LHATTO--THE WOMAN.
Ageless woman! The beckoning centuries seem to run before her tireless
energies, still stretching forward the span of her sublime motherhood,
still exacting the tribute of her sons and daughters to meet the needs
of History!
She becomes in retrospect the origin of human life, the vast
procreative source of all civilization and all progress, and from her
bosoms, clutched by the fixed hand of infancy, flows the milk that has
formed the tissues of all known human annals.
Prophecy dwells upon her head, for from her proceed the nations of
the earth. Poetry and Drama surround her, for she, in her evocative
charm, haunts the innermost chambers of Desire, and it is her touch
that lights the fires, else unseen, upon each altar of Passion, of
Aspiration, of Revelry, of Joy.
Nature is her antitype, and in Nature as in a mirror she sees the
multiplied reflections of her own beneficence and her own fertility.
She rules in the vestiture of Man’s Empress, and the flood of time yet
bears upon its tides the meanings of her presence and her powers.
Immortal Woman! in whose dowry Intention has placed all things
beautiful and tender, around whose neck hang the prayers of men, and
from whose eyes shine the rewards of men; she who by a welcome paradox
makes her weakness the unmastered ruler of men, and whose promises are
the last incentives to their ambition.
In the metaphors of Revelation she stands revealed as the victim of
her own surrender to enjoyment, and through a miraculous genesis of
life she is enthroned upon the seat of Mercy, as the vehicle of Man’s
restoration.
And this Primal Woman? Shall such panegyric belong to her? She stands
upon the threshold. Behind her the depths and mists of Oblivion--before
her Man’s Empire over Life. Let us see.
As we watch her thus beaming and looking upward, she springs forward
into a patch of light made by the sun’s descending rays through some
aperture in the boughs of the high trees. Her beauty is revealed.
She is not tall, but the tense vigor of her muscles, all uncovered
and shining in the sun like a golden bronze, gives her superb frame,
modelled with a charm of outline born of exercise, an imposing
expression. She is not voluptuous, but the graded and blending
surfaces of her body--softly tinted with that indescribable color
that becomes an embrowned bronze, alive in the shadows, and a lustrous
metallic sheen in the high lights--form a picture of enticement. The
swollen excrescences of breast and hips, repulsive to all adroit and
delicate desire, are replaced by refined outlines, sexual in meaning,
but restrained to the limits of sculptural modesty. Her neck sweeps
deliciously upward from the bare shoulders, imprinted with the kisses
of the sun, bearing a head, perhaps small but exquisitely adjusted,
and displaying features puzzling in their type, and suggestive of the
subtle union of the American, the Negroid and the Malayan.
The nose aquiline, but thinly ridged and faintly expanding into nervous
and sensitive nostrils, the lips full and pouting, yet short, the eyes
half limpid and dark, but carrying flashes of defiance, the forehead
low, the cheeks oval and delicately hollowed, the ears small and just
obviously inverted, and the chin abrupt and firmly built; the whole
composition lending itself to a range of expressions from languor to
anger and repudiation. Nor was it deprived of less extreme shades of
meaning. As she stood in the light, her eyebrows arched in attention,
the smooth skin between them disturbed by a few lines of indecision
and her lips parted in expectation, she leaned forward, and a look of
infinite interest, a strange pained thoughtfulness arose in her face.
She raised her hands as if in oblation to the light above her, her
tumultuous black hair streamed down her naked back, and she sighed.
The poise was perfect, the aesthetic unity complete. Gold bands held
her ankles, gold links were upon her wrists and ears, a white shell
comb was inserted in her hair, and an apron of fox skin hung before
her. Such was Lhatto, the girl of the Sierras, before human history
began, the Woman of the Ice Age, living in the warm Fair Land in North
America.
We are not concerned in proving the reasonableness of this fair
vision. Eve has been made beautiful by Art. Why not Lhatto by Fiction?
