A Story of Selflessness
and Survival
Helena P.
Blavatsky
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Editorial Note:
Boris de Zirkoff 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,
India, 1984, 247
pp., pp. 126-130. Original title:
“From the Polar Lands - a Christmas story”.
We divided a few
longer paragraphs into shorter ones.
(Carlos Cardoso
Aveline)
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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, and we found ourselves cut off for eight long months
from the rest of the living world……. I confess I, for one, felt it terribly at
first. We became especially discouraged when one stormy night the snow
hurricane scattered a mass of materials prepared for our winter buildings, and
deprived us of over forty deer from our herd. Starvation in prospect is no
incentive to good humor; and with the deer we had lost the best plat de résistance against polar frosts,
human organisms demanding in that climate an increase of heating and solid
food.
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. They had been caught by
the icebergs, just as we had been.
“‘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. How I learned it I do not know; save
that I knew - I knew it.”
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