THE CRATER OF EVERLASTING LIGHT
The return of the Ophidian Pilgrims, as the Professor termed them,
seemed unreasonably slow. The wardens, Ziliah, and the servants of the
Capitol were all equally mystified over this unusual slowness. Cold, dry
weather supervened, for indeed the stationary sun seemed sensibly to
respond to the secular influences of the seasons, as we know them. We
had all been too sufficingly engaged in studying our new surroundings,
to regret or miss the absent Government, for a larger liberty had been
vouchsafed us, though one thing was forbidden. We could not enter the
precincts of the forest to the west of the Capitol.
We walked through the city, we explored the Capitol, we increased our
acquaintance with the domestic habits of the populace, and the Professor
and myself had accumulated notes on all of these things, to be
incorporated in the work on Krocker Land which we fervently hoped to
write, and which now—Alas!—may never see the light, for—the Professor is
today a fixed official fact in that almost mythical land in the Arctic
Sea. But I hasten.
Goritz had restrained with difficulty his almost uncontrollable impulse
to perpetrate some outrage on the Capitol itself in his determination to
accumulate a fortune of gold. We had averted this danger by very
emphatic protests. We pointed out to him its danger and the folly of
jeopardizing our safety when the means of getting back—I had almost said
to the Earth, as if we had actually left it—were now almost null, or
were at least desperate. We told him that the plunder in his room, if
found—and I began to fear that the depredations on the tree shrines had
already been detected and were, in some way, a cause for the delayed
return of the pilgrims—would involve us all in grave difficulties. To
our entreaties or threats he became deaf or obstinate, and I had
followed him, in the sleeping hours, when he expected to achieve his
robberies without molestation, only to intercept him chiseling at the
gold plates that encrusted the Capitol.
In the meanwhile the Professor, whose popularity increased with
everyone, had become attracted to a young Eskimo whose first
astonishment over the Professor’s poll of red hair had been succeeded by
a sort of personal adoration. He followed the Professor with an
attachment and fascination that might have proved irksome. I made some
inquiries of my informant, the acquiescent Ziliah, about him, and
learned from her that he was a guide and the gatherer of radium. He
alone apparently was able to penetrate the strange and ghastly country
where the radium masses were collected, in that zone of the Unreal where
lay the CRATER OF EVERLASTING LIGHT. His peculiar ability arose from his
immunity to the influence of the radium itself, which invariably
prostrated those who touched it, while the region itself forbade
approach, by reason of those indeterminable emanations which destroyed
the adventurers who entered it. For some reason, or, in some way,
Oogalah Ikimya, the young Eskimo, enjoyed a unique invulnerability, and
on his efforts Radiumopolis depended for its supply of radium. This
distinction had given him a particular arrogance. He alone now dared the
inexplicable dangers, or even knew the devious route that threaded the
labyrinths leading to this unutterable place.
When I told my friends about this, we all felt a mad desire to see, even
at a distance, this intolerable land, a mineral Gehenna. I knew of the
man’s devotion to the Professor, and I felt certain we could gain his
consent for us to accompany him. No one of us felt a keener impatience
for the trip than Antoine Goritz. I told Ziliah of our wish. She grew
pale with horror at the suggestion; her beautiful eyes pleaded with me
to abandon the suicidal project; she pointed to Spruce Hopkins in
piteous despair, she indeed flung herself at his feet, and invoked his
commiseration of her should he be lost. Then she became tempestuous with
scorn and indignation.
We could not go. The guards would prevent us. She would summon the
magistrates of the city. Was she not Ziliah, daughter of the President,
head man of the Council? We should not stir. NOT HE.
And that feminine transport over, she again importuned us, with terrible
threats of our fate, not to consider it; so many had perished in the
same outrageous pursuit; dead bodies marked the way; it was forbidden;
the curse of the Crocodilo-Python followed those who went there; it
meant madness, hysteria, death.
Finally it was made clear to us that whatever Oogalah Ikimya might say
this influential and enamored young woman would prove hopelessly
obstinate. Physical force would be invoked to restrain us. Oogalah
himself rather welcomed this opportunity to show off his skill, his
exceptional prowess, but his volubility and transports availed nothing.