And why not beautiful indeed? Child of Nature, nurtured amidst its
beauties, trained in the many ways of earning life from its free gifts,
dispensing with all artifices of living, gathering strength, and color,
form, feeling and passion from the splendor of Nature’s panorama and
action. The wonderfulness of such panorama and action was in this
temperate and tropic and frigid zone unsurpassed. Why not find in these
first Earthlings some impassioned instance--accident it might be--of
Creation’s early effort to reflect,--as if in sportive prophecy of all
Woman should be thereafter,--the approaching terrors and glories of her
reign in history and story, in play and legend, poetry and music.
Lhatto stood an instant longer in the sun. Then, as if regulating her
movements by some carefully conceived purpose, she turned back to the
sylvan camp and drew from a rude receptacle, fashioned from the trunk
of a tree, a more complete covering, seized a harpoon-like weapon
from the ground, crowded a pemmican mass of cooked grain and smoked
meat into a woven basket, rudely ornamented with figures, and turning
backward spoke to the moving figures of men and women far off in the
perspective of the forest.
Her voice belonged to and fitted all her natural charm. It was musical
and jubilant with woody sweetness, and a lingering ring, like the
melting and penetrating calls of birds. It made her more beautiful.
“To the water,” she cried, and the passive figures, scarcely arrested
in their toil, answered back with murmurs of assent. Lhatto turned
again, and Atalanta-like, sped down the path that started at the upland
and ended on the distant shore.
She carried her clothing and the food basket, pressed in a bundle close
beneath her left arm, while her hand held the harpoon, her right hand
was raised before her and like a Grecian herald, “she ran swiftly.”
She soon reached the edge of the upland where the path descended to
the valley and the lake. Here her agility and sure footedness were
seriously tested. The broken descent was a series of intervals between
rough and angular blocks of stone, slippery with lichens or moss, and
now wet from some recent shower. The path with long interruptions where
no evidence of its direction could be seen, was detected by worn spots
or traces, upon the larger blocks. Lhatto seemed to exert no thought
upon the selection of her way. With light feet she sprang from point
to point, and running along the narrow edge of some decumbent mass of
rock, suddenly dropped from its side to a lower level without volition,
so vigorous and just was her instinct of place and action.
She had reached the valley; the high grass nurtured by some favorable
influence reached half way up to her own height and pressed upon her.
Its swaying ran in radial waves outward from her vanishing figure,
as her laggard arm, now thrown behind her, swept its mobile crests.
Suddenly she emerged on the dome beyond, bare or scantily dressed in
verdure, and here her figure became instantly and superbly visible.
A wind blowing freshly from the sea, and now chilling and raw, brushed
backward the glistening hair, color throbbed in her cheeks with a
deeper dye, her bosom pulsating with the efforts of her unusual
exertion rose and fell, and to her eyes had risen some suppressed
emotion that gave them brilliancy; her lips, after a moment’s pause
while her uplifted head, with a sort of statuesque elation, greeted
the blue sky, opened suddenly with song.
Or was it but a cry, a weird inchoate yearning for music’s melody and
rhythm?
It rose upon the air of that immeasurably distant day, and floated out
over the waves that were making their own rudimental symphonies on the
lonely shores. It rose upward and floated backward to the forests where
the birds in myriad ways were beating the same air, on which it came,
with song. It was part of the intuition of all feeling things to put
their feelings into the subtle measure of music. And she who sang had
come upon earth before civilization or science or art, in formal types,
had yet been dreamed of. It was the prototype of folk song, or nursery
croon, of legendary melodies, of national anthem, the song of Lhatto,
on the outskirts of all regulated thought and invention.
Imagine--all you who behind foot-lights, and in front of crescent
platforms, hear the manifold choruses that shall in some way, sometimes
inscrutable, sometimes clear, interpret for you feeling or fancy, that
use all the sound resources of orchestras straining in all imaginable
ways to construct new fabrics of notes, building in echoes of old
tunes, forgotten lays, choral unions of tones, and hurrying from grave
to gay, from slow to quick, in the laborious compilation that rises
with elastic buoyancy, until the last chord crashes or sobs, and the
listener departs numbed and despairing--imagine Lhatto on the door
step of human time singing to the morning skies.
