GORITZ’S DEATH AND THE GOLD MAKERS
I skip the coronation and enthronement of King Hlmath Bjornsen of
Krocker Land in Radiumopolis, because the King asked me to do so in my
last interview with him. He wishes to reserve its features for his great
book. He thinks that the ceremonies, taken in connection with many other
considerations prove that the Krocker Land culture ties together a
number of ancestral ethnic cults, and that there is good reason to
believe that the mixture of semi-savage practices, the archaic or
nepionic status of society, the advanced language, the peculiar
acquisitions of the patrician class, their specialized though limited
knowledge, the vitality of the serpent-monster worship taken in
connection with the biological fact of a partial, at any rate, survival
of Mesozoic conditions in limited topographic basins, as seen in the
Saurian Sea, in the chain of swamps beyond the Pool of Oblation, and
especially in the undeniable and formidable fact of the existence of the
Crocodilo-Python, an animal quite unlike any known saurian, indicate
what he terms the concatenated debris of a series of overlaid
civilizations and that its complete interpretation will carry us back to
the probable origin of _Homo sapiens_ and the Garden of Eden, restricted
of course to a purely naturalistic conception. (Erickson took a long
breath, and then—he was off again.)
The geological features of this polar pit, its stepped or terraced
conformation, the extraordinary igneous activity revealed beneath it and
the disclosure herein of immense endomorphic radium deposits, combined
with unparalleled meteorological phenomena are also reserved by the
Professor, the King, for personal and elaborate treatment. With the
especial opportunities now available the Prof—the King (It’s difficult
for me to be consistent in alluding to my old friend) will prosecute
inquiry, so far as his official duties permit, but through me, Mr. Link,
he most fervently implores scientific recognition of the facts so far
recorded in this narrative, and immediate scientific interposition in
his behalf and cooperation for his assistance. (Erickson again paused
and allowed the full meaning of his elongated statements to penetrate my
purely secular mind.)
However, this in passing, Mr. Link. I will recur to it. Let me resume my
story, omitting under the foregoing stipulations any description of the
Professor’s enthronement. I am indeed approaching the moment of my own
hazardous dash from Krocker Land for the outer world.
Goritz, I said, had disappeared. It seems he had not been seen for many
_settas_—setta is equivalent to about twelve hours. Hopkins and I had
been away scouring the countryside, and knew nothing of Goritz’s
whereabouts. I have already hinted at his restlessness, moodiness, and
his unceasing hunt for gold. Latterly this had become changed into an
intense eagerness to revisit the radium country with Oolagah to collect
radium.
We had not yet seen the process of transmutation, certain as we were as
to its accomplishment and knowledge of the same among the
Radiumopolites, a knowledge probably limited to the doctors. Goritz had
a theory as to the illimitable power of radium to effect this
conversion. He was mistaken. He was dissatisfied with the pieces we had
been given—oxidized lumps holding the unchanged metal in their
centers—and was always teasing Oogalah to take him again to the radium
valley or chasm. Oogalah refused. I think he did not relish Goritz’s
company. Now Hopkins and I believed Goritz harbored the intention to
gather his belongings at a favorable moment, mostly the gold objects and
the radium, and, trusting blindly in his great strength, experience, and
resources, to force his way back to the Krocker Land Rim, regain the
coast, hunt up the naphtha launch and possibly make some attempt to sail
back to Point Barrow. It was sheer madness. We had had few occasions to
argue it with him, as he rather avoided us, and his secretiveness and
stealthy activity strengthened our suspicions. Hopkins half feared the
unfortunate man was losing his mind.