Hopkins executed what the French might call a _coup d’amour_ and
liberated us. His overture to the despairing or incensed Ziliah through
me was rather compromising and risky, but its effect was instantaneous
and certain. Opposition vanished when Hopkins explained that the lovely
woman _might get herself disliked_, and that any conceivable state of
future happiness for both of them depended on _his having his way_.
So it eventually ended, as the mountainous objections seemed to melt
away like dew before the sun, that we found ourselves on the road that
led westward from Radiumopolis, under the guidance of Oogalah Ikimya,
who strode before us with rapid swinging of legs and arms, his face
radiant with pride. We had cautiously promised to be careful, not to go
farther than was prudent, to satisfy ourselves with a distant view of
the blasted land, and to return as quickly as we went, for it was
insisted that we should hold ourselves ready for the disposition of the
Council, when the long delayed pilgrims returned, to settle our fate.
The noisy rumor of our departure for the Radium Country, and the
haggling and delays that preceded it, Ziliah’s outbursts and excitement,
the consultations over the permission to let us go at all, Oogalah’s
gossiping activity about it, led to the population’s—which besieged us
and surrounded us almost daily—outpouring on the day of our departure,
so that for miles we were accompanied by a crowd watching us with
increased wonder, and, among the older, with much ominous head shaking,
and, with the younger, many sneering comments, a little cheering and
some obstreperous farewells. The Professor evoked much enthusiasm—he
always did. I do not know the _rationale_ or the etiquette of love
matters in Krocker Land, but I remember that Hopkins took the profusely
smiling and opulently lovely, young and small Ziliah aside, and tried to
make her understand—without my help—that their public parting should be
very formal, no matter how ecstatic their private one might be. On top
of that, considerably to his disappointment or chagrin perhaps, Ziliah
hugged him pretty tightly when they stood on the terrace stairs as we
left the palace, and the very observing public gathered about were
neither amused nor interested.
It was rather funny I thought, but I admitted, I am sure, that as a
display of superb manners it would be unmatched anywhere else in the
world of so-called culture today. Atala came into my mind, though Spruce
Hopkins was a good deal of a contrast to the sentimental Rene, and there
was a certain _aplomb_, directness, vivacity and insistence in Ziliah
that hardly suggested the Natchez maiden. And there certainly was no
Outogamiz.
Well, at length we were on our journey. At first the highway, for,
though seldom used, this western road was in a state of fine
preservation, traversed a thick but low wood entangled with undergrowth.
We had never entered this wood before and had been especially prohibited
from entering it. Of course we tried to see all we could, but there was
absolutely nothing remarkable about it. The land to the left sloped off
into a marshy tract. The people were numerous also at this point, which
interfered with our inspection, and I know now that Oogalah, obedient to
instructions, hurried us along this section of the route—he first, the
Professor second, then Goritz, then myself, then Hopkins—until we
reached a spare, meagre country, beyond which rose the western ranges of
the Pine Tree Gredin.
The land rose steeply, but it was almost bare, the parched soil
supported a ragged growth, and in this appeared a few stunted pine
trees. Apparently, for many miles north and south, this condition
prevailed, an unhappy and strong contrast to the pine tree zone to the
east of the amphitheater, where the land bubbled with springs, was
murmurous with brooks, and where the lofty, splendid trees spread a
temple-like shade over the vast decline.
Beyond us already rose the faint shimmer of the _Perpetual Nimbus_, that
wall-like screen of vapor that enclosed Krocker Land within the
mountainous Rim that lies outside of this veil of cloud, though here, as
I have already noted, the Nimbus was wavering, inconstant, and in
patches of the distance absent. The Deer Fels country and the aquatic
and marshy plateaux were from here scarcely distinguishable. A level
tract of stony wastes was this, varied by occasional rugged hills,
depressions that glistened balefully, dead ravines barely supporting the
niggardly growth of sapless yellow plants that lurked here and there
below boulders, or sought the moisture of a few sullen pools whose
replenishment depended upon the infrequent but, we were told, furious
storms.
And the Nimbus—a paltry reproduction of the incalculable vaporous
discharges that encircle at every other point this hidden paradise. The
chasm here was indeed deep, but imperfectly continuous, and huge
horsebacks of stone piled within it formed practicable though most
broken and uneven bridges across it. The steam rising from the heated
rocks below was not visibly referable to any water supply, as on the
east, where the plunging rivers so abundantly furnished the means of
raising this colossal stage curtain, and there was absent from here that
tumultuous rolling ocean of clouds in the sky. Probably underground
courses supplied the water, for, after we had surmounted one of the
least precipitous and angular of the bridges and had gotten into the
rising territory beyond, we encountered a puzzling intricacy of profound
cracks or fissures, and we could not only hear but could see the patchy
lustres of running water in them.