Yes! it was a song. It was articulate. This earliest woman had wedded
music to words, and both, in her, perhaps from still more venerable
traditions, or from the creative genius of merely strong feeling, were
signals of man’s primal worship of the sea, and were intelligible. Thus
she sang:--
THE SONG OF LHATTO.
Stay waves. Hold wind. Enough!
Enough! The fish swims on your face,
The fish swims in the deep water,
The clouds swim with the fish,
The sun buries his head there too.
My boat hurts your face,
Your face will eat my boat,
It will swim with the fish
And the clouds, and the sun.
Stop waves. Stop wind. Enough!
Enough!
Let me swim too with the fish,
And the clouds and the sun,
Hurry waves, hurry wind.
The boat I make wounds the
Face of the water. Enough! Enough!
Perhaps it was not music, nor poetry, nor sense, but as the voice
shrilly mounted the sloping rocks and called from all their crannies,
their hiding nooks, their inviolate grottoes the--till then--unused
echoes, the Woman leaped and danced, her bundle dropped from her
arm, and with hands outstretched to the ocean, her face radiant and
laughing, she swung to and fro, pacing and stamping the ground in a
circle.
Then a stranger thing happened, and something more grave and beautiful.
Lhatto knelt and bowed to the far-away sea, and her voice became
silent. So the Woman there in the Earth’s Dawn begat music and
poetry and worship; the mists from the ocean spread about her, the
swarming voices of the day entered her ears, and perchance far down
in her perturbed soul, by some skill of the Great Intention, she saw
and heard the hurrying centuries rampant with life, pregnant with
passion, furious with ambition, prostrate--as she had been before the
sea--prostrate before a Woman’s form, and voice, and soul.
Lhatto rose, resumed her burden and hastened to the edge of the cliff
where the path abruptly ended in a disjointed natural ladder of stone
leading aimlessly, and, as if by preference, dangerously down the
vertical face of the dike.
Lhatto certainly felt no diffidence. From point to point she descended
with ease, leaping with careless accuracy, and scarcely pausing in her
rapid and twisting course. Suddenly her onward motion ceased. She had
reached the lowest step visible from the edge of the bluff; below was a
long interval, perhaps twenty feet to the rolled pebbles on the beach
now rapidly succumbing to the inundation of the inflowing tide.
Her form bent forward. She was scanning the awkward gap, and some
exclamation of apparent wonder escaped her. The last step, a conical
and half sloping fragment of rock, which had usually afforded the final
element in the chain of precarious footholds, had disappeared. Some
dislocation had thrown it over, perhaps the assault of a heavy billow,
and the distance between her position and the shore was uninterrupted
by any intermediate break.
The woman was disconcerted for an instant. But that intuitive response
of her muscular and trained body to each quick and adequate decision
of her mind was instantly displayed. She flung from her the bundle
of clothing, wrapped tightly around the basket of food, and shot
the harpoon far off, aiming at a flat exposure of fine sand between
the larger boulders. Both disappeared below her. She sank to the
narrow shelf on which she had been standing, and with the keenest
agility swung down below its edge, suspending her pendant body by
her outstretched arms, and then began slowly to sway, each flexure
of her back starting a wider amptitude of oscillation, until her
feet alternately rose so far as to bring the axis of her body almost
parallel with the edge of rock to which she tenaciously clung.
Her design was evident. Immediately below her the fallen boulder
lying on its side thrust upward a comb of sharp edges treacherously
marked by braids of green sea-weed. To have dropped upon these flinty
serrations would have meant a serious injury. To escape it she now
essayed to give herself propulsive power sufficient to pass to one side
of this obstacle.
In another second of time she had loosened one hand, continuing with
the other this supremely difficult exercise, which shot into her face
tides of color, and revealed the superb physique, texture and power
of her steel-like muscles. She suddenly released her hold when the
wide swing had become most extended, and shot, half turning backward,
far beyond the threatening boulder, falling with graceful recovery of
her inclined body, as the arrest on the shore brought her head upward
with the yet unexpended energy of translation. It was a skillful and
dexterous feat.
