The Princess Athura: A Romance of Iran

IT was morning on the plains of Asia. Long-legged herons stood in the shallows of the yellow Jaxartes, bathing their feet in its sluggish flood and warming their bodies in the first rays of the sun. They were silently and uneasily watching a host of armed men drawn out in long battle-lines across the lowlands bordering the southern margin of the stream.

Where the armed host stood was a sandy plain, about two miles wide. Beyond this was a low range of sand-hills, which trended away to the southeast, enlarging the plain as they receded from the river. Cutting through hills and plain to join the river-bed was a dry water-course, where, in winters only, a torrent flowed. In it were some stunted trees and scattered thickets of shrubs. To the north of the river was a vast plain on which the dry, yellow grass had been withered by summer sun and wind. Far in the east appeared dimly through a blue haze the summits of high mountains. Westward the river had yet to flow half its length to the Oxian swamps. Here it was wide and shallow and its banks were low and marshy.

The rays of the sun sparkled on the brazen breastplates and shining blades of battle-axes, on the spear-points and gilded helmets, of two hundred thousand men, who here awaited the approach of a far more numerous host coming down from the east along the river towards them. The light rested softly upon the stern, bearded faces of veterans of many wars and the softer cheeks of young men on this, their first campaign. They were men of Iran for the most part, though some were Assyrians, Babylonians, Arabs, Hebrews, or Greeks from the Ionian cities. They were followers of Cyrus, the King of Kings, the Great King, ever victorious Lord of the World.

Those about to attack them were Touranian horsemen, known to ancient history as Scythians, Massagetæ, Sacæ, and to modern history as Tartars, Turks, or Kalmuks. The hearts of the soldiers of Cyrus were glad. For the long, dusty marches in pursuit of an ever retreating enemy would now end in a riot of blood and slaughter, and perhaps they might then set their faces homeward. No doubt of victory entered their minds. They were led by Cyrus, the invincible. It mattered not if the enemy outnumbered them three to one, as their scouts had reported. There would be more killing and a greater victory.

Racial hatred, reaching back beyond history and tradition to the distant age when the first family of man threw off branches to different parts of the earth and the branches immediately claimed the pleasant places and fought each other for them, animated both parties to the coming conflict. The folklore of the early Aryans is largely composed of tales concerning heroes who had saved their people from the ravages of those fierce men of the North, the Touranians. Century after century the wandering hordes of the great northern plains hovered, like threatening clouds, along the boundaries of Iran, looking across the mountains from their own arid and wind-swept abodes to the rich and pleasant hills and valleys of the South. The children of those tribes, in the days of Tamerlane and Mohammed, broke over all barriers, crushed Eastern civilization, and put back the clock of progress a thousand years.

Once even before the time of Cyrus, the wild Touranians had passed over the mountains and pushed through into Mesopotamia, bearing woe to the nations. Then, one day, their captains sat down to a banquet prepared by the conquered ones and instead of meats were fed with sword-blows and dagger-thrusts. Having thus been deprived of leaders, the Touranian conquerors had suffered disaster; and all had been either killed, enslaved, or driven back across the mountains. Stories of that invasion were thereafter told at every fireside of the Bactrians, Medes, Persians, and their kindred tribes; and the mothers in Iran frightened their children into obedience by threatening to hand them over to the dreaded monsters of Touran.