From this point our guide turned abruptly northward, taking us through a
terrible desolation of rocks, with the high snow-clad peaks of the
Krocker Land Rim gloriously looming skyward on the left. I shall not
forget that strange transit. It was hard work. We carried our own
supplies, the water and a few instruments, and their weight was almost
insupportably increased by the discomforts of the harsh, inhospitable
land we traveled through, and, by some dizzying influence which began to
strain our heads with headaches, to parch our throats, and to produce a
most uncomfortable and absurd illusion of treading on air cushions. This
last hallucination made us unsteady, and after a while it pestered us so
much that we were compelled to stop at short intervals to rest.
Oogalah kept on well ahead, looking back at us every few minutes and
distrustfully shaking his head, with incessant gestures for increased
speed. We were not over anxious to hurry. The region was extraordinary
and its geologic features, as connected with this unparalleled deposit,
or vein, or lode, or whatever it was, of radium, were certainly worth
noting. And then our heads! Hopkins diverted us by his misery.
“I’d like to look inside of my cranium just now. I couldn’t begin to
tell how it feels; something, I should say, like what gunpowder men call
_deflagration_ is taking place there, popguns going off every few
minutes, with a hurdy-gurdy accompaniment in my ears and a bad taste in
my mouth.
“The Professor really ought to be very careful and avoid any extra
exertion. In a bean as full as his, there probably isn’t much room for
expansion, and I guess the right word for describing our condition is
expansion—almost unlimited. My head may seem no bigger than usual, but I
should say it had already grown large enough for distribution to a dozen
headless gentlemen, enough to give each of them a head piece of ordinary
dimensions. Whew—but this is fierce.”
The poor fellow had clapped both hands to his head as if to actually
hold it together. And with all of us the inscrutable sensations were
becoming insufferable. Goritz insisted on keeping on but we overruled
that. It was just possible that our resting a while might accustom us to
the strange influence of atmosphere, and enable us to proceed without
this torturing plague of heat and noise and dilation in our poor heads.
We sat down. Oogalah quickly discovered our reluctance, and was back
with us in a trice, gesticulating and vociferating as well, absolutely
unaffected, which brought to the suffering Yankee’s face the most
comical expression of disgust and surprise.
“I say, Erickson, this has me guessing. What do you suppose that
fellow’s made of? Rubber? Cork? Do you know I believe he’d put
electrocution on the fritz. You’d be compelled to pulverize him if you
ever expected to drive the life out of his body. One hundred yards more
of this and I’ll either join the choir invisible _ipse motu_, as they
say in the books, or just get one of you to pass me over with a wallop
on the cocoa, or a fine slit along the carotid. I believe I could go so
far as to commit _hari-kari_, and not know it. It can’t be possible that
you fellows don’t notice it.”
“Notice it!” I answered. “My head feels like a balloon. I almost wonder
I don’t float off with it. We can’t last this way. It would be a sorry
ending to this famous exploit, if we were all to burst like soap
bubbles.”
Oogalah by means of elaborate pantomime to the Professor, and a few
intelligible words to Goritz acquainted us with his assurance that a
hill about one hundred yards away would bring us relief. We struggled to
it, sick and staggering. To our amazement upon ascending it a little way
relief came, and our tormented heads sensibly shrank—so it felt—to
something like their usual volume. Then we noticed, guided by the
Professor’s acumen in such matters, that while the region was
unmistakably an igneous complex, the rocks we had passed over were
entirely granitic, and the elevation on which we now stood was a basic
olivine-peridotite, dense and black, and in some way exempt from the
radiumistic occlusions which perhaps saturated the granitic batholith
around it. I will not stop to discuss this, sir, but later we indeed
established the fact that the enormous outflow of granite lava had
brought to the surface innumerable radium bodies, distributed through it
in molecular aggregates of considerable size, and that the unseen but
voluminous discharge of the emanation so affected us, while the gabbro
dikes, containing none, afforded an impermeable flooring for our
passage.
