The Arctic Home in the Vedas c12.65.2

c12.65.2

and it is so described in the Vâjasaneyî Samhitâ. It is also evident that as the seven rivers, set free to flow by Indra, were released simultaneously with the dawn, they could not be the rivers of the Panjaub. We do not mean to say that the Panjaub was not an Aryan settlement at the time when the Vedic hymns were sung, for the rivers of the Panjaub are expressly mentioned in the Rig-Veda. But the rivers of the Panjaub were not the seven rivers mentioned in the Vedas; and if so, a new explanation of the Vritra legend becomes necessary, and such an explanation is furnished only by the theory of the cosmic circulation of aerial waters or rivers through the lower and the upper world, carrying along with them the sun, the moon and the other heavenly bodies. We can now very well explain how Vritra, by stretching his body cross, closed the passages in the mountainous ranges (parvatas), which, on the analogy of mountains usually seen on the horizon, were believed to lie between the upper and the lower world; and how the waters, and with them the sun and the dawn, were prevented from coming up from the nether world for a long time in the Arctic home of the ancestors of the Vedic bards.