[Illustration:
GORITZ’S DEATH
]
But when we learned of his absence—we were all rather marked men now in
Radiumopolis and our goings and comings were minutely noticed—I
suspected at once he had tried to get to the radium fields alone and had
been lost or destroyed there. Taking Oogalah, now acting under orders,
Hopkins and I started out. We reached the peridotite hills which
afforded us such welcome relief against the inordinate misery of our
heads, that arose from the powerful emanations of the region of the
granite ledges. No traces of our missing friend appeared. Oogalah left
us, passing through the gateway between the sulphur patches, and made
straight for the edge of the cliffside that broke down into the
unapproachable and impossible crevice. Beyond the farthest point he
dared to penetrate lay the prostrate body of Antoine Goritz, our former
leader, dead. Oogalah could see him plainly, but he hesitated to try to
reach him, and it would have been impossible for him alone to have
carried this youthful giant back. Goritz’s head was towards Oogalah
coming from the east. He had fallen headlong, a little crumpled up, as
if in convulsions when he fell, and in his hands, still clutched in an
irretractable deathgrip, were two lumps of radium.
Sorrowfully Hopkins and I turned back, followed by the mute but
wondering Eskimo. We could not possibly have recovered the body then,
but we hoped to later. We had already heard that the workers in radium,
the Gold Makers, were like Oogalah immunized or less sensitive to its
paralyzing influence, and with some of these men we hoped the recovery
could be made. We noticed on this sad errand that our own susceptibility
had changed, that it deterred us less, just as for months past the
irritation of the eyes from the peculiar light of the land had passed
away, which before, in the Deer Fels, even in the Pine Tree Gredin, had
afflicted us. So, reluctantly we returned, fully assured by Oogalah that
with assistance from some of the gold makers the body could be
withdrawn. And that, sir, partially led to our second visit to the
village of the Gold Makers.
That gold was made by some miraculous power, aided by some peculiar
skill in the Radiumopolites, we had convinced ourselves, before we
reached that city. Since then the spectacle of the Capitol, the apparent
extravagance of the use of gold in decoration and in apparel, and even
in the appurtenances of the rooms and homes of the officers of the city,
the shockingly hideous Crocodilo-Python effigies on the palace, and that
impossible, realistic creation of the Serpent-Throne in which the
Professor sat at the time of his triumphant coronation, and Ziliah’s
story and the equally credible narrations of Oogalah confirmed
specifically our suspicions. But we had never seen it made, nor even
found in the industries of the city any trace of its manufacture. That
the odd encounter of ours with the sphalerite in the limestone cave of
the Deer Fels, when the convocation of little men drifted down from the
sky, borne by those incommensurable balloons (and, by the way, we had
never since seen a balloon in use or idle) had something to do with gold
making, we were positive.
Since our arrival and establishment in the city we had heard of the Gold
Makers. It was for them that Oogalah explored the radium fields near the
Crater of Everlasting Light. Oogalah told us most of what we learned
about them. They were a different people again from either the Eskimo or
the Hebrew type in the city of Radiumopolis, and the Valley of Rasselas.
They lived in a secluded community many miles away from Radiumopolis,
and seldom visited the city, though they occasionally intermarried with
the comely Eskimo girls or the larger women of the small race. When we
inquired the cause of their isolation Oogalah said the _mines_ were
where they were to be found, and the burial grounds.
The last named excited our wonder, but Oogalah was vague on the subject
and seemingly uninterested. He did exhibit some enthusiasm over his
recollections of the wildness and beauty of the country where the Gold
Makers lived and worked, and mentioned a mighty river there. This was
the river that issued from the Canon of Promise, the effluent from the
Saurian Sea, which, as I have said, again turned westward and through
another savage defile entered the Kara Sea. That river I named
“_Homeward Bound_,” for by it I came out.
Well, the Professor, after his accession, expressed the strongest desire
to see the Gold Makers and their country, and said that we all must
accompany him. For the Professor had acquired a little knowledge of the
language, and with me as interpreter he got on famously, and told the
Council of wise men that he was writing a book about them, and after
they had mastered the idea, for among their other trivialities they had
no books, no writings of any sort, they took to it immensely. This
appeal to their vanity—megalomania literally and figuratively—was a
great stroke. Bjornsen will find out all their knowledge before he
abdicates.
So it very soon materialized that we should be shown the Gold Makers.
