THE PINE TREE GREDIN
After we had jerked some of the deer meat, fearing that the diminishing
chances for game would leave us unsupplied, and as yet quite mystified
as to where or when we would engage the pygmy people, we took up our
loads and went on. The storm whose gyrating fury had absorbed our
attention had raged itself away, though it was some thirty-six hours
before it cleared, and, slowly liberated from the thickly wrapt curtains
of gloom, the now more and more obvious sun shone again. The upland we
were crossing caused us many perplexities. The numerous broad troughs
and depressions, the tracts of tangled dead bushes and the hedges,
resembling “pressure ridges” of ice, which had been somehow shaped by
prevalent winds into long fences of scraggly, prostrate trees, were
increasingly interspersed with sandy expanses, which we interpreted as
the melancholy presages of a desert area beyond.
The average elevation was level, with a tendency to fall as we advanced.
We expected daily to reach some abrupt drop which would announce our
descent into the “last hole of the Golf Links,” to quote Hopkins. The
scheme of Krocker Land grew daily more and more convincingly simple.
Whatever limital lines embraced it, it was a sort of amphitheater, with
the serial displacements up or down which we had already traversed
succeeding each other concentrically; it was temperate in climate; it
might become torrid because of its inclusion in the deeper parts of the
earth’s crust, or because, even more probably, it was situated over some
residual uncooled igneous magma. It was encircled, we assumed, by the
profound crevice we had bridged below the Rim, and its extraordinary sun
which gave light and heat was practically concealed from external
detection by the gigantic vaporous wall of the “Perpetual Nimbus,”
endlessly created by steaming and evaporation from the crevice itself,
reinforced, too, by the turbulence of the general atmosphere, which for
days and days had presented a turmoil, or else a dead waste, of
cloud-filled skies.
We thought of that outer world now slowly—nay, rapidly—succumbing to the
tightening grip of frost and snow and ice, now again dark or visible
only in that strange sepulchral glow of aurora and stars; of that vast
Arctic desolation, the shrouded corpse of a world, and of the gathering
legions of snowflakes endlessly dropping or whirling from the blue-black
empyrean; of the ice pack formed like a vise around the empty,
tenantless shores, and groaning under the lash of the winds or the
tyrannous push of the tides; of the distant eastern Arctic lands, pale
with ghost lights over glacier and mountain, inland ice, trackless
coasts, black rock-bound capes and the blue domed igloo of the Eskimo; a
land hallowed to thought by heroism; on whose barren plains the
monuments to the dead rise in the wastes feebly to tell of devotion,
courage past knowledge to measure, faithfulness; where the polar bear
and the walrus alone maintain nature’s plea against utter death.
How those thoughts contrasted with all this around us, an undulating
oasis in the polar desert, where now indeed the antipodes drew near in
some strange new development of sand and aridity. Somehow this latter
notion clung persistently. It was partly due, no doubt, to a natural
ascription of deadly power in the inexplicable Sun, whose strength each
mile was revealed in a more deadly manner; in part also to the
decrescence of life, now noticeable in many ways. There was a paling and
bleaching of the herbage, and for miles and miles the movements of
insects were almost absent, while the deer vanished, and only moles or
shrews were occasionally detected in the crookedly ridged ground.
It was after five days’ continuous struggle over the back of this lumpy
and semi-mountainous region, whose charm for us had long before
disappeared, and when the sharpest scrutiny no longer disclosed the
little deer whose succulent steaks and chops had kept us happy and well,
eked out with water, and the still persistent berry I have mentioned,
that we reached the edge of a new descent. Shielding ourselves in a low
coppice of bushes from the peculiar light, which was sensibly increasing
in strength and which seemed less softened by the interposition of veils
of mist and cloud, we could just see, like a black ribbon painted along
the horizon, a zone of tree tops.
“TREES,” we shouted joyously.
“Yes, they are trees,” after a while came the affirmative assurance. The
Professor was studying them with our field glass.
“They are trees, of some narrow leaved or coniferous genus. They are so
densely, darkly gathered together. A wood now would indeed be welcome,
but we are fated for a rather trying march over another desert. I can
see a sand plain stretching away ahead of us, terminating perhaps in
this new region beyond. I have a strong presentiment that this wood
forms the last screen to the grand revelation we are certain to be
vouchsafed. It surrounds the home of the RADIUMITES.”
“That’s a cheerful view of it, Professor, and not a bad name. And if we
are getting as warm as all that don’t you think we might conjure up some
plan of operation before we meet these—these—_electrons_? How’s that,
Erickson? You see I have a talking acquaintance with Science after all,
even if I haven’t got so far as to call her by her first name. Electrons
and Radiumites are rather related terms. Eh?”