Then, too, we were now approaching the splendid prism of light that shot
upward, yet obliquely, in a vast pulsating diffusion of a delicate
radiance that grew, as we advanced, more and more intolerable. Our
progress consisted now in crossing, as quickly as our stumbling
movements would allow, the granitic intervals that separated the ranges
of low basic hills. On these latter we regained our strength and
composure, and prepared for the succeeding dashes that carried us over
the perilous interludes. It was amazing to watch the _insouciance_ and
activity of our guide. He did not even protect his eyes. It seemed as if
some physiological peculiarity rendered him immune to the terrifying
disorders that signalized to us, instantly, the presence of these
puissant particles of radium, or else he had become so from his long
continued exposures, a theory quite incomprehensible to us.
But even to this dogged and halting march there was a limit. Oogalah
himself had enough rectitude of purpose to realize that, and perhaps too
he felt vainglorious of his superiority. He indicated almost sternly a
final towering hill, a continuation of the broken cordillera we had been
following, which should be the terminus of our exploration. We—at least
Hopkins and myself—would not have cared to overpass it. We were deadly
faint and exhausted when we reached it, and but for the magnanimous help
of the Eskimo, who carried our packs, I think we would have swooned and
fallen by the way. The Professor seemed the least susceptible to the
mysterious influence, and this amusingly vexed and confounded Hopkins.
Brute willpower and his insatiable fever of desire to obtain the
transmuting substance which raised before him the vision of boundless
wealth, kept Goritz on his feet. With the Professor it was the
energizing power of scientific curiosity. The paralyzing effect of
suffocation was really noticeable.
Well, after a few minutes’ rest, with Goritz impatient and the Professor
aflame with wonder, we started up a portentously narrow hill, and a high
one too. Oogalah pointed out its pinnacle as our destination, and then
turned westward into that dizzying and unearthly country wherein lay the
trough of radium. Around us fell the radiance of its wonderful emission,
but we found that the climbing path—it had been worn well into the rock
by previous pilgrims—clung to the eastward scarp of the hill, and was
therefore actually in shadow—a welcome relief. Perhaps five hours were
consumed in this toilsome ascent, but when we reached the last winding
trail, and had clambered to a small shelf immediately under the ragged
apex, we looked over a scene of unparalleled terribleness.
The pen of Dante or the pencil of Dore alone could have done justice to
its weird and frightful desolation, not entirely expressed in
lifelessness, but in the awful grimace in it of tortured and disfigured
matter. The blacks, purples and reds, smeared over it wrote in it a sort
of agony of disgrace and unseemliness and pain. I wonder if the
landscapes of the Moon resemble it.
For a long way in the foreground, where we saw with astonishment the
running figure of Oogalah, stretched a broken platform of white
quartzite, and through this sprang the strangest confusion of lines,
skeins, dashes and drippings of black, purple, brown, and traceable here
and there, as of the tracks of a bleeding animal or man, chained drops
of red. It was not beautiful certainly, it had no ornamental or
decorative features; it was, rather, scoriaceous and blasting.
Beyond this rugose platform rose two mounds, one ashen and white—the
Professor said it was a bleached, corroded and kaolinized granite—the
other a purplish, livid mass streaked with threads or blotches of yellow
(sulphur, the Professor thought), and these hills ran north and south,
becoming reduced to sprawling and unwholesome heaps of slaggy
consistency which ever and anon encroached on the quartzite zone and
even encumbered it, as if tossed upon it in drifts of scattered nodules.
Through the gateway, between the two first mounds, we saw even now the
form of Oogalah passing, but he was no longer erect. He was crawling on
hands and knees, and over his head hung a towel. Hopkins and myself
shuddered for him. His venturesome undertaking seemed to us _simply_
suicide. He intended to bring us each a mass of the mineral—a small
piece. When he gathered this miracle-working substance for Radiumopolis,
we were told, he first camped behind one of the peridotite hills, then
issued upon his dangerous mission, collected what he could, returned to
his camp, and for weeks kept at it until his supply was sufficient. The
store made, he removed it in the same laborious way, stage by stage,
until he came to the safer country, where he was met by numerous
assistants who transported the radium homeward.
