Читать книгу Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from Other Worlds - Jerome Clark - Страница 15

In a rambling feature published in the Winnipeg Free Press in March 1941, Charles W. Montrose wrote that a “Black City of the Clouds” figures in the legends of American Indian tribes in northwestern Canada. Not only that, according to Montrose, but living persons reported that they had seen it themselves. The city sits atop a peak in the Mackenzie Mountains, along the Yukon Territory-Northwest Territories border, over valleys that are lush and tropical in spite of its location. These valleys, like the city, are unknown to conventional geography because they are hidden in vast unexplored territory “between the 55^th parallel and the Arctic circle.” Among Montrose’s supposed informants was a trapper who, though he had since “mysteriously disappeared,” had raised vegetables of an immense size over a matter of a few weeks.

The Black City of the Clouds gets its color from the volcanic rock—basalt—from which it is constructed. The individual buildings are “architectural marvels,” occupied by beautiful golden-haired, golden-skinned people who are advanced in science and spirit. They have ready access to a rich variety of precious and semi-precious metals. Witnesses—unnamed—have seen “strange, multicolored lights that at certain times of the year, or under particular conditions, blaze from these mountain tops with great brilliance and a fierce intensity—of airships of strange design which, minus roaring motors and blasting propellers, rose vertically into the air from the depth of the valley and disappear with incredible speed.”

If Montrose’s larger story is unbelievable, no other available source mentions legends or reports of a Black City of the Clouds in the area in question (perhaps his is an embellished or garbled version of the Silent City, see below)—the reference to strange flying objects is interesting. Precisely similar phenomena have been reported in abundance as UFOs since the early summer of 1947 but were almost entirely unknown to any except direct witnesses before that. So perhaps Montrose picked up on something with a degree of factual content.

An enthusiastic, uncritical consumer of occult literature, Montrose linked the Black City and its golden residents to Lemuria, though affording them more physical beauty than other accounts conceded (see above). The Black City was tied to another Lemurian outpost, Mount Shasta. “The same type of airship that legend has rearing silently out of the Shangri-La of the Mackenzies has often been reported as having been seen by settlers living in the vicinity of California’s sacred mountain,” he noted. “The same invisible force or wall of invisible resistance which is reported to guard and block the passes leading to the Black City has actually been experienced … [by] the curious who sought to view the sacred rites or festivals conducted by original Lemurians in the vicinity of Mount Shasta.” Even forest fires could not penetrate the invisible shield.

Around 1937 the mysterious gentle, bearded men who came down the mountain to purchase supplies (paid for with pure gold) in the nearby small town of Weed ceased appearing. Area residents also stopped seeing weird lights and other odd manifestations on the mountain, leading Montrose to surmise that “the Lemurians have gone north … to join their brethren and the ‘golden ones’ in the Black City of the Clouds.”