Читать книгу Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from Other Worlds - Jerome Clark - Страница 25

The origins of Rainbow City go back millions of years, to a long-forgotten time when the human race conquered and colonized worlds in the Milky Way Galaxy and dozens of other galaxies. Eventually, however, the humans encountered their nemesis: a race called the Snake People. The ensuing conflict dragged on inconclusively for a thousand years until at last events turned decisively in the Snakes’ direction. The ancient humans were virtually destroyed, chased through space by vengeful Snakes until finally our ancestors found a few backwater worlds in which to hide and lick wounds. Among these planets was Mars, which sheltered the humans for a long time. Then the planet began to lose its oxygen, and the Great Ruler dispatched an exploratory fleet to the neighboring world, the third from the sun.

SILENT CITY

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, press accounts highlighted observations of what they called the “Silent City.” The Silent City was a mysterious presence supposedly encountered, usually in the summer, typically between June 21 and July 10, in the sky over the Muir Glacier 150 miles (241 kilometers) north of Juneau, Alaska. Dubious-looking photographs of it or something similar (allegedly seen along the Alaska-Yukon border) were printed and sold as postcards. The latter are widely judged to be fakes, but the sightings comprise something of a historical and meteorological enigma.

In late 1890 the Juneau Times featured the testimony of a miner identified as George H. Kerson. (The article was reprinted in other newspapers all over North America.) “I think I am the first white man who ever gazed on the frozen city of the north,” he said. And he did not mean the mirage; he insisted that he had seen the original two years earlier, while in northern Alaska on his way to a prospecting trip to the Yukon Territory. In Kerson’s telling, at one point the party, traveling on the river, arrived at a fork. Kerson wanted to go one way, the rest the other. So he set off on his own after hiring two American Indian guides.

Weeks later, the three reached the foot of a mountain range where they set up camp for the winter. Soon the cold weather set in, sometimes with winds so bitter that the campers dared not leave their immediate location. One day when the temperature was relatively mild, Kerson suggested that they find something interesting to do, such as scale a nearby mountain. When one expressed interest, they embarked along the frozen river, following it for 20 miles (32 kilometers) until they reached their destination. Then:

We reached a plateau between the foothills and high range. Here the stream ended and we started to climb one of the big hills. After a lot of hard work we reached a point near the summit. A wonderful view was had from here, but the strangest thing was a city in one of the valleys….

At first I thought it was some fantastic arrangement of the ice and snow which had assumed the form of a city, but examination with a glass showed that such was not the case, it being too regular in appearance. It was a city, sure enough.

Determined to see more of it, I commenced to work downward. … After several hours of hard work I reached the outskirts of this mysterious city, and found that this place was laid out in streets, with blocks of strange looking buildings, what appeared to be mosques, towers, ports, etc., and every evidence of having been built by art.

The whole was of solid ice, or seemed to be, but blows from a hatchet on one of the walls disclosed the fact that beneath this barrier of ice was some sort of building material. It looked to be wood, but of stonelike hardness, and apparently petrified.

The silence around the place was something ghostly. Not the slightest sound broke the awful stillness of the place, which, added to the weird look of the empty streets, made it gruesome enough. I soon got tired of investigating the city, as the streets were blocked in many places with huge masses of ice, rendering passage almost impossible. [My companion], too, became uneasy, and we started on the return trip, reaching camp the next day, tired, but satisfied that we had been the first men to gaze on that silent city for centuries.

In an 1895 issue the New York Sun noted that “at least half a dozen white men profess to have seen the city, while the natives of the Alaska coast cherished the tradition of its existence.” One witness, John M. White, “solemnly declares that he saw it on June 21 some years ago.” According to the Sun:

He declares that he studied the mirage for nine hours through a powerful glass as it was spread above the glacier on the side of Mount Fairweather. He affirms that the city is walled; that its houses are battlemented and the chimneys surmounted by chimney pots; that within the walls there is a tall monument surrounded by the sculptured figure of an Indian in full headdress and feathers. His glass revealed to him some of the inhabitants, men in knee breeches and jackets. The only beast visible was a donkeylike creature, with a body as large as that of a horse.

