The Arctic Home in the Vedas c6.16

c6.16

whiteness burns into ruddy rose-light, fringed with purple and gold. Day after day, as we measure days, this splendid panorama circles on, and, according as atmospheric conditions and clouds present more or less favourable conditions of reflection, kindles and fades, kindles and fades,—fades only to kindle next time yet more brightly as the still hidden sun comes nearer and nearer his point of emergence. At length, when for two long months such prophetic displays have been filling the whole heavens with these increscent and revolving splendours, the sun begins to emerge from his long retirement, and to display himself once more to human vision. After one or two circuits, during which his dazzling upper limb grows to a full-orbed disk, he clears all hill-tops of the distant horizon, and for six full months circles around and around the world's great axis in full view, suffering no night to 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."1