THE DEER FELS
I must hasten my story; so much remains to be told, more wondrous,
strange and unnatural, though that last word is not to be interpreted in
any of its senses as abhorrent. Far from it.
We hurried away from the scene of the peculiar combat and the
fratricidal feast. I do not think we feared these hideous saurians. We
looked for them, and the Professor exulted in their evident marks of an
evolutionary history (philogeny, he called it) quite isolated or diverse
from those established by Barnum Brown, Williston, Lowe and others for
the _sauropsida_ of the—Mr. Link I was actually going to say EARTH, in a
foreign sense, for somehow in this Krocker Land we felt detached from
all we had ever known or ever been. Had we been transferred to Mars or
the Moon or any other inconceivably contrasted sphere, we could not have
felt more inimitably separated from what we had called the Earth.
No more of the Crocodilo-Pythons, so Goritz called them, were seen. We
believed that their habitats were in the half submerged broad flatlands
that rose in archipelagos out in vast expanses of this inland sea.
Perhaps we traversed a distance of one hundred miles before the mingled
expression of sage desert and semi-tropical lake began to change. The
opposite boundary of the lake (Goritz as our geographer has named it the
_Saurian Sea_) became visible. We were approaching a constriction or
closing of its banks, and in a few days we perceived that it emptied
into a wild, deeply sunken ravine or canon, an enormous, terrifying
gorge of sandstones and limestones, where we could just dimly discern
the foaming cataracts, the eye-like preparatory pools, and then the
sweltering froth of raging rapids.
The water of the Saurian Sea enters this canon (the Canon of Promise
Goritz called it, for a reason yet a long way ahead in my narrative)
over an incline, and a series of waterfalls, which were invisible to us.
It was hopeless to follow the canon, nor could we continue northward for
we were powerless to cross the river. There remained the alternative of
turning to the left, penetrating the sage plain and attaining the slopes
of a hill country eastward, at whose feet doubtless the desert
terminated. It promised to be an easy day’s journey and it was. The
quail had supplied us with food. They now replaced the ducks. Indeed the
Saurian Sea became almost devoid of aquatic bird life as we advanced, an
eloquent testimony we thought to the fear of the omnivorous brutes who
lived there.
We crossed the desert and were delighted to observe its gradual
surrender to the encroaching features of a pleasanter land, a hill
country sloping away into painted domes; not a land of heavy rainfall
nor deeply forested. Its undulating skyline presented rounded and
densely shrubby ground which to our eyes seemed luminous with a pink
haze. The flanks of these hills were clothed in a coarse grass unevenly
distributed, and even absent from bare spaces of the limestone rock,
where a gray half succulent moss flourished. We noted too with some
astonishment that these aspects of the hills facing us seemed in shadow,
contrasting effectively with the singular pinkish aureole along their
high outlines.
Goritz discovered with our glass the presence of moving or browsing
groups of animals and a moment later exclaimed:
“They’re deer, small deer. No worry now about the commissariat.”
“You see,” murmured the Professor, “the sedimentary rocks here prove
that at some time this boreal basin has been invaded by the sea, a
former deeper cavity has been filled up by these strata of limestone,
slate, sandstone and marl. The molluscan remains, such as I have picked
up, whether in the Saurian Sea area, in the Canon of Promise, or on
these moors, are generically similar to those of the cretaceous,
tertiary, and paleozoic rocks of Europe or America. About that there can
be no doubt,” and he approvingly exhibited the small collection he
retained from his examination. “The outermost rocks of the Krocker Land
Rim are the earliest crystallines and eruptives. Their solidification
belongs to the very first primary conditions, and I think there can be
no doubt that we can say that this stupendous cavity, continental in
extent, either represents that physical polar pitting I alluded to when
we discussed this expedition in Norway, made when the Earth was assuming
its spheroidal shape and was a mass of swiftly revolving mobile magma,
or—” the Professor’s succeeding statement impressed him so solemnly,
that his administrative and reportorial manner became almost gloomy in
its earnestness. We watched him with dilated eyes—“or—that it represents
the wound, cicatrix, and HOLE from which was ejected the earth’s
satellite—the MOON.”