(This was some time before Goritz’s death.) It was a picturesque trip. I
shall never forget it, and for good reasons. It started me on my way
home.
The Professor, Goritz, Hopkins, myself, and the chief men of the Senate,
Javan, Put, Hul, Peleg and Hadad, made up the party with the guard,
drivers and a few attendants. We went in their odd wooden-wheeled
jaunting cars, pulled by the very lively and entertaining rams.
It would form an appealing and pleasant study for me to describe the
Junta of Radiumopolis—those thirty humorous little figures, with the
sedate, old, and variously featured faces, a galaxy of physiognomies
that embraced good nature, cunning, sullenness, querulous self
importance, feebleness, gravity, benevolence (more in the seeming than
in the reality, I take it) spitefulness, apathy, fussiness, dullness,
alertness, sympathy, cruelty, perhaps sternness, and above all a
mannerism of profundity unspeakably amusing. Their physique is hopeless,
for they have pin bodies and have pin heads, as Hopkins described them,
and their off-the-center look with their top-heavy heads and bowed
shoulders make a mannikin effect, ludicrous and grotesque. All are dark.
But while we are on our way to the Gold Makers, through the open
flowering meads and broad pastures and arable acres of the Rasselas
Valley, I will try very briefly—_in staccato_—to put before you Javan,
Put, Hul, Peleg and Hadad.
Javan, the father of Ziliah, was by far the best looking, and generally
the best formed. His face was really handsome, and his beard made no
false claim to being one. It was full and flowing. His eyes were large,
glowing and passionate. He smiled too much, and a “few crowns and
bridges made from home material would have benefited his mouth organ,”
said Hopkins. His cheeks were hollow and pale, but the positive beauty
of the broad white brow seemed to compensate for all other defects.
Put was a rather tall man, under the restricted sense of long and short
as applied to these gentlemen, and nearly bald. His nose was a more
modest creation that those of most of his colleagues, but his mouth, in
so small a face, was portentous. Nature by some ineptitude had almost
omitted his ears, and his eyes had a glassy and fixed stare (when not
concealed by the official goggles), but the forlorn remnant of some
forgotten smile had become fastened in his face, which actually helped
the artificial effect of his eyes to the point of making you almost
believe he was of wood or plaster, and not of flesh and blood. Hopkins
quoted the Bab Ballad verse, which runs,
“‘The imp with yell unearthly-wild,
Threw off his dark enclosure:
His dauntless victim looked and smiled
With singular composure.
For hours he tried to daunt the youth,
For days indeed, but vainly—
The stripling smiled! to tell the truth
_The stripling smiled inanely_.’”
Hull was somewhat shorter but he was a distinct analogue to Put, with
most of Put’s eccentricities, softened, by no means to the point of
extinction, but so far as to make him a laughable simulacrum.
Peleg was the best example of this small Semitic people in the thirty
Areopagites. He was really muscular in a way, well developed, with a
hawk’s eye, and a severity that would require, I surmised, very little
provocation to turn it into ferocity. His head seemed less ponderous, he
carried it straighter, and a deeper glow of redness in his face imparted
to him a humanity denied by the parchment-like texture of his fellows.
His beard too, was full and his hair really rich and luxuriant. I think
he would have proven a firm friend.
Hadad was an anomaly. He was fat. Hopkins called him “the Alderman”; he
was the presumably happy possessor of a so-called corporation (as
Hopkins put it, “a Trust individualized as an abdomen”), and his voice
and laugh were musical. Generally I don’t insist on the association, but
I have found it noticeable. Hadad had pop-eyes and an incorrigible habit
of spitting. He seemed loquacious, and he usually could be found in the
midst of any discussion.
This conventionalized description might produce a wrong impression.
These little men did not dress in coat, vest and pants. Figure them in
yellow or blue tunics falling well below the knees, sometimes in a sort
of violet cassock, either bound with the rococo gold belt and its
conspicuous gold buckle, with leggings or buskins, with the beehive hat,
and all this apparel on state occasions loaded with gold chains. You can
conceive that they presented a most unusual appearance, even one of some
dignity, though it must be confessed their relatively large noses
undeniably depraved it with a vaudeville effect. Hopkins never could get
over this impression.