For an instant she covered her face with her hands. The exertion had
been significant and unusual. The bundle and harpoon, the latter fixed
upright in the sand, were recovered, and with a relaxed, perhaps a
slightly halting step, Lhatto made her way over the sea wall of rolled
and polished pebbles to the less dismal and barren shores beyond, where
a long beach passed upward into dunes, drifted into hillocks, and
partially induced to support a scattered wood of dark, motionless, and
elongated cedars.
The lonely woman, emblem and promise, stood a long time on that
untenanted shore looking outward, the encroaching tide slowly
encircling her feet with wavelets, while each advancing ripple bearing
some bubble of foam bound her ankles with a ring of airy beads.
Before the ocean, whether in calm or in storm, youth feels the power of
its silence and its immensity. The wind that moved over its passionless
face when still, the wind that carries hurricanes over the same ocean
when convulsed and dangerous, solicit the recreant passions of youth,
aimless, boundless, and unfulfilled.
Though speechless its murmurs are the voices of sirens luring him
with musical and seducing phrases to enter its green abyss and find
delight. The horizon, a merely necessary optical limit, a mathematical
certainty, a physical injunction upon eyesight, is to youth a line on
the threshold of New Worlds, a doorway to all the pleasures that the
leaping heart, with wise madness, craves incessantly.
To the Woman of the Ice Age, to Lhatto, still struggling with the youth
of her own life, and struggling more profoundly but unconsciously,
and forever inexplicably, with the youth of the race, at the birth
of emotion, at the birth of thought, of worship, of sexual fruition,
competency, and desire, this remorseless inspiration of the ocean
smote upon her breast and mind like some vast magic magnetism, holding
her senses in its irresistible blissful power. And Nature was Lhatto’s
schoolhouse; perhaps more deeply than ever since amongst men she dwelt
in Nature, nursing at its breast, and yielding, as a child should
yield, terror to its imprecations, obedience to its prayers.
But Lhatto, though thus imperiously influenced, had no introspections
in the matter. She simply turned her beautiful face to the sea, and
somehow a voice from that great deep said to her “Come!”
The sun had reached the ninth hour of the day when Lhatto turned
backward to the shore, leaving the waves that were now lapping with
soft kisses her knees and thrusting out innumerable tongues upon her
smooth and sculptured thighs. She made her way unhesitatingly to a
thicket of cedars which, by some propulsion, and encouraged by a spring
of water welling upward near them, had advanced far beyond their
companions, and by reason of this temerity had become the target of
storms, which had broken their boughs, bent their growth, and thrust
them upon each other as if, in a last fraternal embrace, they had
concluded to die together.
In the shadow of this thicket, and now evident, as the Woman advanced
toward it, lay a narrow keeled but somewhat well shaped and serviceable
boat. It was a tree trunk hollowed out with some precision, the method
being clearly indicated by the charred remnants of its roughened and
chipped interior surfaces. The original tree trunk had been hewn down,
its outer bark removed and one half of its circumference hacked away.
Upon the section of the tree thus exposed fires had been lighted, or
heated stones placed, and the incinerated wood loosened and excavated.
The process had been toilsome; but in the primitive occupations of that
prehistoric people, time or exertion counted for little, so free could
they then be in the expenditure of each.
The boat had not been altogether carelessly conceived. A sort of prow,
a square stem, full sides and a flat bottom made it useful along the
shore fisheries, and a long paddle now lying at the bottom of the boat,
and bruised and indented by use, showed that its occurrence was not
accidental.
Lhatto threw her food basket and harpoon into the boat and then
unwrapping the little bundle of clothes took out a pair of skin
breeches, a soft fabric shirt, and a seal-skin blouse or jacket. She
unloosened the fox skin apron about her loins. It dropped to the
ground, and the nude Eurydice, save for the glittering anklets and
wristlets and necklace, for an instant saw her beauty in the still
encroaching waters that may even have hastened their tardier approach
to indulge in the shadowy carresses of her reflection.
It was only for an instant, for even then modesty--the primal
birthright and ornament of womanhood--in this wild child of nature,
this woman hidden in the nameless, dateless past, made clear its
claims. Lhatto, with a startled look, through which there also sprang
hints of a mischievous and tantalizing happiness in her own beauty,
half bent, half turned, though only the impersonal sky and rocks and
trees were there, and snatched the waiting garments. Quickly they were
drawn on over her warm bronzed skin, and then seizing the boat’s stern
and pushing outward, she drove it across the shallow tidal flood, its
harsh grating sounding strangely on that empty shore.