Comment was in order, but we had become rather plastic under the
Professor’s instructions, or, shall I say, gelatinized, and incapable of
a natural remonstrance against his dictations. But Goritz demurred.
Hopkins and I listened with admiration.
“Professor, the moon came out of the side of the earth, centrifugally
separated at the equator by fastest motion, surely not out of the pole.
Darwin has suggested, you know, that the Pacific Ocean—”
“True, Antoine. True, true. I know all of George Darwin’s speculations.
True, but suppose the axis of the earth’s rotation has changed; suppose
this very area here at 85° north latitude had formerly been equatorial
in position. That is a view of commendable authority. It has been urged
to explain the Ice Age, though I admit, Goritz, it has not, today, the
most respectable authorization.
“_Mais, passons._” This theoretical retreat and deflection of the
Professor before Goritz’s criticism sensibly flattered my friend. “You
see gentlemen, that these startling surfaces before us seem, as you have
noticed, to be in shadow. I think that throws some light on the
character of the singular continuous illumination of this region. Up to
this point we have generally been descending, since we left the vapor
shroud of the Perpetual Nimbus; we have been climbing down the walls of
a bowl whose central sun is of sufficient intensity to illuminate it
throughout its extent, but, having an inconsiderable volume or size as
compared with the size of the bowl itself, and also—mark me—a fixed
position, can only throw shadows when intervening objects occur, as a
lamp in the middle of a room illuminates the whole room, but throws
shadows toward the walls of the room, where there are obstructions. But
the higher the position of the lamp in the room, with reference to the
floor, the shorter the shadows. Here is an exact parallel, and I take it
that as the shadow of these hills, which may be three thousand feet
high, hardly extends into the plain, the fixed, subsidiary SUN we are
approaching may be towards the limits of our atmosphere, or say
twenty-five miles over the mean level of the earth.”
We grasped this quickly enough, and the image remained, as you will see
in the sequel, substantially correct, though greatly corrected as to
altitude.
The deer were easily trapped; they hardly noticed our approach, and,
though startled by the discharge of our guns, would only scamper off for
a short distance, herd in compact bunches, and watch us. They were small
animals, perhaps half the size of the Virginia deer, but their flesh was
delicious, and our first meal, graced with the coldest spring water and
by a small toothsome red berry like a strawberry, imparted to us the
liveliest spirits. We felt eager and excited, an almost irritable
curiosity had developed within us; forgetful of all we had left,
oblivious, through an inscrutable exaltation of wonder, of the things,
objects and endearments of home, we hungered for adventure. It was not
many hours later that a new sensation eclipsed everything we had so far
experienced, and threw us into an excitement that stirred the depths of
our beings.
[Illustration:
THE DEER FELS
]
Less than a day was consumed in making the ascent of the hills, which
resembled steeply inclined moors, and on their summits we entered on a
sunny (?) expanse, captivating in its loveliness of color, and
ingratiatingly varied in topography. The tantalizing pinkish haze was
explained. It was an endless billowy ocean of pale heather, with clumps
of yellowness like gorse. As we looked over the entrancing picture in a
golden light, in a freshening and tonic atmosphere, with a reverberant
sense of being travelers in fairy land, a poem taught me long ago by an
English friend came almost unbidden to my lips:
“‘What, you are stepping westward? Yea
’Twould be a wildish destiny
If we who thus together roam,
In a strange land and far from home,
Were in this place the guests of chance:
Yet who would stop, or fear to advance,
Though home or shelter he had none
With such a sky to lead him on?’”
_And westward we too went on._
Marshes, wet concealed bottoms, lakes and boggy tracts diversified these
uplands; and down gulches in the bold profiled bays streams poured in
cascades, all rushing westward. Coming over a lower neck between the
domes we came in view of a dark blue lake of water far down in a narrow
amphitheater; just above it on a higher shelf was a second smaller lake.
What appeared to be white gulls were sailing in circles over them. The
picture was a lovely one. We clambered up its eastern wall, and, in the
midst of low balsams that here interrupted the heather, and so thickly
crowded together that you could walk on top of them, we looked straight
into the pocket. We lay down on the short balsam trees, in a soft
perfumed bed of green needles, and gazed and gazed. A strong wind blew.