“Alfred, if I could ship ’em, as they stand, on the hoof so to speak, to
New York!—sign a contract as manager, and bill ’em for a tour of the
States, my financial horizon would be cloudless. Eh?”
The defects of these diminutive people seemed increased by contrast with
the taller race, who were well made, normal in every way, and whose
women were most pleasing. And as regards the ladies of the small type,
they were much bigger than the men—another fact to the disadvantage of
their undersized partners—and often, as with Ziliah, they were superb.
(The matrimonial question was already looming ominously prominent for
King Bjornsen, and his counsellors, I knew, were solicitous for his
royal appreciation of their daughters—“one, or several or all,” said
Hopkins.)
And _there_ was the great and glorious land of the Gold Makers. As we
approached, its diversity and contrasts became excitingly apparent. And,
as in myself dawned the scheme of making it the point of my departure,
or ESCAPE, to that great outer world from which like thrown pebbles
Chance—not in this case a blind goddess—had dropped us into this sealed
and secluded lesser world, it assumed a veritable splendor. Far off the
shimmering agitation of the broad stream that poured its accumulated
flood down a long grade from the Canon of Promise, in a vast crosscut
through the Pine Tree Gredin, sparkled in our view. Hills, low and
sparsely wooded, rose from the floor of the Valley of Rasselas—we had
already reached the latter’s northwestern limit—between them were flat
and grassed interspaces, and in the foreground a savannah-like expanse,
quite treeless, and then far to the right the clustering villages of the
Gold Makers. Obviously the river dominated the scene, with that far
distant background of indefinite elevations outlining the northern
concentric bulwarks of Krocker Land, beyond which a good glass might
detect the shroud of the Perpetual Nimbus, and yet farther, infinitely
removed, but seen in presence if not in form, the snowy or ruddy
pinnacles of Krocker Land Rim. The river before it reached the pastoral
foreground had recovered its calm, and only in its full tide did the
gliding patches of foam, and here and there a larger, more disquieted
wave, indicate the turmoil and torture of its descent. The road drew
near to its banks. Within our view it turned westward, and we could see
that it again passed outward between the walls of a rugged and imposing
defile. Could I trust myself to its impetuous current, and find over its
boiling waters an avenue of escape? So I mused, as we jolted along and
as, to me, the scenery brought back long forgotten pictures of the Vale
of Llangollen in Wales.
Scarcely were we in sight of the villages than some of their occupants
hurried to meet us. When they came closer, to our wonder, we found them,
as Oogalah had described, of a different racial type from the rest of
the Radiumopolites and very unmistakably Samoyedes, men from the vast
Siberian uplands, physically distinguishable by the broad faces and
pyramidal skulls of the Turanian family. These nomads of the treeless
fringes of Siberia, so far as indications showed or inquiry elicited,
had been in a small company, wrecked on the Arctic coast of Krocker Land
in some dateless past. They had made their way into the Valley of
Rasselas, had established themselves without molestation in this
restricted corner, and had then—how, remained an unanswered or insoluble
question—come under subjection of the Radiumopolites. When the peculiar
industry which now engaged them had developed was as indefinite in its
relations to what went before or followed after it as the advent of the
supernatural(?) stranger who had taught Radiumopolis the process of gold
manufacture itself.
It seemed however that at an early time these Samoyedes had been
appropriated as workers in this singular art, because of their
discovered immunity from the deleterious effects or influences of the
hypostatic element.
I saw men and women fishing in the broad river, and to my amazement
found their boats were literally rafts—wooden logs bound together by
ropes or thongs of leather and fibre. Hardly had I perceived this before
the thought and hope flashed through my mind that on some such vehicle
of transit I could trust myself to the stream, and that it was most
likely that these hardy highlanders could give me the information I now
needed as to the channel, direction, debouchment, and navigableness of
the noble water in its course to the coast.