“Well,” I said, “Hopkins’ suggestion is surely a wise one. These
remarkable creatures have obtained some curious insight into chemical
laws. They are our masters if we meet them. Before we can do a thing
they will transfix us with chemical ions, or something like them, and
decompose us into our original elements. I’ve been thinking about those
little lead pipes they carried. I saw them press them and wave them, and
whenever they did either, something happened; they went up and down, or
any way else, as they wished. The balloons were not so very small; they
appeared, I think, smaller than they really were, and they did look too
small to lift their loads, little and light as they seemed, even if they
contained our lightest gas-hydrogen. I tell you they’ve refined methods
in radio-chemistry perhaps, that enable them to generate an even lighter
gas, and its buoyancy is out of all proportion to the gas volumes
represented in these small balloons. These little men are formidable
savants, who may get rid of us, if they want to, like that,” and I
snapped my fingers.
This harangue stirred the Professor. I meant it should. His hair, which
now seemed almost redder than when we started, and had grown so that it
enveloped his head in a penumbral glory, like a sunset fire, rose, as it
were, to the occasion.
“Erickson,” he retorted, “put away your fears. The very fact of the
intellectual promotion of these people would make it certain that they
have abandoned savage ways, and that they would recognize in us, to say
the least,” it may be the Professor blushed slightly, though the
rufescent splendor of his hair disguised it, “representatives of a
culture that will excite their curiosity, their—Ahem—_envy_. Personally
I feel confident that—Ahem—once some sort of communication is
established between us, I can interest them. I should feel honored even
to present their contributions to science before the Royal Academy of
Sciences at Stockholm. In the hierarchy of scientific authors their
names would arrest the attention of the whole earth.”
After this flight there was a respectful pause, until Hopkins resumed:
“Say Professor, the particular culture that would impress them most now
would be a wash, a clean shirt, a shave and a haircut. Eh?”
The Professor contemptuously ignored the interruption, though a
furtively repressed approach of laughter on his face showed his
appreciation of its justice. We were indeed frights.
“And, Alfred, as to your suggestion of a gas lighter than hydrogen in
the balloons, perhaps you are aware that so far as the apparent
transmutation of the elements permits any conclusions in the matter,
hydrogen has hitherto yielded only helium, neon, carbon and sulphur, all
heavier bodies. I don’t say you are not right. It’s tremendously
interesting. However, you may have underestimated the size of the
balloons and over-estimated the weight of the little men. They had a
very _papery_ look to me, and of course,” the Professor always had this
pragmatic style of insisting _you knew_, when he was inwardly crowing
over his chance of illuminating your ignorance, “you know that the
levitation of hydrogen equals seventy pounds to one thousand cubic feet
of gas—at ordinary pressures. Those balloons were larger than they
seemed; some reflexion in the air diminished them, and really those aged
infants, I believe, scarcely exceeded thirty pounds in weight. Do you
know,” he became excitedly radiant, “perhaps their tenuity has some
relation to their intellectual development—they represent some final
stage of human evolution, when the body shrinks, and the mind enlarges,
and—”
“The teeth drop out,” suggested Hopkins.
“True, Mr. Hopkins. Professor Wurtz has pointed out the probable
absorption of the teeth or their disappearance under the debilitating
influence of mental growth. These people may live solely on saps,
juices, milks, liquids, extracts.”
This tickled Hopkins boundlessly, and he rattled away—I don’t know
whether it was quotation or improvisation:
“Really I hesitate to say,
What they promise now some day,
When learning and brain
Are fit for the strain,
Of telling the Truth to a hair.
“For the _Docs_ have puzzled it out,
And there isn’t a reason to doubt,
That we’ll lose all our grinders,
All our gold-plugged reminders,
Of the toothache that taught us to swear.
“It’s a case of gray matter and such,
Though for that we need not care much,
For—cocktails and chowder for lunch,
Soft drinks, sangaree, and rum punch
Will surely be living for fair.”
“Come,” growled Goritz, “this sort of nonsense isn’t getting us
anywhere. Strap up your packs and get out of this. The chances for grub
ahead are not the best in the world. The country is already as bare as a
cleared table, and what are we going to do for water?”
That was a disagreeable predicament. Hitherto the springs, little tarns
or water holes, though decreasing in number as we advanced, had fully
met our requirements, but if we were to cross any considerable dry tract
we might be seriously imperiled. To be sure, the limestone country if
prolonged would almost certainly feed us, but that desert land which our
closest inspection of the distance only made more unquestionable—How
about that?
