Page 255 - Lokmanya Tilak Samagra (khand 2)

42 SAMAGRA TILAK - 2 • THE ARCTIC HOME
fall upon his favoured home-land at the Pole. Even when at last
he sinks again from view he covers his retreat with a repetition
of the deepening and fading splendours which filled his long
dawning, as if in these pulses of more and more distant light he
were signalling back to the forsaken world the promises and
prophecies of an early return. "*
A phenomenon like this cannot fail to be permanently im-
pressed on the memory of a Polar observer, and it will be found
later on that the oldest traditions of the Aryan race have preserved
the recollection of a period, when its ancestors witnessed such
wonderful phenomenon,-a long and continuous dawn of several
days, with its lights laterally revolving on the horizon, in their
original home.
Such are the distinguishing characteristics of the North
Pole, that is, the point where the axis of the earth terminates in
the north. But as a Polar home means practically a home in the
regions round about the North Pole, and not merely the Polar
point, we must now see what modifications are necessary to be
made in the above characteristics owing to the observer being
stationed a little to the south of the North Pole. We have seen
that at the Pole the northern hemisphere is seen spinning round
the observer and all the stars move with it in horizontal planes
without rising or setting; while the other celestial hemisphere is
always iilvisible. But when the observer is shifted downwards,
his zenith will no longer correspond with the Pole Star, nor his
horizon with the celestial equator. For instance Jet Z, in the
annexed figure, be the zenith of the observer and P the celestial
North Pole. When the observer was stationed at the terrestrial
North Pole, his zenith coincided with P, and his horizon with the
celestial equator, with the result that all the stars in the dome
Q' PQ revolved round him in horizontal planes. But when the
zenith is shifted to Z, this state of things is at once
altered, as the heavens will revolve, as before, round the line
POP', and not round the zenith line ZOZ'. When the observer
was stationed at the North Pole these two lines coincided and
hence the circles of revolution described by the stars round the
celestial Pole were -also described round the zenith line. But when
the zenith Z is different from P, as in the figure, the celestial

• See Paradise Found, 10th Ed., p. 6g.