It floated, and as Lhatto stepped upon it, the sides were half hidden
in the water. Her hand, with balanced rhythm, paddled the little
boat out from the shore, and the crude invention evinced some artful
adaptation for its purposes as it moved on an even and noiseless keel.
She first propelled it beneath the highest sheer cliff of dark basalt,
whose pediments lay fathoms deep beneath the wave. The steep walls
resounded in hollow and reinforced echoes, as she worked her way
through gaunt spires of rock or looking upward caught the tiny rain
that shot from some narrow shelf of rock tufted with grass, drenched
with percolating waters.
For a moment she rested, and then her wandering eye turned seaward.
Far out she saw the lifted ledges, remnants of the wasted dike, now
withdrawn through the age-long conflict with frost and wave, leaving
behind these rugged roots; and she saw too the glint of a seal’s gray
body on the rocks. Quickly she turned the careening canoe and shot
towards the distant spot where the white spray dashed upward. Perhaps
a mile’s distance would cover the breadth of water she crossed,
perhaps less. The ledges almost formed a low islet, and Lhatto still
noticing the unchanged location of the seal whose eyes arrested by her
approach now rested, half vagrantly turning from side to side, upon the
unexpected visitor, steered her boat to the opposite end of the little
patch of reef. It occupied her but a moment to slide the boat up upon a
convenient and smoothed edge, and then as quickly to seize her harpoon,
and hunter-like, creeping almost prostrate on the rocks, to reach a
point almost directly above her still undisturbed prey.
Even as she raised in the air the sharp bone point of the harpoon
above it, its eyes turned half languidly upon her, but no sense of
alarm, scarcely an indolent effort to see her more clearly, interfered
with her design. Lhatto paused, and the poise and action of her body,
although hidden and disguised by her more cumbrous clothing, were
strikingly suggestive, and full of interest. The succeeding second,
and the harpoon, hurled with splendid precision, buried its murderous
point in the neck of the seal that tumbling from its perch struggled
momentarily in the water, pouring out a red stain upon the foam and
green blades of waves. Its efforts were soon over, and hauled back
and earned by Lhatto to the boat, its glazed eyes seemed to renew its
vacant inquisition of this cruel and unexplained intruder.
Lhatto stood irresolute. Her minute scrutiny of the dead animal showed
an awakening repulsion, and to the first glance of satisfaction
succeeded an unsettled expression in which perchance regret fought with
wonder, and finally surrendered to the latter. For the woman kneeled
and pressed and smoothed the drenched skin, lifted up the disfigured
head, and holding it in both hands so that its shadowed orbs were in
the direct line of her vision, she sang again, and this time the song
was low and whispering and plaintive.
THE SONG OF LHATTO.
The eye has gone out, and the breath,
And the thing is still, broken.
Where is the eye-look and the breath-spirit?
In the water, in the air, nowhere.
Hit it, it does not move.
Warm it, it does not move.
The wind cannot make it move.
Nor the water, nor the Sun.
Has it gone away? Will it come back?
And the primal woman leaned over the dead seal, and before the mystery
of death began the long interrogation which man has ever put to this
same wonder, running on past false prophets, ethnic faiths, revelation
and modern science.
Lhatto disengaged the harpoon point which, as in the same instrument
of the Esquimaux to-day, was attached by a thong to the wooden shaft
that carried it, and washed it clean and replaced it in a socket in a
handle. She laid it in the boat and stood lingering over the spot where
the seal had been slain, perhaps with some propitiary thought, for the
life she had taken from the world.
She turned to the boat that now with the receding tide had become half
elevated from the water on the widening surfaces of the bared rocks. A
light push, a leap and the rocking dug-out shot outward in a maze of
ripples, with its agile occupant still standing upright, a curious gaze
of interest rising in her face as she looked northward to the blanched
and drifting ice bergs, intermittently visible and absent on the far
horizon.