Far, far eastward rose that portentous bulwark of clouds and misty
confusion which the Professor had called the “_Perpetual Nimbus_,” and
which was the cosmic screen of this wonderland. Hopkins was on his back,
and it was he whose cry shot a new thrill of—How shall I name
it?—laughing consternation through us.
“My God,” he cried in a sort of stifled shout, “there’s a gang of the
fellows we’re looking for, straight above us, in a cluster, like so many
soap bubbles.”
Again his summons brought us to a concentrated attention, and sure
enough, dimly separable from the air in which it floated, was a minute
cloud of small balloons, and dependent from each group of three the
outline of a small human figure—and all gently drifting in an upper
current of air, certainly less strong than the brisk gale about us.
“Get under the trees,” whispered Goritz, “they’re coming down.”
We were quickly concealed, burrowing our way with the alertness of moles
below the thatched branches, and each eagerly hunting for a spying place
whence we might watch this strange argosy. Yes! They were rapidly
approaching; the dangling legs, the fluttering blue and yellow tunics,
_confined by golden belts_ (!!!) were visible, curious unproportionate
heads, hanging forward as if from heaviness, legs in loose trousers, and
sandaled feet. Then the wind blowing about us touched them and, like a
gyrating swarm of mosquitoes dispersed by a breeze, they were flung
away, dancing, bobbing, hither and thither, and from them issued squealy
shouts and squeaky laughter. They came together again, directed by means
undiscoverable to us, though the Professor detected some waving objects
in their hands, and then the crowd, perhaps twenty, as if suddenly
apprized of their desired position, dropped like so many unsupported
bodies straight into the deep pocket of the little lake we had just been
admiring.
The wind did not drift them, the balloons seemed collapsible, but, to
our amazement, they expanded again, checking the fall. In fact, unless
our eyes deceived us, and we all agreed as to the main point, the
balloons inflated and shrank, somehow at the will of these extraordinary
beings, producing an effect not dissimilar to the opening and shutting
of a bird’s wing, the alternations of which carry it up and down.
As they slid past us, perhaps not more than a good stone’s throw from
our place of concealment we were permitted to catch a glimpse of them,
and it was hard to restrain the impulse of leaping to our feet to obtain
a longer inspection. Another moment and they disappeared below the brow
of the hill. We emerged cautiously. Goritz spoke first, though he, like
the rest of us, seemed a little stunned by the weirdness, the wizardry
of it all.
“If they’ve gone down, they must come up. But what are they?”
“Well,” answered Hopkins, “search me! This is nearer to fairy land than
I ever thought a human could get, and—I don’t believe I like it. Rather
goblin-like I thought, though not Gilbert’s notion either;
‘The goblin-imp, a lithe young ape,
A fine low-comedy bogy?’”
“Certainly the genus _homo_,” said the Professor reflectively, and
looking more startled than pleased. “They offer a field of unusual
research. They might be,” he lifted his eyes upward, almost as if
imploring light on the subject, “they might be preadamites. They were
not simian, not in the least. Gentlemen,” sudden thought lit up his face
with the customary smile, while his lips retreated, displaying his
imperfect teeth, his eyes grew larger or they issued farther from their
orbits, and his red hair, now inordinately long, draped his face in a
rufous tapestry that made him look still more strangely excited.
“Gentlemen, I have it (“Thank God,” _sotto voce_ from Hopkins), I have
it. We have here an isolated group of mentalities that have been
subjected to a restrictive and intensive process of development. Of
course they had initially the prerogatives of reason. They have attained
a peculiar culture, it may be a very one-sided one, but at least their
methods of aeronautics leave little to be desired, and they understand
and practice metal working, textile arts; they have a language. Personal
beauty they do not boast (“That’s putting it mild; they looked like
blueprints,” again _sotto voce_ from Hopkins) and their physiques seem
dwarfed and impoverished. How did they strike you, Erickson? What did
you see? Your linguistic knowledge may help us, and—I think you had our
glass.”
