to my imagination that all thought of an
analytical criticism has been effectually dispelled.

Marco Polo will doubtless shift uneasily in his grave at the strange
story I am called upon to chronicle; a story as strange as a Munchausen
tale. It is also incongruous that I, a disbeliever, should be the one
to edit the story of Olaf Jansen, whose name is now for the first time
given to the world, yet who must hereafter rank as one of the notables
of earth.

I freely confess his statements admit of no rational analysis, but have
to do with the profound mystery concerning the frozen North that for
centuries has claimed the attention of scientists and laymen alike.

However much they are at variance with the cosmographical manuscripts of
the past, these plain statements may be relied upon as a record of the
things Olaf Jansen claims to have seen with his own eyes.

A hundred times I have asked myself whether it is possible that the
world's geography is incomplete, and that the startling narrative of
Olaf Jansen is predicated upon demonstrable facts. The reader may be
able to answer these queries to his own satisfaction, however far the
chronicler of this narrative may be from having reached a conviction.
Yet sometimes even I am at a loss to know whether I have been led away
from an abstract truth by the ignes fatui of a clever superstition, or
whether heretofore accepted facts are, after all, founded upon falsity.

It may be that the true home of Apollo was not at Delphi, but in that
older earth-center of which Plato speaks, where he says: "Apollo's
real home is among the Hyperboreans, in a land of perpetual life, where
mythology tells us two doves flying from the two opposite ends of the
world met in this fair region, the home of Apollo. Indeed, according
to Hecataeus, Leto, the mother of Apollo, was born on an island in the
Arctic Ocean far beyond the North Wind."

It is not my intention to attempt a discussion of the theogony of the
deities nor the cosmogony of the world. My simple duty is to enlighten
the world concerning a heretofore unknown portion of the universe, as it
was seen and described by the old Norseman, Olaf Jansen.

Interest in northern research is international. Eleven nations are
engaged in, or have contributed to, the perilous work of trying to solve
Earth's one remaining cosmological mystery.

There is a saying, ancient as the hills, that "truth is stranger than
fiction," and in a most startling