The girl slowly resumed her paddling, and began, after some hesitation,
to row still further outward from the shore, that now seemed a long
way off, its details softened into confused blotches of color, and
its irregularities of outline merged into bold and simple shapes. The
strangeness of her position, the weird isolation of her voyage on
the Pacific, a human waif in the great void of expectancy of nature,
certainly carried no intimation of its poetic or dramatic interest to
her primitive experience, and feeling. She, the naive precursor of a
continent’s population!
A fascination only drew her outward, the compelling curiosity of her
nature, that delicate and insistent inquisitiveness of woman, which in
more conventional forms is reduced and dissipated into the idle and
transitory whims of modern life.
In Lhatto, this minimized attitude of interest in trifles, innuendos
and intrigues, was foreshadowed by a great yearning; the stalwart,
uninjured, bare response of her strong passionate heart to her own
questioning of nature, to the myriad strains of sympathy between her
and this chrysalis of mysteries into which she had been born. How shall
we justly realize the proportions or properties of the first full
formed human soul in a woman, standing somewhere near the marvellous
incident which evolved or made her; yet possessing an indescribable
heritage of half-animal instincts, transmuted let us hope, by the
benison of the Great Intention, into a labyrinth of longings, and
dreams, and hopes, and queries.
She moved constantly outward on the waste of waters, and her face was
turned to the land looming up behind its first declivities in purple
mountain tops, here and there accentuated in sharp and sparkling
pinnacles. Still outward. And now so recklessly had she advanced that
the thronging fingers of a great oceanic current, sweeping northward,
like myriads of tiny tentacles, each the lapping summit of a drop
of water, had seized her boat and slowly swerved it from its path,
carrying it on the broad river of its eddying tides.
Lhatto seemed to notice nothing at first, but suddenly she rose to
her feet. The receding land seemed miles away, the sun shone from the
zenith, the little groups of rocks on which she had landed were lost to
sight, a low creeping ripple made itself heard and the boat rose upon
the successive swelling convexities of larger and larger waves. The
realization of her position was acute. She worked vigorously to draw
her little vessel out of the hastening and now vociferous tide, but for
once her strong arm, nerved into desperation by a sense of impending
danger, was impotent.
The struggle between the woman and the now exulting water, leaping and
splashing upon her terror-stricken face, was an unequal combat. The
insidious gliding wavelets, as if instinct with a hidden purpose, had
disguised their force until their softly augmented power had reached
the full measure of an irresistible purpose. Nothing now in that
woman--become frail before the strength of natural agencies--could save
her.
She stood up, and dropping the useless paddle, between her scooped
hands shouted to the shore. The wild sad cry drifted lonely, shivering
unanswered, over the hopeless plain of water, and if it reached the
shore, died forgotten against the flinty barriers, or lost itself in
cranny, crevice, and defile.
The tide grew stronger as if exultant in its remorseless purpose. The
boat swayed and swung like a chip upon a descending stream, the dancing
waters leaped about it, the long swells rose higher, and a growing cold
caused the young creature to draw her wisely designed clothing closer
to her form, while the unused paddle lay at her feet, and far beyond,
as her appealing eyes looked northward, the great icebergs drew nearer.
Indeed the spectacle became each moment strangely beautiful and
stupendous, and the despairing woman, in whom the dawning responses to
beauty daily strengthened, forgot for a moment her extremity, in the
superb picture that grew and grew as the now shooting currents carried
her against its awful frigid majesty.
The day was far spent, the sun’s red disk hung on the very edge of the
western horizon and the far away shores of the Fair Land, from which
Lhatto had drifted, seemed drenched in purple, though above their peaks
and domes of rock, a rosy light yet lingered. The sun, unattended by
clouds but veiled in some unapparent mist, glowed garnet red, and its
dissipated or obstructed rays dimly touched the ocean’s face with
molten glints and splashes of bronzy gold.