Parenthetically I may tell you, Mr. Link, that I have been a poor sort
of a journalist, and a teacher of languages, and a traveler, a mixture
of vocations not conducive, you will say, to signal distinction in any
line.
“This is what I saw,” I began, with an assertiveness that brought me
wrapt attention. It was true that I had seen a good deal; my monopoly of
our field glass had been complete. I spoke with rather crisp acerbity
because I had already taken a strong prejudice against these jaundiced
objects, and neither as associates nor as subjects of study was I
willing to seek their acquaintance.
“They are diaphanous yellow anthropological _insects_, with big beetle
heads dropping forward, scrappy hair or none at all, are anemic, short
bodied, long legged, short armed, and absurdly pervaded by a
saffron-blueness—I can describe it in no other words. You saw their
dress; the tunic clothing them like a nightshirt or a butcher’s blouse,
is cinctured by a _gold belt_! They are scarcely more than three feet
high.”
“Alfred,” asked Goritz, “are you sure about the gold belt? I thought I
saw yellow links around their bodies too.”
“Oh, yes,” I replied indifferently, “the gold belts were plain enough,
but Antoine, I tell you you had better leave these microbes alone.”
The intensity of my repugnance amused them. I think it was shared by
Hopkins. He said, “They’ve rather got my goat, but the risk of seeing
the thing out is worth taking. They certainly have the goods and, as for
scrapping— Well, say, we could blow ’em away.”
“Could you,” I indignantly flared up. “Not so fast, Spruce. Did you see
those tubes in their white fingers?”
“Yes, I saw them?” Hopkins rejoined interrogatively. “Looked like lead
pipe.”
“Well, I’m sure there’s devilment enough in them. They raised them this
way and that, and guided their flight by them.”
“What’s the harm?” Hopkins continued. “Perhaps they’ve a thing or two
worth patenting in ballooning; very likely. They’re funny enough,
but—Pshaw!—we can run ’em in any time with these guns.”
“How many balloons were attached to each person?” asked the Professor.
“Three,” we all said together.
“I thought so,” he continued, “one from each armpit, and one from the
belt. They spoke distinguishable words. Could you make anything out of
them Erickson?”
“Why,” I muttered laconically, quite as a matter of course, “It sounded
like corrupted or archaic Hebrew.”
“By the Great Horn Spoon,” shouted Hopkins, “_pawnbrokers_. Levitation
would be worth while to some I’ve known.”
After this explosion we were silent for a few moments. Our thoughts were
running wild over the inscrutable occurrence which portended strange
developments ahead of us. Hopkins was elated at the prospect of
adventure, Goritz, I really believe, was consumed with a passionate
curiosity to see more of the _gold_, the Professor was burning up with
scientific wonder and excitement, and I alone was overcome by a
repulsion which I could not explain, and which, on the face of it, was
unreasonable.
Communing thus with our thoughts and quite indescribably stirred,
Hopkins cried out, “Beat it. Here they are again,” and there, rising
gently from the depth below our elevation came the little flotilla of
bobbing manikins, announced even before they were seen, by a shrill
chatter, and squealy laughter, which consorted naturally with their
queer, aged, wrinkled faces, the fluttering tunics entangling their
pipe-stem legs, and the odd diaphaneity of their bodies.
I am not a naturalist, Mr. Link, and there are some things in nature I
cannot reconcile myself to: snakes, caterpillars and BUGS.
We were under our coverts in a jiffy; the celerity of our movement was
something like the noiseless tail-up concealment in the ground of
prairie dogs. And our eyes became as active as our legs; not an optic
nerve but was strained to the full extent of its reportorial powers. One
feature of their machinery, I had not noticed before. Flexible tubes
tied the balloons to their bodies, and these again were connected under
the sleeves of their tunics with the lengths of pipe they carried in
their hands. The swelling and deflation of these balloons seemed most
delicately under their control, and at times they would, like a swarm of
flies, rise and fall, in a perfect mimicry of a fly’s uneven and dancing
undulations. It was most curious and utterly inexplicable, and then too
when they moved to and fro or advanced, the tubes were held behind them,
and some propulsion ensued which carried them on their flight, though it
was quite evident that any volition on their part was quite overcome by
the prevalent currents of air. The latter they avoided by rising above
or sinking below it, and at the moment, as we gazed, they surrendered
themselves to the wind blowing about us at our elevation, and were
tossed along it, in shrill enjoyment, and vanished westward. They were
absorbed in misty veils that were drawn between us.
