THE PEOPLE OF THE COMET
“He turned to the globe and put his finger on the spot that I had called Greenland.
“ 'If you will look at this globe you will observe that there is a great deal of land in the North. The continent which you have called Greenland reaches close to the Pole itself; and in my day extended to and beyond the Pole as far south as the seventieth degree, and was fringed on the opposite side by a number of islands, of which this,’ he pointed to Nova Zembla, ‘might have been one. Still farther south were the great continents, the torrid lands of the south, teeming with terrible life, pestilence, steaming heat, and sudden death—regions which we could circle, but which we could penetrate only at the penalty of certain destruction. All our life was clustered about the Pole,
“ 'This was due to a very simple fact of planetary evolution. The Earth, when it cooled, allowed life at the poles before anywhere else; when the rest of the Earth was a swirl of steam, when the crust of the equator was a mass of fire, the temperature of the poles, alone, was of sufficient coolness to allow the beginnings of life.
“ 'We know that the first life upon the Earth was about the poles. We know also, that, before the beginning of life, the Earth was a ball of fire. It is a part of the solar system, and much like the sun about which it rotates. We know that uncounted ages must have elapsed before the planet had cooled sufficiently to allow the hot vapors to condense and settle into the hollows to form the oceans. In the first ages the whole Earth must have been surrounded and enveloped by an immense pall of vapor through which the sun could not penetrate, and under which the Earth lay swaddled for eons, warmed by its own heat and entirely independent of anything external. In the first ages, then, the poles were much like the equator. There was no sun—only a half light, and moisture dripping never ceasingly from the everlasting clouds. It was an age of mushroom-like vegetation; but of very little animal life.
“ 'Then came the sun.
“ 'The pall of vapor broke and descended into the seas; and life began to appear and to roam over the face of the Earth. And when the sun first broke through, it was not a question of how much heat; but of how little. Naturally, the first place where life was possible was at the poles.
“ 'Thus we accounted for the beginning.'
" 'I understand,’ I answered, ‘most of our astronomers accept it even today. Life was certainly possible at the Poles before anywhere else. But I don’t recall any scholar ever suggesting that we look there for the origin of Man.’
“ 'Why not? Surely you have traced him from the north?”
“ ‘Come to think of it, we have. Tell me what you know. Whence came your Sansars?'
“But he shook his head.
“ ‘That I cannot tell. I am as ignorant of the origin of our Man as you are of yours. You say that your beginnings are shrouded in mystery and obscurity. So are ours. Only, while you may trace yourselves back to the Sansars, we can look back only into the mists of the beginning.'
“ 'How long had you a record of your Man?’ I asked.
“ 'Millions of years.'
“ 'And your civilization?’
“ ‘Several hundred thousand years. I think our civilization was much older than yours. Though we had no record of Man in the beginning, we had, nevertheless, a written chronicle that ran back many thousands of years.’
“ 'And you say that all this was in the past—millions of years ago—that you are millions of years of age—and that the Caucasian races of today are your descendants?'
“ 'I am sure of it. You speak the Sansar language, and that is proof of the relation. If you live here’—he pointed to California—‘you must be living on an Earth where the Poles are frozen; and that alone is a proof of the Time. We have been away for millions of years—though to us it seems but a number of days. Sora here,' he pointed to the girl, ‘does not understand; but I can explain. Let me look at the globe.’
“He spun the sphere upon its axis; then he stopped it and traced his finger over the North of Greenland. He shook his head.
“ 'Some of this is familiar; but not all, The city of the Sansars should be here, very close to the pole. You have it down as sea. Farther south, where you have these islands, were the observatories, close to the Magnetic Pole. The first observatory was at the Pole itself. The city of Sansar was a metropolis of a million inhabitants. All this,’ he made a sweep over the Arctic—‘was rich and inhabitable, a prosperous country teeming with resource. But here,’ he pointed to the North tip of North America, ‘we could not go. It was too hot—.’
“ 'You mean, then, that in this age of which you are speaking, the Earth was cooled off only about the poles, and that what we call North America was too hot for human habitation?’
“ 'Exactly. We lived about the pole. There were a few, our Wise Men, for instance, who calculated against the future, when the cold would encroach, and we would have to move to the southward; but the average man considered it not. There were some, super-wise, who predicted that the time would come in the eons of the future, when the whole world would freeze up entirely, and life be impossible,’
“I nodded at this.
“ ‘That is so,’ I said. ‘We have proof of that in the moon. There is no life upon the moon. And as the moon has gone so must go the Earth.'
“ 'Yes. That is where we got our proof of the future. But in our day the moon was inhabited.’
“ 'Inhabited? Then your civilization must have been greater than ours of today. How would you know? Had you means of communication with the moon?'
“ 'Yes. But that is a long story. We discovered its life and civilization through an accident of our wireless, which I do not care to relate now. I shall only say that there was not only life, but a great civilization upon the moon, and that the satellite was in the last stages of active planetary evolution; and had come to the point where life was possible only about the equator. Therefore, when you say that you are living here, in what you call California, I know that I have been gone a great length of time,.It would take millions of years for the Earth to cool off sufficiently to permit life this far south. My people of Sansar are dead, the Northern Pole is frozen, and I return to the Earth a stranger.'
“I could but listen. Was it possible that there had been life, even civilization, upon the moon? Could it be that this man, coming out of mystery, would unriddle the past? Who of us has ever gazed at the moon, without speculating over its history, without considering what it might have been when it was a whirring planet, alive and atmospheric? Surely, it was not impossible that there had been life, even civilization!
“I recalled, further, that, although all of the white races have come sweeping out of the highlands of upper Asia, there is not, for all that, one man of the original stock left there today; and there is no one, even among the greatest scholars, who can give a satisfactory answer to the riddle of the Aryans. Like bees, they have swarmed out of the original hive in the uplands of Asia. Iberians, Greeks, Latins, Celts, Goths, Hindoos, Persians, Scandinavians, Germans, Slave—each swarm sweeping and crowding its pre-