The conclusion we came to was to husband all the resources we could
command. It sounded grandiloquent—_our resources_! What were they? Some
patches of jerked deer’s meat, our fryingpan and pot, the remnant of our
improvised tent and our knapsacks, almost empty except for the
instruments, a few necessary implements, the ammunition, still
sufficient, and our guns. Our clothing was desperately worn. Literally,
we were in rags, but a primitive kind of treatment in water, from time
to time, had freed this dejected apparel of at least a large
percentage—I really think a preponderant percentage—of its dirt. The
question of water remained urgent.
In about a day or so we came upon the outlines of the desert
plain—scrappy expanses of sand and pebbles—mostly angular, and we noted
the dust occasionally sweeping heavenward in yellow clouds but still we
thought we also saw the dark farther zone of trees. Our horizon was now
more limited; we had descended some fifteen hundred feet, and the
advantage of an elevated circumspection was denied us. The professor
determined the sand to be a pulverulent shattered and crumbling
limestone, and although absorbent and apparently deeply bedded he
believed we could, almost anywhere, upon digging find water. This was
encouraging, and the trip over this tawny and sometimes dazzling waste
seemed less formidable. The light became peculiarly tantalizing and
objectionable, and we were thankful enough for the goggles. After
deliberation we made up the canvas of our little tent, which we still
retained, into bags (we had pack thread and sailors’ needles) and
expected to use them as water carriers. Then we trapped a few moles,
though recourse to this unpalatable flesh would only be considered in an
extremity, and then, not without foreboding, we started over the pallid
desert.
We soon came upon traces of the great storm which we had watched from
the Deer Fels. These were unmistakable. Deep gouges had been made in the
sand by the volleying and cutting winds, but the most extraordinary
vestiges of its violence were the conical hills of sand, raised over the
surface in huge mammilary erections. These were distributed with a very
striking evenness, except at spots, where it would seem the moving hills
in their translation had closed upon one another, and, demolished in the
collisions, left formless congeries of tossed and sprawling heaps, which
might have a length of a mile or more, and were from half to three
quarters of a mile in width. They were disagreeable obstacles, and
ploughing through them was the hardest kind of work, for the surfaces
were composed of a deep deposit of minute grains and dust and our feet
sank into them as quickly as though we were engaged in a plunge through
a colossal flour bin or a wheat pit.
But our complaints and discouragements were providentially rebuked.
Fighting our way up and down these dry quagmires of dust, stumbling,
falling and not infrequently assisting to extricate one another from the
floury embrace, we had come to the crest of a ridge which crossed
diagonally one of these shapeless, tortuous mounds. This ridge, over the
mean level of the plain, was almost twenty feet high, a good measure of
the strength of the wind suction which had built it up. We were dusty,
almost exhausted, and the water we had carefully conserved, as best we
might (for the bags were not watertight) in our canvas receptacles, was
approaching a dangerous depletion. It was absolutely necessary, fight
against it as we might, to wash our mouths and throats, clogged and
asperate as they were with the grains and dust, quite often, or, it
seems to me, we would have been suffocated. What gratitude we felt you
may imagine, when, on surmounting the ridge, our eyes fell upon a small
pool of water entrapped upon some impervious bottom, in a natural bowl,
enclosed by the ridge on which we halted and a lower ridge beyond us.
The familiar thought of how it transcended in value any imaginable
wealth of gold and diamonds at that moment flashed, I guess, through all
of our minds. We camped there. The water was clear and cool, for, I
should have mentioned it, the weather had been colder, and, when our
“fixed Sun,” as Goritz called it was hidden, we suffered somewhat from
imperfect protection.
“Queer we don’t hit any more of those weird phantoms that own this
place, isn’t it?” said Hopkins.
“Oh,” I replied, “they may be watching us now, listening to us. You
can’t tell. I think they’re a sort of supernatural people that can do
almost anything. Perhaps they wear magic cloaks, hats, shoes, that make
them invisible. Speak easy when you meet ’em Spruce, and don’t abuse
them behind their backs, for—it may be—_to their faces_.”
“Look here, Alfred, I really believe you’ve loosened a nut in that tight
little head of yours. To hear you talk gets on my nerves. Don’t do it.
Hasn’t the Professor explained it all as Evolution, and how exceedingly
friendly these fine folk will be to us when they get a bead on our own
families. As for speaking easy, I shan’t speak at all. With me it’s the
case of Pat once again, and I couldn’t get even as far as he did with
the Frenchman with his “_Parlez-vous français, and—give me the loan of
your gridiron._”
“Alfred,” asked the Professor, “could you talk with them, if it turns
out that their language is Hebrew?”