Once more we came out of our hiding with a ludicrous astonishment
painted on our faces. Hopkins looked the least bit scared. Almost
instantly he expressed his feelings.
“They certainly have me guessing. Old guys, all of ’em. Perhaps they’re
terribly old, and perhaps that’s the way up here—everything very old
shrinks, wrinkles and wears glasses.”
“Glasses,” called out Goritz. “Yes! I saw that, and do you know for more
than a week my eyes have ached. It’s something to do with this strange
light.”
Then came the confession from all of us, that we had each been bothered
with our eyes. Shooting pains, blurry outlines, whizzing sensations in
our heads, and a sense of dryness of the eyelids, as though they had
been overheated by a mild exzema of the skin. It was surprising, the
moment we attended to the matter, how urgent our complaints became, and
how communicative we were about it.
“I feel sure,” said Goritz, “that we are bewitched by this light. These
odd creatures have become crinkled and gnarled by it. They’re a race of
dwarfs, prematurely aged and megalocephalic.”
This last daring incursion into the Professor’s domain of reserved
scientific language rather startled us. “’Peaching on the Professor’s
preserves,” whispered Hopkins. But the Professor did not resent it. It
was some minutes later, after an expectant silence, that he very
demurely suggested that we all put on our snow goggles. And we did. It
seemed to help.
Of course, considerably flustered over the unexpected appearance in this
utterly unexpected manner of the aboriginals of this enigmatical region,
we undertook to examine the narrow and deep little valley into which our
visitors had descended. It was a rough scramble, as the sides of the pit
proved not only very steep but unreasonably rocky, sharp and
precipitous. When we finally reached the bottom, and the Professor
exultantly told us the rock was a dolomite, that it contained coral
remains and brachiopodous shells that were Devonian, we found ourselves
in a peculiar place.
It was a kind of gigantic well, on the floor of which and to one side
were situated the two little lakes we had seen from above. Considerable
water flowed into them from crevices in the walls, and the place was
overshadowed at one point by a projecting ledge that formed a portico to
a cavernous recess. Leaden colored fish rose and sank in the water of
the lakes, and we thought the gulls, who must have penetrated to this
remote asylum from Beaufort Sea, had been attracted by them. It proved
to be a dreary, bare hole and instilled in us a feeling half despairing
and melancholy.
“This isn’t the gayest place in the world,” said Hopkins. “Our insect
friends certainly didn’t come here for recreation. Looks like a
smuggler’s retreat, or a den of crime. Perhaps we may find here some
enchanted troubadour, a chained damsel, a lurking dragon, or the
fountain of eternal youth, which those cadaverous anchorites we saw
upstairs visit occasionally to keep the life in their shivering shells.
Or—”
“What’s this?” exclaimed Goritz, his muffled voice proceeding from the
recess into which he had penetrated, entering its prolongation, which
became a sort of cave.
We rushed forward, all keyed now to an excited limit of curiosity, so
that, as Hopkins expressed it afterwards, “an invitation from the angel
Gabriel to step into Paradise, wouldn’t have phased us much, in fact
would have been an ordinary incident in our investigations.”
“What is it, Antoine?” I cried as I reached him and found him gazing in
bewilderment at a shining nodule of something ahead of him, in the
deeper gloom within. I asked no more questions, but stood still with
him, wondering. The others came up and we all gazed awhile, transfixed
by a common astonishment.
The glowing mass, perhaps about the size of a baby’s closed hand, shed a
mellow radiance about the cave; its light draped our own figures, and it
was reflected from innumerable bright points which spangled here and
there on the floor and walls like minute lamps.
“Diamonds,” murmured Goritz, awestruck.
