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.