Lost Worlds
In
1914, Professor Nikolai Trukanov, a Russian who was an exponent of the
Hollow Earth theory, confirmed his beliefs when he ventured deep inside
the bowels of Gaea. His expedition gained access
in the Sea of
Beaufort, north of Nansen Land and they soon saw the dull red, central
sun, which never sets. The professor named it Pluto. The creatures they
found are all extinct in the upper world, ichthyosaurs, mammoths, huge
cave bears and dinosaurs! But the residents of 'Plutonia' that
Trukanov and his team encountered were primates, living in the
semi-tropical jungles and swamps. Since then, other explorers of Plutonia
have described the inhabitants as less than half the size of average
humans, with it's ecology in miniature too.
The Rainbow City was
visited by a man named Emery in 1942, beneath the South Polar Region. His
expedition found living quarters, shops, hospitals and museums, but
everything was on a larger scale than usual, designed for subterrestrials
over eight feet tall. There was a central pyramidal temple which contained
a 'learning chair' and one could acquire knowledge of the 'Venusian'
language rapidly by this method and read from a colossal library full of
books, that also spoke their contents. Obviously intended for more evolved
beings than the 'Plutonians.'
When Maurice Champagne wrote of,
La Cite des
premiers hommes, in 1929, he told the story of a French geologist
and paleontologist, Cesaire Paroulet, who reached this subterrene world
through a tunnel in Australia, while fossil-hunting in the company of his
nephews. They found it to be mostly dark and barren, and harbouring
prehistoric monsters, but a small inhabited area on the banks of a large
sea, was brightly lit by electric power and had parks full of butterflies
and bees. The technology was highly developed and the people utilised
atomic energy to power a craft which could fly, as well as travel speedily
underwater.
A region in Paroulet's country was home to the
descendants of Jalesh, another 'Noah' who had the foresight to build an
ark to escape the flood; it came to rest on a mountain, beneath the
Earth's crust. The tribe of Jalesh dressed like biblical characters and
called themselves the 'First Men' and spoke an early form of Hebrew. Their
weapon was a ruby box, worn round the waist which emitted ultra-violet
rays, but as they were non-violent, it was used only for hunting the
prehistoric animals. Submarine tunnels connected this land with the
surface world, which the First Men believed was no longer
populated.
More recently, a Professor Percival Potter
(no relation
to Harry)
discovered an entrance to the inner-world in the 1960's, through the
crater of an extinct volcano in the Ahaggar massif of North Africa. He
described this land as being bathed permanently in an unnatural light,
with areas covered in dense jungle, comprised of foliage found in each of
the prehistoric periods, Cretaceous, Jurassic and Devonian, growing
together. There was a Great Sea, teeming with sea-serpents and a small
inland sea, which washed up onto rolling hills. Rising above that, the
mountainous Peaks of Peril were the home of dangerous pterodactyls,
saber-toothed tigers and woolly mammoths!
This world was known as
Zanthodon, and believed by some travellers to be an oasis of the lost
Atlantean Empire. The people were beautiful and un-selfconscious, tall,
blonde, blue-eyed Cro Magnons, but they coexisted with Neanderthal types
and another, little known race, who were highly civilized. The common
dialect spoken by all (except the grunting ape-men) was a proto-Aryan,
which gave rise to Sanskrit, the root of all Indo-European
languages. |