The place was heated, and the light made us shade our eyes. The
Professor had moved alertly forward in an impulse of almost desperate
joy. He stood in wrapt contemplation of the luminiferous chunk, then he
struck one of the scintillating projections, a piece detached itself,
and showered some splinters through the air to the ground. The splinters
shimmered like microscopic mirrors.
“_Sphalerite_,” he cried. “Zinc sulphide! This is literally a chamber of
Sphalerite, a huge pocket enclosed in the limestone. It has been worked
somewhat; its extension in the rock is probably very deep; and,
gentlemen,” this apostrophe accompanied by upraised hands, palms
supplicatingly held towards us, always denoted some especially
disturbing or exhilarating announcement, “this light proceeds from some
natural _phosphori_. It may be,” he paused to allow our minds to adjust
themselves to a new attitude of marveling, “it may be RADIUM. We are in
a world of transmutations, the home of the Stone of the Philosopher. In
the world we have left—” the language was positive, convincing, for now
the feeling of translation from all the familiarities of the world of
Europe and America grew persistently, even though plants and animals
expressed a similar life—“in that world, the combined product of all its
mines, of all its laboratories, scarcely exceeds Two Grammes. Here is
perhaps four ounces, or the Quarter of a Pound, and—”
It was then that a black clot, shaping itself in irregular fingers with
blue and yellow fringes revolving raggedly around it closed my eyes. But
before vision departed, I saw the Professor clutch his breast, stagger
forward, and I heard him cry, “Out, out!” and then I felt my knees stung
by the pointed stones and, blindly groping, I crawled away.
It was later, I do not know how long, that I recovered my sight and
around me, languid and prostrate; though reviving as I was, were my
comrades.
“Transmutation?” said Hopkins, feebly smiling. “It was pretty nearly a
transference _over the river_, and no return trip-slip either.”
“Heaven! How my head aches,” groaned Goritz.
“Gentlemen,” the Professor gurgled, flat on his back and sicker than any
of us, but with his scientific apparatus under control and working
smoothly, “we are on the eve of great discoveries. The papers which I
can prepare for the Royal Academy of Sciences will throw a flood of
light on a subject hitherto only darkly approached. I am confident that
we were in the presence of a monstrous—monstrous comparatively, you
observe—mass of radium. Further, I feel sure that the Stationary Sun
that maintains a perpetual day in this remarkable land has something to
do with radium emanations from the Interior of the Earth!”
The poor gentleman stopped abruptly, some peculiar evidences of his own
interior activity just then making him roll over and refrain from
speech, because he was _otherwise engaged_.
“Do you suppose,” asked Hopkins, “that those aeronautical hairpins left
that gold brick inside there?”
“Certainly,” answered the dilapidated Goritz. “And they were up to
something curious perhaps. Why, somehow I can only think of Aladdin and
the lamp in the Arabian Nights. You remember it?”
“Of course, Antoine, but you see there are devilments here that are not
so very beguiling or so very profitable. At any rate let us get out of
here. The wind has risen; a storm is coming on. The darkness above looks
interesting; in this hole it will be just stupidly pitch black. I feel
half suffocated in this pit. There isn’t a very promising chance for our
survival if we go on into this radium land, with a sun made of radium,
when a handful turns us into puppets and pretty nearly into corpses. I
say leave it, leave it all. It’s madness to go farther.”
“You are mistaken—mistaken,” interrupted the Professor, who had
regained his composure. “The proximity—the reflections—our own
unadaptability—fatigue—the closeness of the confined space and
the—the—unmitigated monotony of our food made us ill. No—no—We must
see it all. It will be the miracle of the century.”
He gasped out his remonstrance and explanations in dissected sentences
that measurably restored my good humor, so funny were they. A little
later and we had set about getting back to the balsams on the cliff top,
and to the small shelter we had so far managed to construct, and whose
protection in a storm seemed very attractive. The storm itself in these
strange quarters promised new scenic effects, and its meteorological
features might exceed all possible anticipation. Three of us had become
ecstatically anxious to see everything, one of us (myself) shrank from
his own baleful premonition of the future.
But we had reached the height, and the freshness of the air restored our
equanimity, and made our strength whole again, and before us, with slow
divulgements of unusual grandeur, spread the black skirts of a storm.