One of the strange idiosyncracies of the Radiumopolites, in spite of
their attested skill in workmanship, their intelligence and emotional
liveliness, was their obtuseness in geographic matters, or better,
_numbness_. I don’t think they ever questioned the fact of their
absolute finality both in place and in existence. Outside of the distant
Krocker Land Rim was nothing but that blockade of ice, of which they had
heard—the gold belt found by Goritz was a token of an aeronautic (?)
reconnaissance—and outside of that, if speculation in their minds
suggested the query, was just nothing again. As the Professor said, “The
centripetal tendency of many primitive cultures was well understood, but
in this case it was pivotal on a new topographic conformation that
forbade migration.” I don’t suppose it ever occurred to a Radiumopolite
to even ask what might become of that river cutting across this corner
of his Eden-like valley. They had become _static_, and what they knew
and what they enjoyed never changed. In house building, in weaving, in a
rude artistry of design, in agriculture, in brick and tile and pot
making, in their religion, in their games, they had attained a
development that gave them happiness. And that ended it. It was
Inca-like, or Mayan, Toltecan, Aztecan, or any of the American cultures
which inhabit one spot, flourishing within it and never exceeding it,
like the phenomena of centralization in plants and animals. And yet what
questions this same culture suggested to a less individualized student,
that diminutive Semitic race, the tree and serpent survival, and this
unique oligarchy of little magnates!
Arrived within the precincts of the Samoyedian village, there was a
bustling reception from dogs and children. These were the first dogs we
had seen. Then a slow emergence of women and older men from the low
briquette abodes followed. Almost without noticing their salutations,
Javan, Put, Hul, Peleg, Hadad, leading the way, took us through the
scanty settlement to a series of barracks, also made of burned clay
briquettes, and entered the first one. On long rude tables were heaped,
in this armory, piles of _galena_ (lead sulphide), and the glistening
mineral was in nodules, free and clear, or enclosed in a pulverulent
limestone. It was the duty here of the workmen to extract the mineral
from its matrix, pound it into dust, and separate it in small wicker
baskets. It was then carried away in these receptacles, by men, to other
buildings. In another house or shed _Sphalerite_ (zinc sulphide) was
similarly treated. From these preparatory stages we passed to the radium
storehouse. This was practically a cave dug in the side of the hill,
where the material, gathered by Oogalah was kept, and which we were not
permitted to enter. The radium masses were thrown into this place
through an opening above, a sort of chimney, and removed below by an
opening which permitted their extrication by stone hoes. As they were
drawn out they were taken in baskets to the Mixing House. The critical
work was effected here.
In every respect it was like the other workshops, but in it the workmen
did not remain more than two hours at a time, the “shifts,” as we would
say, being then changed. At one end of this building the radium nodules
were cleared of their dull coatings of oxide. Instantly the metallic
nuclei, which was malleable to a slight degree, but which soon developed
brittleness, were pushed towards other workmen, who hammered them with
stone mallets or hammers until they were broken or splintered into
grains or small angular pieces. This triturated metal was pushed forward
again with slate knives to the last group of workers to whom the basket
of pulverized lead and zinc mineral had been brought.
These operators divided the broken radium into lots and poured over each
lot the contents of a single basket. The heap thus formed of the
commingled radium and sulphide was then drawn to the edge of the stone
and brick table and carefully scraped into a leathern or woven apron or
bag and tied up. From this house these bundles were carried away to a
distant upland which furnished a favorable soil for their burial; they
were deposited in holes, five to ten feet deep, the variation in depth
having some reference to the size of the bundles. These burials were
then not disturbed for a length of time which corresponded to about a
year of our time. At the expiration of that period they were exhumed and
examined. Fortunately we were enabled to see this stage of the process
also. The bundle being taken out of its sepulture is opened on a table
and its contents spread out in a thin layer. From the granular
commixture the gold particles are carefully picked out, and are then
collected for welding by pressure into larger pieces.
