"WillisGeorgeEmerson-TheSmokyGod" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Willis George)

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 brought home to me within the
last fortnight.
It was just two o'clock in the morning when I was aroused from a restful sleep
by the vigorous ringing of my door-bell. The untimely disturber proved to be a
messenger bearing a note, scrawled almost to the point of illegibility, from an
old Norseman by the name of Olaf Jansen. After much deciphering, I made out the
writing, which simply said: "Am ill unto death. Come." The call was imperative,
and I lost no time in making ready to comply.
Perhaps I may as well explain here that Olaf Jansen, a man who quite recently
celebrated his ninety-fifth birthday, has for the last half-dozen years been
living alone in an unpretentious bungalow out Glendale way, a short distance
from the business district of Los Angeles, California.
It was less than two years ago, while out walking one afternoon that I was
attracted by Olaf Jansen's house and its homelike surroundings, toward its owner
and occupant, whom I afterward came to know as a believer in the ancient worship
of Odin and Thor.
There was a gentleness in his face, and a kindly expression in the keenly alert
gray eyes of this man who had lived more than four-score years and ten; and,
withal, a sense of loneliness that appealed to my sympathy. Slightly stooped,
and with his hands clasped behind him, he walked back and forth with slow and
measured tread, that day when first we met. I can hardly say what particular
motive impelled me to pause in my walk and engage him in conversation. He seemed
pleased when I complimented him on the attractiveness of his bungalow, and on
the well-tended vines and flowers clustering in profusion over its windows, roof
and wide piazza.
I soon discovered that my new acquaintance was no ordinary person, but one
profound and learned to a remarkable degree; a man who, in the later years of
his long life, had dug deeply into books and become strong in the power of
meditative silence.
I encouraged him to talk, and soon gathered that he had resided only six or
seven years in Southern California, but had passed the dozen years prior in one
of the middle Eastern states. Before that he had been a fisherman off the coast
of Norway, in the region of the Lofoden Islands, from whence he had made trips
still farther north to Spitzbergen and even to Franz Josef Land.
When I started to take my leave, he seemed reluctant to have me go, and asked me