But it was not over us, though patches of cloud were streaming from the
west in hurrying phalanxes, dun, disordered, driven, as if under orders.
And far off, beneath, it almost seemed, that strange stationary sun now
half eclipsed, the hurlyburly of an inordinate atmospheric disturbance
was visibly in operation.
The impression almost instantly made was that of a cyclonic movement—a
suction of the air into the maelstrom center of a revolution that was
gathering from the four quarters reinforcements of cloud and wind. A
dull yellow light shone through occasional gaps in the aerial concourse
of vapors, fish-gray chasms opened out at moments as if torn apart by
uprushing or irrepressible volumes of wind, and, lit up by sharper
flashes, they would suddenly evert, pouring out in boiling currents
torrential black clouds. Then a cap of darkness seemed to descend, and
yet in the remnants of light that stuck here and there to the flanks of
this mountainous obscuration, we could see the multitudinous scurryings,
windings and collisions of the smoking flails and banks and missiles of
cloud.
Below this indivisible commotion, between it and what seemed the earth,
stole or lay a stratum of light, and into this, slowly evolving like a
gigantic corkscrew from the storm above, grew downwards, streaked with
black, pillars of condensation, that were nothing else than
water-spouts, terrible tornadoes in traveling helices, erect, inclined,
and stalking towards and away from each other like watery titans.
We thought we even saw their conjunction and dispersal, but what was
visibly secure in the picture was the ascent heavenward of an
intolerably wild dust avalanche. The whiteness, for such it seemed,
smote and penetrated the clouds; it swerved and was beaten into straight
ribbons of livid light, or, mingling universally, adulterated the inky
burden with a spurious ghastly filminess. Flashes of lightning (a rare
phenomenon in the north) that must have been terrific in intensity and
portentous in size bit through the darkness, and rumblings reached us
from the remote conflict. Then agglomeration and colossal curdlings and
it all was swallowed up in night!
We talked long that night upon the excitements of the last ten hours,
and it was plain to each one of us that we were again approaching
descents to parts still farther below the levels already passed; that
the storm was over a distant depression; that in the last day or two the
actinic power of that strange radiance that lurked somewhere in the
skies over this depression was becoming stronger and more intolerable;
that we might expect to find the incredible influences of Radium in all
this; that perhaps in some way that Sun we saw, we felt, which was the
photal center, provocation and cause of the plant life around us, and
through which we had passed, was now limiting or suppressing it; the
unmistakable dust or sand tornado showed a desert region before us.
Then, too, we discussed the poverty of the faunal life, now growing
thinner, smaller, more depressed as we advanced, the sallowness of the
grass, the blueness of leafage, the anemic pinkiness of the heather, our
own tortured feelings of alternate hope and apathy, of well being and of
sickishness.
The bleaching, killing effect of this radium light (so we called It) was
partially overcome by the rainfall which operated favorably for the
plants. In hunting the small deer, and even they became more infrequent,
we noticed that they occupied the shadowed sides of the hills and, in
this stationary light, these shadowed sides remained almost unchanged. I
say _almost_, because it became more and more apparent that the
stationary Sun stirred. It rose or fell or approached or receded. There
was some fluctuation too in its light. It was not a lamp hung in the sky
but an _aura_ that floated inconstantly over or around some central
pivotal, causal spot, that varied also in its emanations.
Should we go on? I was silent. Overwhelming as might seem the
inducements to break through the veil of the mystery before us I
hesitated—No, I recoiled. But this was flagrant treachery to the spirit
and ambition of exploration. So I was silent. Goritz dreaming of his
Ophir and Golconda, was impatient to hurry on. Hopkins felt that there
was nothing else to do; his doggerel helped him out:
“‘What matters it how far we go?’ his scaly friend replied,
There is another shore, you know, upon the other side.”
But the Professor was resolute. Here were all his predictions
fulfilled—the vortical polar pit, the warmth, the aborigines, Eden
reminiscences (he referred to the Crocodilo-Python) and now, what, so he
modestly admitted, he had never dreamed of, the—
METROPOLIS OF RADIUM.
Go on? Of course.
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