But we could see from our elevation beyond these dead heaps, beyond,
into the vale of Acheron, as it were,
_Quam super haud ullae poterant impune volantes
Tendere iter pennis_;
a further dead valley declining into the deeper chasm from which sprang
the auroral light. This chasm was evidently indefinitely prolonged
northward; from it rose the coronation or rays which seemed converged
upon a marvelous blazing precipice on the further boundary of this
irregular, narrow, longitudinal canon. Into the canon itself it was
impossible to look. It was enclosed in the upper valley which we could
see, and which presented a spectacle of stony desolation. Its sides were
evidently precipitous on the east, and pretty generally hidden from us,
but on the west it presented to us a long, receding slope of rock palely
illuminated beneath the light streaming in a broad and thick flood over
it. These rock exposures were curiously discolored, and also curiously
spotted with glow-spots, from included radium perhaps.
Clefts or rents tore down their sides, and ragged, serpentine embrasures
interrupted the cliffs that bordered it. Black recesses contrasted with
the bright surfaces, and sharp crests (_arete_) bristled here and there
in jagged series, where the cliffs attained elevations of probably
thousands of feet. It was a vast abyss and was split more deeply by a
secondary and later fissure which had uncovered the central masses of
radium. Nowhere could we discern any evidences of aqueo-thermal
activity, no steam spirals anywhere. The vapor line was eastward along
the crack where the Perpetual Nimbus appeared. Beyond, far beyond, rose
the snowy tops, the glacier ridden summits of the Krocker Land Rim.
It was enthralling. Remember, Mr. Link, it was the night time of the
polar world, and here all was bathed in light or silhouetted in shadow,
while that Stationary Sun which filled the immense valley land with
light, imparted to it warmth; it shone in its peculiar zenith, deriving
in some way (by reflection from the crystalline walls to the west) its
replenishment of light and heat from this stupendous source of both. We
watched in a trance of amazement for hours. There were perceptible
pulsations in the emanation, and it was altogether remarkable to observe
that these were recorded in the variable sun, obviously susceptible to
these changes. Its reference (the sun’s) to the radium masses, here
uncovered, was now indisputable.
It had now in the advanced season become apparent that the earth’s
secular changes were not quite dissipated in the Krocker Land basin by
its unique feature of the Stationary Sun. For weeks it had been growing
colder, and now—to our astonishment a spectacle of dazzling beauty
relieved the singular weird terror of this lifeless scene. We saw a
gathering gloom from far away darken the peaks of the Krocker Land Rim;
it spread and became revealed as a snowstorm. A wind brushed over
us—another instant and the wide zone of delicate radiation was
transformed into an indescribably glorious firmament of stars, shifting,
dying out and renewed, and around us from the sky fell a shower of icy
particles, a flurry from the tempest that was sweeping over the distant
ranges.
Hardly had we recovered from the shock of this unexpected display when
we heard the voice and saw the form of Oogalah approaching our position,
from the opposite side of the hill. He had executed his errand and was
returning, and the expanded bag in his hands showed that he had
accomplished his purpose. We had seen him disappear in the defiles
beyond the crumbling hills. He showed the strain of his work and the
effect of the unnatural influence of that exposure, but in a short time,
after resting, his strength and composure returned, and he was ready for
the home journey. He afterwards told me he had never looked into the
chasm, or chasms, whence the radium emissions or radiations proceeded.
He had not cared to. Once on the field of his dangerous occupation,
groveling to the ground, he moved cautiously over the rocky flooring,
and extracted the mineral masses from the veins wherein they seemed to
be segregated, _hammering them out_. Formerly he had been able to pick
the nodules up loose from the granite ledges. That was no longer
possible. He had exhausted the supply of free lumps, and now he was
compelled to practice this superficial mining. He knew that the surface
finds were abundant further down the slopes of the defile, but he
dreaded the experiment of entering further into the disorganizing
influences of the lethal chamber. He had once been rash in that way and
had swooned, and only the brush of some cavorting wind current from
above, such as we had ourselves felt, had sufficiently revived him to
enable him to regain his feet and to escape.
On our return Goritz monopolized Oogalah. He plied him with questions,
and evinced the most excited interest in his work. Poor fellow—the
poison of the lust for gold, _sacri fames auri_, had entered his mind
and heart. A magnificent man, Mr. Link, sturdy, resourceful,
remorselessly self forgetful, and most simple in tastes, a lovable
brother, if ever there was one, but sir, never the same after that
unlucky find of the gold belt, when we crossed the first barrier of the
Krocker Land Rim.
