"W. G. Emerson - The Smoky God" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Willis George)

dispelled.

Marco Polo will doubtless shift uneasily in his grave at the
strange story I am called upon to chronicle; a story as strange
as a Munchausen tale. It is also incongruous that I, a
disbeliever, should be the one to edit the story of Olaf Jansen,
whose name is now for the first time given to the world, yet who
must hereafter rank as one of the notables of earth.

I freely confess his statements admit of no rational analysis,
but have to do with the profound mystery concerning the frozen
North that for centuries has claimed the attention of
scientists and laymen alike.

However much they are at variance with the cosmographical
manuscripts of the past, these plain statements may be relied
upon as a record of the things Olaf Jansen claims to have
seen with his own eyes.

A hundred times I have asked myself whether it is possible that
the world's geography is incomplete, and that the startling
narrative of Olaf Jansen is predicated upon demonstrable facts.
The reader may be able to answer these queries to his own
satisfaction, however far the chronicler of this narrative may be
from having reached a conviction. Yet sometimes even I am at a
loss to know whether I have been led away from an abstract truth
by the ignes fatui of a clever superstition, or whether
heretofore accepted facts are, after all, founded upon falsity.

It may be that the true home of Apollo was not at Delphi, but in
that older earth-center of which Plato speaks, where he says:
"Apollo's real home is among the Hyperboreans, in a land of
perpetual life, where mythology tells us two doves flying from
the two opposite ends of the world met in this fair region, the
home of Apollo. Indeed, according to Hecataeus, Leto, the
mother of Apollo, was born on an island in the Arctic Ocean far
beyond the North Wind."

It is not my intention to attempt a discussion of the theogony of
the deities nor the cosmogony of the world. My simple duty is to
enlighten the world concerning a heretofore unknown portion of
the universe, as it was seen and described by the old Norseman,
Olaf Jansen.

Interest in northern research is international. Eleven nations
are engaged in, or have contributed to, the perilous work of
trying to solve Earth's one remaining cosmological mystery.

There is a saying, ancient as the hills, that "truth is stranger
than fiction," and in a most startling manner has this axiom been