In 1895 a dozen men supposedly saw a spectacular walled city on the side of Mount Fairweather in Alaska (iStock).

The mirage appeared at first about 11:30 AM as a mist, and out of this rose the towers and battlements of the city as did those of ancient Troy. By noon the city was as clearly outlined as New York is from the Jersey heights.

White theorized that the city whose image was being reflected into the air existed “at the north pole on the edge of the traditional open polar sea.” As evidence he pointed to a native Alaskan legend about a race of savage warriors who had passed through the region, on a rampage of murder and destruction. They became the ancestors, White speculated from no apparent evidence, of the present-day American Indians. The unknown race left behind others who lived, and continue to live, in a warm region near the North Pole. Since then these mysterious people have built a huge city.

Other, relatively more prosaic, but still problematic hypotheses tied the Silent City to Montreal or even Bristol, England (the latter an impossible 2,500 miles [about 4,000 kilometers] distant). In the summer of 1889, an investigator from Chicago, L. B. French, reportedly saw it near Mount Fairweather. “We could see plainly houses, well-defined streets, and trees,” French told the New York Times. “Here and there rose tall spires over huge buildings, which appeared to be ancient mosques and cathedrals. … It did not look like a modern city—more like an ancient European city.” He thought it could house as many as 100,000 residents.

As an 1897 expedition explored the wilderness near Mount St. Elias, its members spotted a vivid mirage above a glacier. One member, C.W. Thornton, wrote, “It required no effort of imagination to liken it to a city, but was so distinct that it required, instead, faith to believe that it was not in reality a city.” It was clearly visible for half an hour, then slowly faded away, leaving a rocky ridge in its place.

The Silent City is little heard of these days, except as an example of a miragegenerated legend. No earthly city plausibly fits witnesses’ descriptions, so efforts to explain the phenomenon now insist that the city’s reported features amounted to no more than optical illusions and imaginings, if not outright fiction.

Further Reading

X. “Cities in the Sky.” Whig-Standard Magazine, 12, 14 (January 19, 1991): 22.

On their return the visitors informed the ruler that they had found a pleasant, fertile place that would sustain human life. Some thousands sailed from Mars to Earth, settling in the area that is now Antarctica, then a warm and tropical land, to construct seven cities, each with its own color in the Martian fashion. Each was named after its color—Red City, Blue City, and the like. The greatest of the seven, Rainbow City, consisted in its entirety of plastic colored like the rainbow. The colony was governed from here, with the son and daughter of the Great Ruler, along with the daughter’s fiancé, himself the son of a leading political figure. The ancients were giants, seven to eight feet (2.4 meters) tall. They developed a kind of teleportation system to move cargo around the globe and as far as the moon. They also constructed an immense subway infrastructure, with trains shooting at 2,000 miles (3,218 kilometers) per hour through vast tunnels that spanned the earth.

A golden age followed, but it ended when the Snakes attacked the earth, flipping it on its side. That caused Antarctica to become the frozen wasteland we know today. The residents of the seven cities were scattered, left to find their way northward toward more temperate climes. Over time—the calamitous event occurred a million years ago—they lost their advanced knowledge and technology and even an awareness of their own history. All that remained were vague myths of a magical era when wise and benevolent gods ruled the earth.

Today, Rainbow City lies under 10,000 feet (3,048 meters) of ice, unknown and inaccessible to all but a handful of persons who are reincarnated ancients from the ruling family. The Ancient Three were, many incarnations ago, the son, daughter, and fiancé, “the Ancient Three, ‘Who were, Who are, Who will be, Always.” They live in a community of mystical masters beneath Tibet.

