Yao, it is true, is said to have reigned a full century, or but one year short of it.  This is perhaps the first improbability we come to; and even of this we may say that some people do live a long time.  None of his successors repeated the indiscretion.  Before him came a line of six sovereigns with little historic verisimilitude:  they must be called faint memories of epochs, not actual men.  The first of them, Fo-hi (2852-2738), was half man, half dragon; which is being interpreted, of course, an Adept King;—­or say a line of Adept Kings.  As for the dates given him, I suppose there is nothing exact about them; that was all too far back for memory; it belongs to reminiscence.  Before Fo-hi came the periods of the Nest-Builders, of the Man-Kings, the Earth-Kings, and the Heaven-Kings; then P’an K’u, who built the worlds; then, at about two and a quarter million years before Confucius, the emanation of Duality from the Primal One.  All this, of course, is merely the exoteric account; but it shows at least that—­the Chinese never fell into such fatuity as we of the West, with our creation six trumpery millenniums ago.

This much we may say:  about the time when Yao is said to have come to the throne a manvantara began, which would have finished its course of fifteen centuries in 850 or so B. C. It is a period we see only as through a glass darkly:  what is told about it is, to recent and defined history, as a ghost to a living man.  There is no reason why it should not have been an age of high civilization and cultural activities; but all is too shadowy to say what they were.  To its first centuries are accredited works of engineering that would make our greatest modern achievements look small:  common sense would say, probably the reminiscence of something actual.  Certainly the Chinese emerged from it, and into daylight history, not primitive but effete:  senile, not childlike.  That may be only a racial peculiarity, a national prejudice, of course.

And where should you look, back of 850 B. C., to find actual history—­human motives, speech and passions—­or what to our eyes should appear such?  As things near the time-horizon, they lose their keen outlines and grow blurred and dim.  The Setis and Thothmeses are names to us, with no personality attaching; though we have discovered their mummies, and know the semblance of their features, our imagination cannot clothe them with life.  We can hear a near Napoleon joking, but not a far-off Rameses.  We can call Justinian from his grave, and traverse the desert with Mohammed; but can bold no converse with Manu or Hammurabi;—­ because these two dwell well this side of the time-horizon, but the epochs of those are far beyond it.  The stars set:  the summer evenings forget Orion, and the nights of winter the beauty of Fomalhaut:  though there is a long slope between the zenith Now and the sea-rim, what has once gone down beyond the west of time we cannot recall or refashion.  So that old Chinese manvantara is gone after the Dragon Fo-hi and the Yellow Emperor, after the Man-Kings and the Earth-Kings and the Heaven-Kings; and Yao, Shun, and Yu the Great, and the kings of Hia, and Shang, and even Chow, are but names and shadows,