Page:Amazing Stories Volume 15 Number 12.djvu/129

Rh island's doom. In that light, many other facts take on new significance. Atli, son of Wotan by a snake mother, has a serpent's den wherein he throws his enemies. His sister gives away "sun necklace." The most ancient Norse meaning of "Odin" is "water" or "rain." The pharoahspharaohs [sic] of Egypt wear a snake head in their crown, apparently coming from the forehead. The Aztecs tell us that "atl" means water to them. The strands of interlinking evidence are strangely suggestive, and far too numerous to list here.

However, if we deny the explanation of a lost homeland in the Atlantic, and argue that the pyramid building, sun-worshipping Snake Totem did not flee to the four corners of that ocean in their long, slender, square-sailed ships; and insist that the discovery of their giant stone walls and terraced hillsides in such widely separated parts of the world as Holland, Greece, Central America, England and Peru is just an accident; how are we going to explain the fact that in languages which time and invasion have so altered that they no longer have any words in common, the name of Votan, Wotan or Vulcan is always connected with that descriptive phrase—"The Clever Builder"?

T IS ironic that we have become so enlightened as to be able to measure the invisible, farflung reaches of trackless space, and still remain so earth-bound both physically and menially as to be unable to really understand what the distances mean. For the human mind has no means of comparison by which to judge or evaluate the bewildering, seemingly fabulous distances involved in astronomical measurements.

Take for instance the statement recently made by Harvard astronomers that their tests show the lateral bounds of the universe to exceed forty thousand parsecs.

But what, you may ask, is a parsec?

A science fiction fan or an astronomer would answer that a parsec is a name derived from jamming together the terra, "parallax second," and means that the distance which the parallax (or apparent shift of position of a star as viewed from opposite sides of the earth's orbit) is one second of arc.

In figures this is something less than two million million miles; approximately 206,263 times the distance of the earth from the sun. And 400,000 times that gives you the latest approximation of the size of our universe.

A more familiar method of measurement is by light years. As light travels over 180,000 miles a second it covers quite a bit of ground in a year. About five million million miles. Yet the light from the closest star is four and a half years in transit, and the light from the last discovered star cluster, from which the observation of the size of the universe was made, was from 50,000 to 100,000 years in arriving.

So that makes the size of universe about two quintillions of miles laterally. Of course that doesn't allow for shrinking. A few inches might have been lost that way somewhere along the line.

N THE construction of the six-million-ton Boulder Dam the engineers found it necessary to build more than five hundred miles of tubing into the structure, through which ice water circulates from a plant capable of turning out a thousand tons of ice a day. It was necessary to do this to hasten the cooling of the thousands of tons of concrete poured into the dam. If left alone it would have taken more than a hundred years for the dam to cool!