“Certainly,” I answered, “I am a Jew, and my earliest training has never
been forgotten. I have been hugging the thought that I can understand
them or make them understand me. I grant, along traditional lines there
was something Hebraic in their looks.”
“Yes Alfred—this,” said Hopkins, touching his nose.
We laughed, but the Professor stared at me thoughtfully.
“Alfred,” at length he solemnly began, “the Vestiges of Creation—Who
knows but—”
The sentence was never finished and to this day I only dimly suspect the
lurking and indefinable thought that those world-dreams of the past,
with Eden placed at the North Pole, and a still more irreclaimable
theory of a residual population descending from some God-made primal
ancestor, confusedly rose in the Professor’s mind, and that he was
groping his way to express this cryptic and impossible illusion.
No! the Professor was probably utterly stunned into dumbness, as we were
made half wild with wonder by a cry from Goritz:
“SEE! Over there are the head and arm of a dead man sticking out through
the sand.”
We jumped to our feet, followed with our eyes his stiffened,
outstretched arm and rigid finger, and saw the chubby face of a corpse,
with closed eyes, streaming black hair, pushed out from a blanket of
sand, while an arm with a clenched hand was protruding from the same
covering. For a moment—perhaps for several—we remained motionless,
perusing the face which was so astonishingly contrasted with the
lineaments of the diminutive aeronautical philosophers, and noting too
the convexity of the earth covering the body, which indicated a man or
woman, of an average size or a little undersized. What struck each one
of us at once was the unmistakable Eskimo type, the narrow eyes, small
_joufflu_ nose, wide mouth, puffed cheeks, low forehead and coarse,
straggling and profuse hair.
A little later and we had dug out of his grave the astounding figure.
When it was uncovered it corroborated all our first impressions as to
its Eskimo relationship, but we then detected that its construction was
more slender and generally better proportioned, and the beardless face
was more refinedly cut. Its dress was a yellow gown or tunic over very
loose bluish trousers, and its feet were encased in roughly made loose
slippers, fastened by laces or strings over the instep. The material of
the dress was a woven wool. The tunic was clasped by a broad belt of the
same substance, fastened by a leaden buckle; the trousers were held in
at the bottom by a kind of anklet of bone and skin, and the sleeves of
the tunic were similarly confined.
But perhaps it was the buckle that excited our curiosity the most, for
there was engraved—not embossed—on it the same serpent and
crocodile-like figure that had been seen on the gold buckle Goritz
found, and over it too were the singular conventions of a branched tree
encircled by a snake. Goritz compared his belt and buckle with it and
was convinced of their identical interpretation. Nothing else was found.
We detected no pockets of any sort in the clothing—Yes, there was
something else, from under the body we dug up spectacle-like yellow
glasses.
It was clear that the creature had been overwhelmed in a sandstorm, but
it was not clear why he should have been alone and apparently wandering
a long way from his home and companions. The incident incited us to
greater haste, and when we had replenished our water skins, we resumed
the exhausting tramp. The tree line became increasingly plainer to view,
and it offered a goal and prize now that dissipated our fatigue and
roused our ambition. We had not discussed the Eskimo waif but I guess
through all of our minds slowly or quickly filtered the conviction that
he represented a lower slave or working group; that we were soon to
break into a world of industry and achievement, founded on social
distinctions; that indeed up here in Krocker Land flourished perhaps an
oldtime class regime with knowledge and power confined to a priestly or
imperial class, like Egypt, like Mexico, like Peru.
[Illustration:
THE PINE TREE GREDIN
]
Some of my first trepidation over the adventure had vanished, but much
remained. I felt no confidence in those uncanny air travelers. Goritz
became impatient and almost retaliatory; he was maddened by the vision
of wealth, for he dreamed we were coming close to some dazzling,
incalculable phenomenon of riches. Hopkins was good-naturedly suspicious
and apprehensive, but confessed to an overpowering desire to see the
thing out, and “_have it over_.” The Professor lived in the seventh
heaven of delectation over the prospect of preparing a batch of papers,
to be read before the Royal Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, that would
place his name high on the walls of the Temple of Knowledge. All of us
were thus anxious to get on, and we made rapid progress. Need there was,
for our provisions were again nearing exhaustion.
It was almost a hundred and twenty hours, or five days, since we had
left the Deer Fels before we dragged ourselves into the first grateful
shadows of the great _Pine Tree Gredin_. So Professor Bjornsen termed
it. Such it was. A vast, plunging hillside or scarp, covering miles and
miles, and appareled from top to bottom with this wonderful vesture of
tall pines. And it sang with the refreshing music of innumerable brooks.