He became secretive, avaricious, moody, impatient, a delirious dreamer,
and then most unaccountably suspicious. It was a revolution in character
that would have puzzled an expert in psychology or nerves to explain. To
me it was a pretty bad shock, and when at last the unhappy man—but let
that wait. It displays a measure of the pernicious power of the
temptation of money to corrupt (the word in Goritz’s case is
misapplied), to alter nature and temperament, and all because he
expected to enjoy its pleasures in the world we had left; for gold in
Krocker Land for any of ordinary uses, like ours, was literally not much
more desirable than so much earth. To the Radiumopolite it administered,
it is true, a mild esthetic pleasure. There was some recondite
recognition in his ingenuous nature of its beauty at least, and its
unchangeableness. To the rulers, the doctors, the chiefs, it may have
seemed more; at any rate they devoted it to the purposes of distinction
and religion.
Goritz on our way back was most impatient to examine the strange mineral
Oogalah had brought us, but the man refused to let him, intimating,
quite fiercely, that it should be distributed among us when we got back
to the Capitol, and not before. This refusal really arose from his
intention of giving the Professor the largest piece. As Hopkins averred,
the Professor had Oogalah “_buffaloed_” an epitomized substitute,
certainly not intelligible, for a lengthier explanation of the
Professor’s extraordinary influence over the man.
I remember we were all silent on our way back; we were dazed, and the
journey had been rapid and arduous. The Professor himself had indeed,
for weeks past, neglected to speculate on the wonders about us, and we
now seldom received from him those lectures with which he had first
instructed us. Perhaps he was overwhelmed by the incredible realization
of the prophecies he had made to us on the sylvan banks (how far away
and distant they seemed) of the beautiful fiord in Norway, under a
summer sky.
Once again within the charmed borders of the Valley of Rasselas we found
the highway deserted. It was a contrast to the eager multitudes that had
escorted us when we left. Past the mysterious swamps on the right from
which, at one moment, I thought I heard a queer sucking wail or bark, as
of some big animal, and on into the city, and yet no encounters! Past
the bathhouses, over the wide serpent pasture with its populous cribs,
up the wide western terrace of steps of the Golden Capitol, and not one
welcoming face—only the listless snakes sluggishly gliding or coiled in
varnished mats.
To these omnipresent, pervading inhabitants we had become, in a manner
of speaking, accustomed; we found them in the streets of the city, and
through the courtyard of the Palace, over the parapets, ensconced in
niches in the walls, rising hideously from the pavement of the inner
halls, or unexpectedly and unwholesomely slipping over the mats of our
rooms, or dripping like dark thongs from their cornices. Hopkins
detested them.
“I tell you, Erickson,” he would exclaim, “an externalized _delirium
tremens_ of this sort is worse than drink. Beats me how people ever came
to think well of these critters. They’re the most painfully unpleasant
denizens of this earth that I have ever encountered—_to me_. Tastes
differ of course, but I can’t help feeling that nobody really likes ’em,
and pretences to the contrary are just plain lies, or the deponents have
never enjoyed the advantages of a public school education, a hot bath,
towels, soap, the morning newspaper, pure food, clean shirts, and the
white things that generally go to make up white civilization—in other
words, Alfred, they’re just savages like these big and little demons all
around us.”
“How about Ziliah?” I might ask mischievously.
The handsome fellow would smile bewitchingly. “Say Erickson, if Ziliah
and I ever go to housekeeping we’ll cut out the snakes—_I will_—and I’ll
start up Anti-Snake missions, until we get the people converted into
regular Christians—the real Irish sort. Then I’ll come the St. Patrick
act on them, and exterminate the varmints, and coming generations,
hereabouts, will call me blessed.”
We were somewhat more astonished to enter the western doorway of the
Capitol and still find no one, but we could see darkly through its dingy
length—the radium lamps were covered—and noted a crowd outside of its
eastern entrance. At the same time something like beating cymbals and
tanging drums came to our ears, and then unmistakably the shouts of
people.
“They’ve come back,” shouted Oogalah in his lingo, and he rushed past
us, mad with expectation.
We followed him with almost equal precipitancy, and the bag of radium
mineral that had cost us all this effort was forgotten. Oogalah dropped
it, we neglected it in the sudden excitement, and—_it was never again
found_.
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