A Norwegian sailor and his father sail through an opening at the pole into a world inside the earth, lit by a smoky central sun, where the people stand twelve feet high — and the survivor tells it as a deathbed deposition. Emerson was an Iowa lawyer and mining promoter who founded a town in Wyoming; he presented this 1908 hoax as a true manuscript, and hollow-earth believers have quoted it as evidence ever since. Fifty-one plates by painters including Aivazovsky and Bradford carry the polar seas, whaling grounds and strange lit skies that this voyage into the earth demands.
