Random Readings.

Waipa Post, Volume VIII, Issue 373, 8 December 1914, Page 3

Random Readings.

AN ARCTIC DAWN. The return of the sun after the six months’ night of the Polar regions is a moment not to be forgotten. Ejnar Mikkelsen, in his book, “Lost in- the Arctic,” describes the scene and the emotions it aroused : “The loneliness is so immense, everything seems dead or in a trance, waiting, as we, for the advent of the life-giving sun. At last the day arrives when it should appear, but we do not see it, for the weather is cloudy, stormy, and foggy. Not until the following day, February 10th, do we see its red disc once more. We stand outside the house, waiting. At the end of half an hour we begin to grow impatient.

“At last it comes; the glow to the southward deepens until it almost hurts the eyes; the mountain-tops are tinged with rose, slowly extending downwards towards us; then suddenly a red-gold ray is flung out over the ice, and we give a mighty shout of welcome—a cheer for the herald of summer, summer that is to bring us our deliverance. “And we are not the only beings that rejoice—far up above us sounds the astonished cry of a raven. It was flying eastward, but on seeing the sun it changes it course and steers right for it, with mighty strokes of its great heavy wings, and calling, glad as we to see the sun, a fire-worshipper, as also we have grown to be. We follow it with our eyes until it disappears in the eye of the sun. Happy raven! If we had but wings!”

INVENTIONS FORETOLD

Chance phrases in the literary works of other days describe with uncanny exactness inventions' of hr later times. For instance, we find in the “Prolusions” of Strada the Roman, which was established in the year 1617, what might bo held to embody a crude description of wireless tVegraphy. Strada represents two friends as carrying on a correspondence by means of a “certain loadstone which had such virtue in it that, if it touches two needles, when one of tlie needles begins to move; tiro other, although at ever so great a distance, moves at the same time and in the same manner.”

In 1674 Robert Hooks published a work wherein he observed that, as glasses improve the vision, so ways might be found to improve our other senses. “It is not impossible,” says he, “to hear a whisper a distance of a furlong, and perhaps the nature of the thing would not make it impossible although that furlong should be ten times multiplied.” This seems to be a fair forecast to the telephone. In “Gulliver’s Travels” Swift causes his hero to relate, in the voyage to Laputa. that the astronomers there “have likewise discovered the two lesser stars or r'Y'bbs which revolve about Mars.” Tin’s lias been held to constitute a satire on sham science. Nevertheless. P.oi'e s«u- .Asaph Hall a few years ago di.-covered the two liny satellites.

It was more than seventeen hundred years ago that Lucian gave an -icoount of the manner wherein the inhabitants of the moon drink “air squeezed or compressed, into a goblet” so that it formed a kind of dew. This clearly suggests liquid air. The same writer in “Vera Historia” humorously and at some length describes an aerial ship, the sails of which were inflated by a whirlwind, thus impelling it through space to the mcon.

INDIAN HANDICRAFT WORKERS.

To watch an Indian weaving a pile carpet, for example, is to behold a striking picture. To see him at his best, seven or' eight o’clock in the morning should be selected for a visit. Then the tropical sun is gleaming in all its golden glory, without being oppressively hot. The loom is set up in a long, narrow shed, straw-thatcied, without any walls, open to sunshine and the fitful breeze that stirs the swaying, plume-like leaves of the slender palm, and cocoanut trees that rear their tall, proud heads above it. Four or five or even more boys, sit on wooden boards on the mud floor in front of the loom, their feet resting in a shallow pit underneath it, dug especially to receive them. In mie corner squats a man, his back probably turned to the weavers, his eve dreamily gazing into space or quite shut, droning—“ Three magenta, two green, five blue, one orange,” and so on in a sleepy, sing song sounding, to one unfamiliar with his language, like the babbling of one talking in his sleep, or like muttered prayers. But he is not dreaming or performing his devotions. He is dictating to the boys at the loom the colours of thread that each respective worker is to twist about the particular strand on which he is working; the lads obeying his commands as mechanically as if they were automatons, none of them knowing aught of the scheme of the carpet, nor any one of them conscious of the progress that is being made in the pattern that is being worked out on the other side of the surface from that on which the weavers gaze. Moie often than not the director has no notes to refer to; yet each individual twist of the yarn is so indelibly photographed upon his memory that he never falteis for a moment nor calls* out the wrong colour. An idea of the mental feat involved in thus remembering an elaborate design may be gained from the fact that a carpet made in Warangul, in Hyderabad, Deccan, had 400. knots to the square inch, 3,500,000 in all, and the pattern was so intricate that a separate needle had to be used to tie each knot. By Saint Nihal Singh, in ..The Girls’ Realm.” for March.