7. RESULTADOS
7.5 PARTE IN SILICO A POSTERIORI
7.5.2 Acoplamiento molecular sobre PPAR-
Long ago, said the elderly Paiute, a tribe called the Hav-musuv migrated to the Panamint Mountains. And in a sub-terranean cavern, they built a city. For they wished to dwell in seclusion, hidden from the warring tribes of the region.
The nearby Paiutes, however, were aware of their pres-ence. For the Hav-musuvs were both technologically and culturally advanced; and when they traveled, they did so in silver airships—flying disks that would emerge from the cavern and disappear into the clouds.*
The Paiutes feared their subterranean neighbors and
10.
Paiute Chief
* That issue of Fate had two articles on flying saucers. For editor Ray Palmer was zealously promoting the phenomenon. Initially, he proposed an extraterrestrial origin for UFOs. But he would later change his mind, and argue that they came from inside the earth.
The career of Ray Palmer (who has been called “the man who invented flying saucers”) will be examined in chapter 20.
avoided contact with them. But on one legendary occasion, the Paiute chief visited the Hav-musuvs.
The chief ’s young wife had died suddenly. Overwhelmed with grief, he had wandered off into the mountains. His intent was to perish there at the hands of the Hav-musuvs, and join his wife in the Spirit-land. For the Hav-musuvs were reputed to slay—with a kind of ray-gun—anyone who approached their cavern.
The Paiutes mourned their chief. But after many weeks, he returned to them. And as they gathered round, the chief described his experience in the mountains.
The Hav-musuvs had welcomed him, he said, and escorted him into their underground city. There they had taught him their language, their legends, and their wisdom. Taken with the beauty of the city, and impressed by the advanced ways of its inhabitants, he had wished to remain with the Hav-musuvs. But they had insisted that he return to his people, and pass on the wisdom he had acquired.
So that is what he did.
•
When the old man had concluded his tale, Oge-Make
asked if he believed it to be true. The Paiute took a few puffs of tobacco and was silent for a moment. Then he acknowl-edged that the chief may have imagined the encounter. His grief, coupled with the isolation of the mountains, could have affected his mind.
But then the old man gestured at the mountains.
“Look behind you at that wall of the Panamints. How many giant caverns could open there, being hidden by the lights and shadows of the rocks? How many could open outward or inward and never be seen? How many ships could swoop down like an eagle, on summer nights? How many Hav-musuvs could live in their eternal peace away from the noise of white-man’s guns in their unscaleable stronghold?”
And staring into the fire, he said: “This has always been a land of mystery. Nothing can change that.”
He passed the pipe to Oge-Make, who gazed out at the mountains and wondered what lay hidden therein.*
* Oge-Make was actually L. Taylor Hansen (1897–1976), a magazine writer and ethnologist. And “L. Taylor Hansen,” her usual by-line, was itself a kind of pseudonym. Her full name was Lucile Taylor Hansen; and she wrote a monthly column for Amazing Stories that explored Indian legend and lore. In the 1940s ethnology was still largely a male enterprise; and Hansen apparently concealed her gender that it might not diminish her credibility.
But why present herself in this case as a Navaho? Conceivably, Hansen was an honorary member of the tribe, which she had vis-ited and written about. (She had been inducted into at least one other tribe, the Ojibway.) More likely, Ray Palmer, the editor of Fate, sought to enhance the authenticity of the article by having it appear to have been written by an Indian.
Oge-Make was not Hansen’s first incarnation as an Indian. In the December 1946 issue of Amazing Stories (also edited by Pal-mer) was an article titled “America’s Mysterious Race of Indian Giants.” The writing style, learned and literate, was recognizable as that of columnist L.Taylor Hansen. Yet the article was attrib-uted to “Chief Sequoyah,” supposedly a hunter and fisherman.
Chief Sequoyah (that is to say, Hansen) is worth quoting at length,
for his evocative prose, and for the lore about giants:
“The very first stories I heard as a boy were those of a mysteri-ous race of Indian Giants which the Indians of the Pacific Coast called the Se-at-kos. Whether sitting before a friendly campfire or snugly wrapped in furs on a long canoe voyage up and down the Puget Sound, the story teller would always eventually turn to the colorful Giants who roamed up and down the Olympic peninsula as well as the Rocky Mountain range; who were such swift runners they ran their game down and killed it with their hands; whose strange sex-life moved them to kidnap Indian women into wifely bondage; who understood and could talk flu-ently the different parent tongues of the Pacific Coast Indians;
who knew the art of mass hypnotism beyond the knowledge of any modern hypnotist; whose peculiar Nietzschean philosophy often made them ruthless; who were past masters in the art of ventriloquism; who were psychic and had strange mystical pow-ers and yet had such an original sense of humor that they appeared at times like boisterous irresponsible children, playing practical jokes upon people and laughing their way through life. . . .
“Occasionally, the Puget Sound Indians heard strange, soul stirring songs just before winter set in, as the Giants mobilized in the Olympic Range and started their long march to the south. I have gathered from Indian mystics who heard their songs, that it sounded like the rhythmic rumblings of muffled thunder sym-bolically attuned to sidereal harmonics, to the cosmic chant of the stars, to the music of spheres, to the crashing of systems in the four great cycles of Man, to the querulous chirp of the hungry people in the dead ashes of time, to the cool tumult of elemental conflicts as cyclonic winds went questing in the darkened void for atoms and Man, to the flaming up of America in the primeval darkness of the fire age, to the onset of tidal waves crashing over the hum of gnats, the trumpeting of mastodons, the barking of dogs, the coughing of lions, the melody of the thrush, the bull-roar of Giants and the wailing voice of man. . . .
“The Puget Sound Indians are not the only tribe that have seen and talked with the mysterious race of Indian Giants. The Okanagans, the Iroquois, the Coeur D’Alenes, the Kalispels, the Pend Oreilles, the Nez Perce, and the Cherokees tell of them in song and legend.”
As a chronicler of Indian lore, Hansen was both erudite
and eloquent. Yet her monthly columns—never collected into a book—are slowly disappearing. For the pages of old issues of Amazing (which was printed on pulp paper) are turning brittle and crumbling. Like the culture she sought to commemorate, these writings by L. Taylor Hansen are vanishing.
For more on Hansen, see Partners in Wonder: Women and the Birth of Science Fiction by Eric Leif Davin.
O
, ,
-man was abducted by fairies. They took him to their underground realm and held him captive.His attempts to escape failed; and the clergyman became a resident of Fairyland.
He is apparently still there.
His name was Robert Kirk. He grew up in Aberfoyle (known today as “the gateway to the Highlands”), where his father was the local minister. After studying at Edinburgh University, Kirk was himself ordained and assigned to the town of Balquidden. For twenty years he served as minister there. He then succeeded his late father at Aberfoyle—where he remained until that fateful evening.
In both places Kirk attended diligently to the needs of his parishioners. Yet he also had time for scholarship. He translated the Psalms into Gaelic. And he supervised the publication of a Gaelic Bible—that the Holy Scriptures might be read in the Highlands. But an endeavor of a dif-ferent sort would come to preoccupy him.
For the Reverend Kirk had begun a study of local folk-lore—specifically, of fairy lore. Notebook in hand, he would visit his parishioners and record what they had to say (in Gaelic) about “the little people.” His notebooks filled, with traditions about the fairies—and with eyewitness accounts.
For some of his informants, endowed with second sight, spoke of personal encounters.*