The exhaustless reservoirs of water emptied upon the vast desert zone
which, almost without leaving a trace of greenness behind them, entered
that profoundly weathered and comminuted soil, engulfed completely, as
are the rivers of California or Colorado or Persia, and reissued
unsullied, purified and cold, over this pine tree steppe.
The exhausted pilgrim through Purgatory who sees the gates of Paradise
open to him, would, for Christians, furnish a description of our
feelings as, ragged, choked with dust, almost crazed with thirst and
speechless from fatigue, we threw ourselves at the foot of the first
towering grove, and sank our heads into its moss lined bowls of living
water. As a Jew I myself recalled the pretty fable of “_The Slave Who
Became a King_” and all that the shipwrecked wretch had felt when the
new people he had reached made him their king and fed and clothed him;
for indeed to us, as Nefesh was to Adam, this new stage was the Island
of Life. I had reason to remember the story more literally afterwards.
And the marvelous stateliness of this blue-green ocean of straight
trees, the entrancing vistas between the majestic columns, with a life
of pheasant and hare and squirrel, the bubbling cadences of springs, and
the rambling mirthfulness and riot of the brooks, the deep-browed
silence in places, and the needle-thatched ground, inviting us to sleep
and dreams, had a fabulous expression, as if the prelude to some
unearthly—See how the whole unreality of it haunts me—experience. But,
besides its picturesqueness, we rejoiced in the dusk-like protection
from the light; in the effect and feeling of a dark submarine immersion,
the light became so beryl-like, that we again, and now as it were _en
masse_, encountered fresh reminders of the still invisible people we
must soon see face to face.
There were clearings which had been made in the forest. They were dotted
with stumps and crossed by fallen trunks, and made outlooks from which
we saw the interminable distances of serried ranks of trees. Far to the
right, far to the left, far before us with as yet no determinable limit
in any direction, the gigantic flood of pines flowed ceaselessly down
the sides of a continental amphitheater.
These cleared rings were suggestive enough. There was no evidence that
less toilsome methods had been used than those adopted by prehistoric
man. The trees had been hacked and cut by stone axes, they had been
trimmed by stone axes, and we found traces of fire around them, which
had been made to hasten their fall. But it was not long before we came
upon well-made roads threading the forest, to which the clearings
themselves were tributary, and over which the great logs had been
transported.
Besides we found dishes and cups, vessels of various sizes, which were
well advanced in fictile skill, being watertight, with glazed bodies of
white and yellow or terracotta tints. And over them, as on the buckles,
were rudely painted and reburned that now familiar symbol of the tree
and serpent. These interested us greatly, but our sharpest hunt for some
gold relics was unrewarded.
“No lost property worth advertising for ’round here,” said Hopkins.
“Well it’s still westward,” said Goritz. “We must run them down soon.
But see how endless the prospect,” and he pointed to that unique
multitude of motionless trees, falling away and ever downwards into some
gigantic central subsidence.
It was remarkable that we encountered no temporary abodes, no camps, no
settlements and no laggard or outpost of the elusive people.
The Professor, invincible in theorizing and pertinacious in assertion,
animadverted on our discoveries in this way:
“Well, these Radiumites show a sort of frustrated culture. They have
some specialized knowledge, and then again they are in other respects
primitive. It’s a very interesting ethnological problem. It’s a well
known circumstance that civilizations decline or even degenerate. The
modern Indian of Mexico or Peru offers a sad contrast to his ancestors,
but in the useful arts, as Tylor remarks, a skill once acquired is
seldom or never abandoned or forgotten. If these people could smelt iron
they certainly would not resort to stone for felling trees. Races like
the New Zealanders have never learned to reduce iron from its ore,
though iron ore abounds in their country.”
The trails and roads proved to be labyrinthine, and led us over long and
useless journeys, frequently back to our starting point. It was Goritz
who solved their apparent confusion and proved that they were parts of
intersecting loops or circles, and that each series of circles connected
with a succeeding one by roads leading always from the westernmost (or
lowest) edge of each circle. These latter roads seemed radial and
continuous. The plan was like this (Erickson showed me a drawing) with
the circles a mile or half a mile in diameter.
But it was the Professor who detected a remarkable feature which plunged
us all into renewed speculations and wondering surmises. In following
one of these circular roads he observed that the area enclosed by it was
a depression, and this fact, together with a less crowded growth and
some previous clearing permitted him to note that an unusually large
tree towered among the others, apparently exceeding them greatly in
height and, rudely at least, it was at the center of the circular space.
