Published 1908, Emerson's book gives Jansen's story in first person: a small fishing boat sails over the polar lip into an inner world lit by a dim central sun, the smoky god. The inhabitants are giants, twelve feet tall, long-lived, Sanskrit-speaking, gold as decoration, monorails and air-current telephones, and their capital is the original Garden of Eden. Jansen exits through Antarctica and, per genre law, loses everything that could confirm the tale.
Emerson loads the account with real polar detail, the dipping compass needle, fresh water in the ice, the unmoving Pole Star, and cites contemporary explorers, an early masterclass in laundering fantasy through footnotes. Later hollow earth writers adopted his inner world wholesale; some identified Jansen's civilization with Agartha, a name Emerson never used. The book became canon for believers who treated its devices as documents.
The claim: placing the Garden of Eden inside the Earth solves the exile problem, paradise was never destroyed, only relocated, and humanity lives on the wrong side of the boundary, which recasts all history as the outside of somewhere. Verdict: the book says it plainly, and it is the sharpest theological move in the genre: the fall becomes an address change. Whether that comforts or indicts depends on whether you think the gate is locked.
Why do the true accounts always lose the proof on the return voyage?