A Story of Selflessness
and Survival
Helena P. Blavatsky
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Boris de Zirkof included
the
following story -
together with other
posthumously published
texts - in the
vol. XIII of the Collected
Writings of H.P.
Blavatsky (TPH,1982, see
pp. 248-251). The
text is also part of the
volume “The Tell-Tale
Picture Gallery”, by
H.P. Blavatsky and
W.Q. Judge, Theosophy
Co., Bombay/Mumbai,
“From the Polar Lands - a Christmas story”.
In order avoid an
excessive use of quotation
marks, the introductory
part is here presented in italics.
We also divided a few
longer paragraphs into shorter ones.
(C. C. A.)
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Just a year ago, during
the Christmas holidays, a numerous society had gathered in the country house,
or rather the old hereditary castle, of a wealthy landowner in Finland
Many
were the remains in it of our forefathers’ hospitable way of living; and many
the medieval customs preserved, founded on traditions and superstitions,
semi-Finnish and semi-Russian, the latter imported into it by its female
proprietors from the shores of the Neva.
Christmas trees were being prepared and implements for divination were
being made ready. For, in that old castle there were grim worm-eaten portraits
of famous ancestors and knights and ladies, old deserted turrets, with bastions
and Gothic windows; mysterious somber alleys, and dark and endless cellars,
easily transformed into subterranean passages and caves, ghostly prison cells,
haunted by the restless phantoms of the heroes of local legends. In short, the
old Manor offered every commodity for romantic horrors. But alas! this once
they serve for nought; in the present narrative these dear old horrors play no
such part as they otherwise might.
Its
chief hero is a very commonplace, prosaical man - let us call him Erkler. Yes;
Dr. Erkler, professor of medicine, half-German through his father, a full-blown
Russian on his mother’s side and by education; and one who looked a rather
heavily built, and ordinary mortal. Nevertheless, very extraordinary things
happened with him.
Erkler,
as it turned out was a great traveler, who by his own choice had accompanied
one of the most famous explorers on his journeys round the world. More than
once they had both seen death face to face from sunstrokes under the Tropics,
from cold in the Polar Regions . All this
notwithstanding, the doctor spoke with a never-abating enthusiasm about their
“winterings” in Greenland and Novaya Zemla, and about the desert plains in
Australia, where he lunched off a kangaroo and dined off an emu, and almost
perished of thirst during the passage through a waterless track, which it took them
forty hours to cross.
“Yes,”
he used to remark, “I have experienced almost everything, save what you would
describe as supernatural. . . . This, of course if we throw out of account a
certain extraordinary event in my life - a man I met, of whom I will tell you
just now - and its ……indeed, rather strange, I may add quite inexplicable,
results.”
There
was a loud demand that he should explain himself; and the doctor, forced to
yield, began his narrative.
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In 1878 we were compelled
to winter on the northwestern coast of Spitzbergen .
We had been attempting to find our way during the short summer to the pole; but
as usual, the attempt had proved a failure, owing to the icebergs, and, after
several such fruitless endeavors, we had to give it up.
No sooner had we settled than the polar night
descended upon us, our steamers got wedged in and frozen between the blocks of
ice in the Gulf
of Mussel
However, we were finally reconciled to our loss, and
even got accustomed to the local and in reality more nutritious food - seals,
and seal-grease. Our men from the remnants of our lumber built a house neatly
divided into two compartments, one for three professors and myself, and the
other for themselves; and, a few wooden sheds being constructed for
meteorological, astronomical and magnetic purposes, we even added a protecting
stable for the few remaining deer. And then began the monotonous series of
dawnless nights and days, hardly distinguishable one from the other, except through
dark-gray shadows. At times, the “blues” we got into were fearful! We had
contemplated sending two of our three steamers home in September, but the
premature and unforeseen formation of ice walls round them had thwarted our
plans; and now, with the entire crews on our hands, we had to economize still
more with our meager provisions, fuel and light. Lamps were used only for
scientific purposes: the rest of the time we had to content ourselves with
God’s light - the moon and the Aurora Borealis……. But how describe these
glorious, incomparable northern lights! Rings, arrows, gigantic conflagrations
of accurately divided rays of the most vivid and varied colors. The November
moonlight nights were as gorgeous. The play of moonbeams on the snow and the frozen
rocks was most striking. These were fairy nights.
Well, one such night - it may have been one such day,
for all I know, as from the end of November to about the middle of March we had
no twilights at all, to distinguish the one from the other - we suddenly espied
in the play of colored beams, which were then throwing a golden rosy hue on the
snow plains, a dark moving spot……. It grew, and seemed to scatter as it
approached nearer to us. What did this mean? . . . It looked like a herd of
cattle, or a group of living men, trotting over the snowy wilderness…….But
animals there were white like everything else. What then was this?…….human beings?
We could not believe our eyes. Yes, a group of men was
approaching our dwelling. It turned out to be about fifty seal-hunters, guided
by Matiliss, a well-known veteran mariner, from Norway
“‘How did you know that we were here?” we asked.
“Old Johan, this very same old party, showed us the
way” - they answered, pointing to a venerable-looking old man with snow-white
locks.
In sober truth, it would have beseemed their guide far
better to have sat at home over his fire than to have been seal-hunting in
polar lands with younger men. And we told them so, still wondering how he came
to learn of our presence in this kingdom of white bears. At this Matiliss and
his companions smiled, assuring us that ‘old Johan’ knew all. They remarked
that we must be novices in polar borderlands, since we were ignorant of Johan’s
personality and could still wonder at anything said of him.
“It is nigh forty-five years,” said the chief hunter,
“that I have been catching seals in the Polar Seas, and as far as my personal
remembrance goes, I have always known him, and just as he is now, an old,
white-bearded man. And so far back as in the days when I used to go to sea, as
a small boy with my father, my dad used to tell me the same of old Johan, and
he added that his own father and grandfather too, had known Johan in their days
of boyhood, none of them having ever seen him otherwise than white as our
snows. And, as our forefathers nicknamed him ‘the white-haired all-knower’,
thus do we, the seal hunters, call him, to this day.”
“Would you make us believe he is two hundred years
old?” - we laughed.
“Some of our sailors crowding round the white-haired
phenomenon, plied him with questions.
“Grandfather! answer us, how old are you?”
“I really do not know it myself, sonnies. I live as
long as God has decreed me to. As to my years, I never counted them.”
“And how did you know, grandfather, that we were wintering in this place?”
“God guided me. [1]
How I learned it I do not know; save that I knew - I knew it.”
NOTE:
[1]
The reader must take into consideration that in
esoteric philosophy the word “God” is but a metaphor meaning the universal law
and the totality of Nature, as well as Atma.
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