"A. E. Merritt - Dwellers in the mirage" - читать интересную книгу автора (Merritt A. E)

to take it as a joke, but Barr was greatly disturbed. He said that the
Uighur tradition was that their forefathers had been a fair race,
yellow-haired and blue-eyed, big men of great strength. In short, men
like myself. A few ancient Uighur wall paintings had been found which
had portrayed exactly this type, so there was evidence of the
correctness of the tradition. However, if the Uighurs of the present
were actually the descendants of this race, the ancient blood must have
been mixed and diluted almost to the point of extinction.

I asked what this had to do with me, and he replied that quite
conceivably my visitors might regard me as of the pure blood of the
ancient race. In fact, he saw no other explanation of their conduct. He
was of the opinion that their study of my palms, and their manifest
approval of what they had discovered there, clinched the matter.

Old Fairchild asked him, satirically, if he was trying to convert us to
palmistry. Barr said, coldly, that he was a scientist. As a scientist,
he was aware that certain physical resemblances can be carried on by
hereditary factors through many generations. Certain peculiarities in
the arrangement of the lines of the palms might persist through
centuries. They could reappear in cases of atavism, such as I clearly
represented.

By this time, I was getting a bit dizzy. But Barr had a few shots left
that made me more so. By now his temper was well up, and he went on to
say that the Uighurs might even be entirely correct in what he deduced
was their opinion of me. I was a throwback to the ancient Norse. Very
well. It was quite certain that the Aesir. the old Norse gods and
goddesses--Odin and Thor, Frigga and Freya, Frey and Loki of the Fire
and all the others--had once been real people. Without question they
had been leaders in some long and perilous migration. After they had
died, they had been deified, as numerous other similar heroes and
heroines had been by other tribes and races. Ethnologists were agreed
that the original Norse stock had come into North-eastern Europe from
Asia, like other Aryans. Their migration might have occurred anywhere
from 1000 B.C. to 5000 B.C. And there was no scientific reason why they
should not have come from the region now called the Gobi, nor why they
should not have been the blond race these present-day Uighurs called
their forefathers.

No one, he went on to say, knew exactly when the Gobi had become
desert--nor what were the causes that had changed it into desert. Parts
of the Gobi and all the Little Gobi might have been fertile as late as


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two thousand years ago. Whatever it had been, whatever its causes, and
whether operating slowly or quickly, the change gave a perfect reason