As, at times yielding to a lotos-like influence, we now moved more
deliberately, and would remain at one camping spot (this was before
Goritz pointed out the more direct line of advance over the radiating
roads) twenty or more hours, the Professor would direct his steps to
this tree as a landmark. Some abstruse stirrings of suggestion urged
him. But it seemed almost a miracle of second sight, for it uncovered an
astounding system of combined surveying or charting, associated
intricately with religious motives. He diverted our attention indeed to
a search which enriched us with some valuable objects, though we were
likely to have lost them all later. But it thus led to the _denouement_
of an utterly unparalleled adventure by forcing us sharply upon the
mysterious people who lived here, and opening up a chapter of incidents
and episodes never otherwise related, except in tales of invention or in
the dreams of disturbed and romancing minds.
He found his tree in a small, open, carefully cleared space, and on it
were not only carvings of the ubiquitous serpent sign, but with this
evidently scripts, which he interpreted as prayers, or sacred utterances
and adjurations, and, more astonishingly, conventionalized GOLD images
(hardly exceeding three or four inches in height) laid at the bottom of
the tree. These images rudely symbolized a human figure enrolled in the
coils of a serpent.
When he brought one of these images into our camp—he timidly refrained
from disturbing the others—you may imagine our excitement. Goritz gazed
and gazed at it in a trance of amazement and gloating. He wanted to set
out on an excursion of discovery at once. But we overruled that. The
Professor had our attention completely. His exploit gave a real
authority to his entertaining disquisition. We were thoroughly
interested.
“Yes, here is a stupendous theme—Serpent and Tree worship—developed on
an unusual scale and in an unprecedented manner. You see this enormous
forest is arranged in a chart-like manner into a series—I might say a
_Halysites_, as it were—of encircling roadways, producing the effect of
a garland of wreathed snakes, while in each fold or embrace, some tree,
conspicuous for size or height, or some physical perfection, has been
selected, about or around which again the serpentine coils are
enwrapped, a splendid combination of tree and serpent worship
ideographically presented in a park plan. Again the votive objects
attached to the trees form a group of subordinated ornamental
commemorative or religious symbols, and the whole display is ancestral,
archaic, _turanian_, for Fergusson holds that no Aryan people succumbed
to this peculiar cult, dimly shadowed forth in myth, fable and history
at the first emergence of racial life.
“Think of the legendary lore connected with the strange prepossessions
of early peoples, the myth of Adam and Eve and the Serpent; the brazen
serpent lifted up in the wilderness by Moses, the Serpent of Epidaurus
in the temple of Aesculapius, the dragon of the Argonauts, the serpent
of the oracle at Delphi, in the grove of laurel trees; the serpent
inhabiting a cave at Lanuvium, and wrought into religious practices; the
ascription to serpents of healing powers and powers of divination; the
snake in Indian, Egyptian, Phoenician, Assyrian religions. Think, Goritz
and Erickson, of the tree worship of the Scandinavians, culminating in
the _Yggdrasill_, the ash, whose branches spread over the whole world,
and even reach up to heaven, the extended and dreadful homage paid to
great snakes in America, still existing among the desert Indians of
Arizona and New Mexico!
“But as a contribution to the ophitic lore I believe we have found in
this new polar continent the central arcana of the mystery referable,
for aught we know, to the Adam legend. Gentlemen, we are stepping on the
skirts of a great mystery.”
The solemnity of this conclusion which was becomingly indicated by the
Professor’s outstretched hands and by the smile of benignant invitation
for us to assume his own gravity, was somewhat abridged or spoiled by
Hopkins’ interjection.
“I’m afraid, Professor, that we’ll be stepping into trouble if we pinch
too many of these joints. I say leave the contraptions alone.” This was
meant as a rebuke to Goritz who was for rifling everything. I half
believe he would now have been willing to abandon our further march,
hunt for the wood temples, despoil them, and retreat, recover our yacht
and hike it over the ice for Point Barrow. The gold had strangely turned
his head.
“Yes,” I interrupted, for I was really anxious too, though I was willing
to join the laugh that followed Hopkins’ remonstrance, “we must be
careful. There’s mystery enough here and there may be power behind the
mystery, enough also to send us each about our business to Eternity.”
However, from this time we watched for the trees that accentuated the
great rings of woods, marked off by the circular and intersecting roads.
We detected numbers of them, though for days none would be found.
Cleared spaces surrounded them, but not always, nor indeed generally,
were there votive offerings of gold images, but bits of apparel,
pottery, glass beads (we wondered much over these last), leaden, rudely
shaped figures, stone implements and carved wooden masks. We wasted time
in this pursuit, urged to it by Goritz’s insatiable delight over the
gold finds (we resisted his intentions of taking everything away, though
he despoiled many of the trees), and I think the Professor was
responsible for much of our wandering, for in his note taking he was
indefatigable.
