike the Afgans or Pathans of the present
day, and man for man they easily overmatched the more enervated
Atlanteans, though some of the large fortified towns of the latter held
out against their attacks for centuries. The Aryans were on the
whole a bright and happy people, though by no means ideal in the
life which they lived. At this period the majority were flesh-eaters; at
least it is certain that some large tribes did kill and eat cattle. Also
there was a good deal of drunkenness among them, the chief liquor
being the juice of some plant of the asclepiad order, which they
mixed with milk. Some of the tribes, when they settled down in the
conquered countries in the north of India, cultivated wheat and
barley, and practically became vegetarians. Nothing in the nature of
caste is observable at this period.
The parents of Alcyone belonged to one of these wandering
bands, and he was born on the march, somewhere in the hill country
in the neighbourhood of what is now called Afghanistan, in the year
12,877 B. C. This band made its way slowly down to the Punjab,
which was already in the hands of the Aryans. These marauding
invaders seem always to have been ready to fight, just as much with
men of their own race as with others, if they could not get exactly
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