North of the Fair Land, north of Lhatto lay the ice country, and it
was thither her eyes turned with wonderment. She had heard of the ice
country. Between it and her own Fair Land stretched the intermediate
morainal zone, already described, where the hairy mastodon roamed in
a dwindled but widely disseminated flora of low willows, birches,
beeches, and gnarled ashes and spruce, where, in sheltered places,
carpets of meadow sprinkled with color, spread between high beds of
naked gravel, boulder piles, and clay. Her people had hunted there.
It was a strange climatic contiguity, the cold and ice-burdened north,
the temperate or semi-tropic region of the Fair Land south, the neck of
transition between.
It was not an impossible condition. In Dr. J. W. Gregory’s _Great Rift
Valley of Africa_, a description is given of his ascending to the
snow fields and glaciers of Mt. Kenya, and the reader is introduced
to a succession of climates precisely such as prevailed in this
reconstructed area of North America where the Romance of Lhatto and of
Ogga was, as here described, evolved.
Mt. Kenya itself, garlanded with glaciers and snow beds, rises some
16,000 feet in the air almost beneath the equator.
The lowlands, miles away from its dark and arctic peaks, are tropical,
where at 2 degrees South Latitude, the Athi River pours into the
Indian Ocean. Nearer to the baffling peak, as the land rises, immense
and dense forests spread an almost impassible skirt about it, the
coniferous trees (_podocarpus_) and bamboo jungles indicate a cooler
atmosphere, and through them hustle the chattering monkies (_Colobus_).
Swamps, morainal hillocks succeed, the forests are replaced by herbs
and bushes and scattering groves, with interspersed peat bogs, and
then, beyond such a region of severer temperate conditions, rise the
arctic highlands of the central confluence of ridges, chasms, and
peaks, where a perpetual winter reigns. And all these progressive
alternations are encountered in a radial circumference of fifty miles.
Already the hastening oceanic stream had carried Lhatto, as the night
fell, nearly a hundred miles from the morning’s shore.
The night had indeed come; and Lhatto, who had long ago abandoned her
desperate struggles to escape from the pitiless tide, crawled to the
bottom of the boat, and crushing upon her head a cap of seal-skin, the
last item of clothing left in her bundle, and eating ravenously of the
meat and grain in her little basket, resigned herself to the strange
possibilities now close upon her. And resigned herself without fear!
Fear indeed holds an awful sway in the primeval brain, stultified and
dizzy before the unaccountable events in nature, its life and death,
its storms and its silence, the stars, the depths of the earth, and
all moving things. But an exalted phantasy sways there too. A sudden
realization of fate and supernatural impulse, of swimming and winged
and footed destinies carrying one on to prejudged conclusions, premade
ends, prefixed disasters.
So Lhatto sat and dreamed and waited, and the biting air sank into
her breast, and she fell asleep, almost undisturbed, acquiescent to
all that might happen. And the same stars in the moonless night shone
on her then, in the Ice Age, as they would shine on the same waters
to-day, in the Age of Knowledge. And so Lhatto glided on unconscious,
to the ice and the snow and the glaciers.
As the sun broke over the eastern rims of land, as its rays fell upon
the half blinded eyes of the waking woman, a chill like a physical
impact shook her frame. It was a strange and picturesque scene, one of
unimaginable wonderfulness and beauty which met her eyes, and startled
her into the widest wakefulness by the piercing cold. And it also was a
scene of fantastic fearfulness and danger. The current had brought her
to the lips, to the opening mouths and throats, the manifold necks and
elongations, the waters fleeted with icebergs, the radiant cathedral
spires, the minaretted roofs, the spouting super or englacial rivers,
the dirt accumulations spilled from its lapsing morainal crusts;
at the beryl wall of the Great Glacier, covering the North country,
_where_ it slid from the distant plateaux, even from the ice encased
Mountain of Zit, rigid in frost, amid its dead and frozen hills,
_where_ it moved with breaks and bounds and dull detonations into the
sea.
As the sun climbed the cloudless sky the immensity of this continental
ice sheet was revealed to Lhatto. The very centre and composed
inspiration of it all was the great towering mountain with its jutting
and defiant peak of rock, where, as was shown before, the superb
elevation was itself broken up into radiating chasms whose rocky
sides rose in black keels of relief above the snow-filled gorges they
defined, while surmounting them all, a keen shaft of granite, roseate
in a hundred lights, or wrapped in pendulous and waving veils of mist,
rose steeply to the clouds.
