वेदों की प्राचीनता एवं काल-निर्णय / ओरायन (लोकमान्य बाल गंगाधर तिलक - खगोलीय वैदिक शोध)

50 . THE ARCTIC HOME IN THE VEDAS. whiteness burns into ruddy rose-light, fringed with purple and gold. Day after day, as we measure days, this splendid panorama circles on, and, according as atmospheric conditions and clouds present more or less favourable conditions of reflection, kindles and fades, kindles and fades,—fades only to kindle next time yet more brightly as the still hidden sun comes nearer and nearer his point of emergence. At length, when for two long months such prophetic displays have been filling the whole heavens with these increscent and revolving splendours, the sun begins to emerge from his long retirement, and to display himself once more to human vision. After one or two circuits, during which his dazzling upper limb grows to a full-orbed disk, he clears all hill-tops of the distant horizon, and for six full months circles around and around the world's great axis in full view, suffering no night to fall upon his favoured home-land at the Pole. Even when at last he sinks again from view he covers his retreat with a repetition of the deepening and fading splendours which filled his long dawnings, as if in these pulses of more and more distant light he were signalling back to the forsaken world the promises and prophecies of an early return."* A phenomenon like this cannot fail to be permanently im- pressed on the memory of a Polar observer, and it will be found later on that the oldest traditions of the Aryan race have pre- served the recollection of a period, when its ancestors witnessed such wonderful phenomenon,—a long and continuous dawn of several days, with its lights laterally revolving on the horizon, in their original home. Such are the distinguishing characteristics of the North Pole, that is, the point where the axis of the earth terminates in the north. But as a Polar home means

• See Paradise Found, 10th Ed., p. 69.