The ground continued to descend, and though the decline was interrupted
by hillocks, protuberant mounds and long, rising slopes, these
exceptions were accidental, and we realized that since entering the
forest we had descended nearly three thousand feet. We were actually
over five thousand feet below the mean level of the earth. From some of
the elevations our view still measured the endless stretch of sombre
green (really a blue-green), though we felt certain that a still lower
valley bounded its marge and that beyond the latter limit there were hot
springs or geysers, the gushing upward of steam clouds was so incessant.
And then more wondrously, we were made aware of a shaft of light, a
luminous prism shooting upward from the earth, which we began to suspect
was related to the stationary sun from which this puzzling and utterly
unrelated nook of the earth received light and heat, when outside of its
charmed and storm-beleaguered rim the polar seas and lands lay bound in
the iron grip of winter and were dark beneath a sunless sky.
Bewildering, maddening paradox! We were often thunderstruck and
speechless, dimly doubting whether we had not indeed “shuffled off the
coil” of life, and had become reincarnate in another sphere.
I guess that I alone had that feeling often, for Hopkins’ imperturbable
realism, Goritz’s avarice and the Professor’s splendid vaulting ambition
to convulse the scientific world kept them mortally conscious and human.
And now an amazing thing happened. It began the rush of events that for
three or four months tossed us along a course of excitement that made
our heads spin and terminated in episodes for all of us too fabulous to
be believed and yet—Mr. Link they are the sober, unvarnished truth. You
may doubt your ears, you may be tempted—you will be—to put me in a class
outside even of the biggest assassins of truth—and as a journalist you
have known a good many, but in the end perhaps I can re-establish my
reputation by an appeal to your eyes! That sort of evidence cannot be
gainsaid.
Well, it turned out that we had nearly crossed the interminable forest,
and were tramping silently along one of the radial roads, just after it
had cut (“bisected” the Professor insisted) the arc of one of the great
circles, when Goritz quickly raised his hand:
“Listen! Music—drums!”
We halted, breathless with wonder. Softly, in a low, monotonous hum came
the itinerant beating. Yes, we all heard it, and with it, as we waited,
was mingled the metallic clangor of cymbals or something like them.
“‘Regardless of grammar they all said “That’s them,’” whispered Hopkins,
quoting his Ingoldsby.
“_Up the tree._ They’re coming nearer,” said Goritz.
“Decidedly,” coincided the Professor. “As an exhibition of the
prehistoric musical art this will be unique.”
We were not long in clambering among the outspread boughs of a big pine,
leaving our instruments and packs at its foot (the species in growth and
cyclical arrangement of its limbs resembled the white pine), helping
each other until we were finally asylumed among the topmost needles,
peering out over the receding road for the approaching procession, if
procession it was.
We were not to wait long. The music, disentangled now from the
interference and dampening effect of the trees, rose assailingly from
the distance, and the thumping drums and the dulcet swish and clatter of
the cymbals seemed almost beneath us. We were straining our eyes, and,
in our impatience and curiosity, became careless of our position, all
half standing on the same bough, clasping the trunk and leaning outward.
There was a glittering, swarming effect in the vista, and we saw the
advancing ranks of the strangers. Instantly we recognized the Eskimo, or
his modified image, in the first companies. They were lurching
ponderously forward, their legs and shoulders advancing together to the
irresistible rhythm swelling behind them. They wore short yellow tunics
or sacks engirdled by cloth belts with leaden buckles; blue trousers
caught at the ankles by leaden anklets and sandals completed their
dress, except that on their heads they wore broad, white, hive-shaped
straw sombreros not unlike the head covering of the peons in Mexico.
Each man swung a short bludgeon comically suggestive of a New York City
policeman’s club.
“Cheese it—the Cop,” chuckled Hopkins.
The ranks came on in goodly number and they formed a stalwart, if clumsy
and shuffling phalanx. The band, as a proper misappropriation of the
word would describe it, succeeded. These, too, were all of the Eskimo
type, but men and women mingled together; the men plied the small,
stiff, vociferous wooden drums and the women rather gracefully, and with
inerrant precision, smashed the cymbals together.
“Gold—by God,” croaked Goritz, and he almost lost his balance in his
admiration.
Gold they were indeed, and the metal delivered a note less rasping and
shattering than the ordinary brass. The men and women of the band were
dressed in closer fitting garments, their legs were naked, but over each
of the women’s knees was strapped a glittering gold cap and their hair
was braided with sinuous gold serpents. They burnished the dark outline
of the marchers like gleams of light or fireflies in a summer gloaming.
