The White-Bearded Man from the Pole of Heaven

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 6 pages

Six pages carrying a Christmas story from Blavatsky Collected Writings volume XIII, "From the Polar Lands," with a frontispiece by Rob Gonsalves and closing editorial notes by Boris de Zirkoff on where the piece sits among her writings.

The setting is a Christmas gathering in an old hereditary castle in Finland, full of worm-eaten ancestral portraits, deserted turrets, Gothic windows and endless cellars — every commodity, the narrator says, for romantic horrors, which on this occasion serve for nothing. The story's hero is deliberately the opposite: a commonplace and prosaic man, Dr Erkler, professor of medicine, heavily built and ordinary-looking, who has travelled the world with a famous explorer and faced death from sunstroke in the tropics and cold at the poles, and who says he has experienced almost everything except what could be called supernatural — apart from one extraordinary event and its inexplicable results. Pressed to explain, he describes wintering in 1878 on the north-western coast of Spitzbergen, the ships frozen into the Gulf of Mussel, eight months cut off from the living world, a snow hurricane that destroyed their building materials and killed forty deer, lamps allowed only for scientific purposes so that they lived by moonlight and the Aurora Borealis. One such night a dark moving spot appeared across the snow: a party of Norwegian seal hunters, also caught by the ice, who said they had been guided there by an old man with snow-white locks. Their chief hunter explained that in forty-five years of sealing he had always known Johan exactly as he was then, that his own father had said the same, and that his grandfather too had known him in boyhood — never seeing him otherwise than white as the snow, which is why the hunters call him the white-haired all-knower. Asked how old he is, the old man answers that he does not know and never counted; asked how he knew where they were wintering, he answers only that God guided him, and that how he learned it he does not know, save that he knew.

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