Certainly nothing could have been more amazing than the exhibition thus
offered of the transmuting power of this wizard element. The
transmutation is never complete, that is, the original mass of galena or
sphalerite is never wholly converted into gold. The residues are
reinterred with the almost unaltered radium, and after six months are
again examined. The second crop of gold grains invariably is less, and
after a third trial the mixture is carefully freed from the radium and
the unaffected sulphide thrown out. The radium thus used is kept apart
from the fresher supplies of radium whose potency is always stronger.
But the partially exhausted reagent is saved, and used over and over
again with fresh ores. For, just as the radium suffers a diminution of
efficacy, so does the sulphide lose its susceptibility to its influence.
This necessarily involves considerable sorting, parceling, labeling and
adjustment. Superintendents watch the operations of each workhouse, and
the new and old supplies of the radium and of the ores are successfully
recorded and mutually apportioned, as experience dictates. The lead
sulphide yields the larger percentage of transmuted gold.
In all instances the crop of gold is small, and its accumulation slow,
so that the rich displays at Radiumopolis must have represented the
result of many years of this peculiar labor. Javan told me that the
yield of gold was steadily diminishing because of the difficulty of
obtaining radium, and the almost exhausted condition of the lead and
zinc sulphide mines. Then he told me of a possible new replenishment of
the latter from deposits far beyond the pine tree forest to the east.
The Professor, Hopkins, and myself exchanged an astute smile of
understanding as did also Goritz, though less intelligibly. We recalled
the flying trip of the doctors, and the radium-lighted cave in the Deer
Fels. The mines of sulphide in the limestone hills of the Gold Makers’
country are of the types familiar to the miners of the same mineral in
Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa.
With what wonder stricken faces the Professor, Hopkins, Goritz and I
gazed upon the flattened piles of sulphide ore and radium, after the
long-buried mixture was taken out of the ground in whose seclusion the
miraculous effect had indisputably been produced. The lead-gray glint of
the ore made more conspicuous the scattered dust of gold amongst it,
with particles cohering to half converted lumps of galena. And our
wonder transcended words when we were led into an adjoining room where
the gold detritus was hammered into sizeable bits, and these again
compacted into sticks or nodules, while on the shelves surrounding this
apartment, the collected masses lay in bewildering confusion. Aladdin’s
Lamp seemed almost less insupportably incredible.
* * * * *
It was on the occasion of the enforced second—but much desired—visit,
when we besought the services of the Samoyedes to recover the body of
our lost friend, that I again studied, more closely, the chances of the
river liberating me from the increasingly unendurable imprisonment. A
few of the hardened Samoyedes were brought back with us, after this
errand of mercy, to Radiumopolis, and with Oogalah they recovered the
body of Goritz. I think the Council would have been pleased to have
instituted a special Crocodilo-Python festival, and delivered the poor
fellow’s body to the horrible denizens of the neighboring swamps, but
King Bjornsen forbade that sternly, and it caused some unpleasantness.
It was another indication to me of the inevitable “blow-up,” as Hopkins
called it, of our amicable relations with these Radiumopolites, and the
increasing urgency of my effecting my escape, to bring to my friends the
means of their possible extrication. Under the pretence of returning
Goritz to the sky, from which (with us) he had come, we secretly buried
him in the valley, and there he lies today.
It was something of a _contre-temp_ to have Goritz die at all. It gave a
rather second-hand and made-up look to our claims to have come from the
heavens, and to the inquiring minds of our enemies supplied undesirable
data for starting grave doubts as to our authenticity—still another
danger lurking in our path, or, as Hopkins gloomily put it, “another
nail in our coffins.”
Our friend was King indeed, but the enthusiasm that had carried him to
that eminence lacked permanence. It could not be rooted in racial
consanguinity, it was probably constantly decried by the little doctors,
and the Professor, to quote the epigrammatic Hopkins, was a “poor
mixer.” That last word unveiled a multitude of perils.
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