It was really very pretty, and Hopkins nearly lost his self control by
starting our applause. The impulse was momentary, for in a trice our
eyes were ensnared in the sight of the astonishing crowd of little
people that followed them.
They were perhaps larger than the strange little men we had met on the
Deer Fels, and their heads did not fall forward with that irksome sense
of heaviness which afflicted those diminutive philosophers. But they
formed a diverting and animated picture. They were in all sorts of
order, and rather prevalently without any order at all. In threes and
fours, in strings and lines, in gravely marching little bands, and then
in dancing disorder, all wearing tunics and trousers of various colors
or plaids, but with the belt and the hieroglyphic buckle. Every now and
then as they surged along they sang, a midget song, quavering and odd,
musical in a way, but a rather poor way, and, like the shrilling cymbals
and the tom-tom drums, sing-songy and monotonous. We became spell-bound
at the weird spectacle. They also wore broad brimmed straw hats, but
pushed back on their heads, as if to offset that ludicrous tilt of their
funny big heads.
And then came a host of the Eskimo girls beating the cymbals again, but
there were no drums or men.
“Well, I must say,” softly spoke Hopkins, “the popular chorus girl
hasn’t anything on these peacherinas, has she?”
But what was this amazing company that followed—bizarre, fascinating,
crudely savage, and yet enigmatically enthralling? A chariot or a flat
platform car on low, solid wooden wheels, drawn by goats whose horns
were tipped with gold snails, bore a group of diminutive figures which
we all recognized as being the very little men whose aeronautics had so
astonished us. They and more like them sat back to back on this equipage
of gold, as in an Irish jaunting car, and one chariot succeeded another,
all loaded down with the _Areopagus_ of councilors and governors, for
such they certainly seemed to be. But they were sumptuously dressed in
violet cassocks, girt with gold; gold chains encircled their necks, and
pendent to these was the serpent symbol. On their heads they wore the
flat broad brimmed hat bedizened with gold trappings. These hats now lay
in their laps, their long-fingered, waxy hands folded over them, and
their eyes were protected by the absurd goggles.
They too were singing or praying, the chant rising to us with the
undulatory emphasis of a Hebrew cantor, and—so it seemed to me—the words
were indeed a Hebrew jargon. But around them, before them, behind them,
stalked an ordered regiment of the slimmer, taller Eskimos; all men, and
they each raised on their left shoulders, held stationary by the bent
left arm and the right arm extended across the breast, a pole of gold,
on which was entrained a living snake. The creatures were imprisoned,
for their necks were caught in locks at the apexes of the poles. These
snakes were black, a glossy black, and on the glossy, glittering poles
they formed a strange _caduceus_. It was in a way a horrible assemblage,
and then again, against the background of all of our incredible
experiences, it assumed a bewildering charm, as if it were a dream half
turned into a nightmare, or a nightmare checked in its course by a
remembered dream. On, on, they swayed and moved, and amid these ophidian
pages, groups of drummers kept up a ceaseless dull, stupid drubbing.
Then something stranger followed. An empty chair on a gold wagon, a
chair itself of gold, but shaped like the stump of a tree with two
branches sprouting from it, and between these as they were projected
above the stump, the spread figure—in heraldry _displayed_—of the
_Crocodilo-Python_, also in gold. The hideous animal enormity was all
there, its anaconda-like tail winding about the tree stump, its stilted
hind feet grasping the lower ends of the branches, its shorter webbed
forefeet dragging their curved ends towards its twisted neck, and the
saurian jaws in a horrid rictus, imminent above that empty throne whose
occupant perchance might be some aboriginal Apollo or a grinning and
revolting savage sibyl.
[Illustration:
MEETING THE RADIUMOPOLITES
]
Well, Mr. Link, the spectacle, with this climax, made us dizzy; some
reminiscent weakness from my swooning attacked me, but I would have been
safe enough. I stuck fast to the trunk of the tree, when Goritz turning
backward stepped on my support. It cracked, it broke. Hopkins seized
Goritz’s arm, the Professor Hopkins’ coat tail—what there was of it—and
ingloriously, with crash and whisking flight from branch to branch, we
four hopeless Argonauts slumped from the top of the lofty pine, with
arresting scramblings and maniacal clutchings, to the bottom, and were
spilled to the roadway; four voiceless, bedraggled, ragged,
bushy-haired, wild eyed, grimy men, more savage in our destitution than
the savages we had fallen amongst. As we banged to the ground, a jolt
stopped the empty throne, with its golden splendors of the distended
image of the saurian, directly opposite our jumbled, prostrate bodies.
------------------------------------------------------------------------