Or so claimed a Livingston, Montana, couple named William C. and Gladys Hefferlin, who surfaced in the September 1946 issue of Palmer’s Amazing Stories. The Hefferlins, however, failed to impress the magazine’s editor and readers, and they turned to the California-based occult organization Borderline Sciences Research Foundation. BSRF issued a series of writings under the rubric “Hefferlin Manuscript.”

The Hefferlins related that in 1927, while living in San Francisco, they met Emery, who shared their fascination with metaphysical questions. After moving to Indiana, they lost track of him for a time, then learned that he was in New York. After some initial correspondence they began communicating by telepathy, with Gladys a medium, handling ESP chores on the Hefferlins’ end. They learned that Emery was often absent from New York, off on unexplained errands. He eventually explained that he was doing the work of Tibetan masters, who introduced him to the Ancient Three. The trio recognized him as a reincarnated ancient engineer. At their direction he built models of a circle-wing aircraft. The Ancient Three wanted him to construct a fleet of 350 full-sized versions.

When those were completed, Emery and an expedition flew to Antarctica to search for the remains of Rainbow City, which they found in late November 1942. From Emery’s continuing telepathic communications, they were informed of the city’s long history. Over the next several years Emery roamed the earth uncovering remnants of the tunnel system. He also uncovered caches of nuclear weapons. Meantime, the circular aircraft continued their search for ancient remains. Persons who saw the planes called them “flying saucers” and thought they were from another planet.

Antarctica wasn’t always a frozen continent, according to one tale. It was located in a more fertile climate and settled by Martians until the Snake aliens attacked Earth and rotated the planet (iStock).

The Hefferlins wrote that the Ancient Three now—as of the late 1940s—were secretly in control of much of the world, with only the white race refusing to recognize or to be guided by them. “Thought machines” set in seven temples around the world beamed teachings to people in the Third World, urging them to cut their ties with the “European Empire Nations.” Soon the white nations would be forced to accept the role of the Ancient Three, who would usher in a utopian society based on the political model of the United States. Aggression, war, and racism would cease. The new order was not far away. The Hefferlins had been appointed North American spokespersons for the Three, but even they could not enter Rainbow City, or so they explained to individuals who wanted them to take them there.

Walter Kafton-Minkel, the leading chronicler of hollow-earth lore, argues that these yarns take their inspiration in good part from H.P. Lovecraft’s 1936 novella At the Mountains of Madness. He writes:

In the tale, a scientific expedition bores a hole into the Antarctic ice crust and discovers a tunnel filled with the well-preserved corpses of alien life forms. Nearer the South Pole, the expedition discovers a great deserted city hidden behind mountains higher than the Himalayas and finds carvings telling the story of a race of “Elder Things” which settled at the Pole nearly a thousand million years ago and created the earth’s life forms. When the “great cold” came, the Old Ones settled first in the oceans, and then traveled down to a sea in the interior of the earth.

In 1960 Michael Barton, writing as Michael X, published Rainbow City and the Inner Earth People, based on psychic communications from astral entities speaking on the “Telethot” channel. Barton fused Shaver Mystery (see p. 55) material and hollowearth theories with the sort of material the Hefferlins, long faded from the scene (“now believed to be living in Rainbow City,” according to fringe chronicler Jim Keith), had peddled. Rainbow City is a kind of base for the Ancients and the Guardians as they enter the earth’s interior through the South Pole. The Ancients and the Guardians — wise Venusians — are cleaning out “both the astral and physical levels of the inner Earth … in preparation for the coming Golden Age.”

Further Reading:

Kafton-Minkel, Walter. Subterranean Worlds: 100,000 Years of Dragons, Dwarfs, the Dead, Lost Races and UFOs from Inside the Earth. Port Townsend, WA: Loompanics Unlimited, 1989.

Standish, David. Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizations, and Marvelous Machines Below the Earth’s Surface. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2006.