Page:The Religion of the Veda.djvu/195
the mountains mean clouds, and the rivers the flow of rain.
After such and other premonitory symptoms of scepticism and unrest, Professor Hillebrandt has recently advanced a new theory of Indra, Vritra, and the waters, which he expounds with great ingenuity and learning.[1] He argues that the streams of India and the neighboring Iranian countries are at their lowest level in the winter; that the confiner of their waters is the frozen winter, conceived as a winter monster by the name of Vritra, "confiner;" that Vritra holds captive the rivers on the heights of the glacier mountains; and that, consequently, Indra can be no other than the spring or summer sun who frees them from the clutches of the winter dragon: "Behold, in winter's chain sleeps the song of the waterfall under the dungeon roof of crystal ice!" So sings a Swedish poet, Count Snoilsky. And another Swedish poet, Andreas Aabel, rings out the antistrophe: "Hear the mountains proud cascade! Just now it has broken winter's check and prison, and now it courses free along its road!"[2]
Now it is true that the emergence of spring from winter is sometimes treated poetically as a battle. We can understand this much better in a north coun-