The extreme velocity of the current had abated and the dug-out floated
slowly forward into this chaotic splendor of icy things. A vagary
of the tide branching sideways brought the boat and its bewildered
occupant into a sea of icebergs, ice-cakes, hummocks and toppling
mounds of ice, where before her rose the very front of the high glacial
stream pushing steadily into the water. In this amphitheatre of
wonders, the crystal prison of the Ice King, full of structure and full
of the most diffused and entrancing colors, here and there, in sockets
and rifts, acute with passionate intensity, the boat rested, bobbing on
the fluctuating waves.
Lhatto stood up on the dancing raft. Her limbs cramped with cold and
the long stagnant sleep, seemed scarcely able to support her. But
stamping and rubbing brought the life back to them, and the blazing
sunlight brought back vitality to her body, even as it also started
the ice streams, and to each tension of the ice masses supplied the
loosening warmth that hastened their solution.
Before Lhatto was a terrace of ice, its minor irregularities masked
by distance, with a height of many hundreds of feet, gashed, riven
and melting, running for miles and miles interminably backward and
sideward. At its feet, washed by the water, thousands of ice floats
rose idly, or were rocked with waves produced by the falling into the
sea of new additions to their number. Rivers were flowing in places
over the ice front, discolored with mud, while leaning boulders of
rocks at points were balanced on the edge of the glacier, or at other
points protruding from the midst of its face, waited momentarily their
own discharge into the ocean.
Beautiful and sublime ships of ice seemed stationary about her with
their deep keels yet anchored to the sea bottom, sculptured and
dissected, with snow drifts piled high upon them or arching in white
cornices from the sides. An incessant murmur entered her ears, now and
then punctuated by a sharper note of cracking and splitting, while the
surges from the falling bodies, accompanied by most audible splashes,
kept her boat tipping and turning, and rendered each movement she
ventured to make, uncertain.
It was the panorama unrolled before her eyes landward beyond the blue
and green precipices of the immediate glacier that drew her rapt
attention. The rocky signal surmounting Zit soared above the ice
fields, whose united surfaces, softened into an unbroken expanse, like
huge shields, encircled it with gleaming armor; its lower attendant
mountains secured a precarious freedom from the dominant oppression,
some raising their heads in dark crests, above the snows, and the
others banked over their highest reaches with fillets or reflecting
bombs of snow. Below all these elevations the universal ice, written
with a thousand details of serac, gorge, moraine, crevasse, and
noonituck swept its dazzling and incredible domain.
Lhatto was beginning to feel a cruel hunger and she was very cold. The
warm shirt, the seal skin dress, protected her, and over her feet she
had also drawn a pair of sealskin boots, all so providently provided in
her bundle of clothes, that it was almost certain that she had not been
entirely without prevision of her coming necessity. But now it was
hunger, too, that added its terrors to her isolation. She suddenly cast
a satisfied glance upon the dead seal, already almost forgotten, lying
in the boat. Beneath its plush-like covering lay the rich nutritous fat
that feeds the fires of life beneath polar skies, with instantaneous
and adequate fuel.
Her thoughts, now again wakeful and swarming upward with fresh hopes of
escape, as the tide had stopped, and land far south showed its varying
outlines, were suddenly interrupted. Although apparently arrested, her
boat had been drawing imperceptibly closer to an enormous berg which
lay, tilted sideways, from some dislocation of its centre of gravity,
its bottom immovable in the mud. A beetling wedge of ice formed its
apex. Beneath this impending block and straight against a shelf of ice
at its base, the exile had drifted. The dug-out struck the ice-cake
sharply and Lhatto was thrown forward upon the prow of the small boat.
Her fall was fortunate. The next instant, long enough for the slight
concussion to be communicated to the toppling summit, the great mass
fell, splintering like some colossal Rupert’s bubble into myriads
of fragments, indenting the water with a deep concavity upon whose
depression the refluent waves rolled in deafening disorder. Lhatto
lay just beyond--by the narrowest margin--the extreme verge of its
showering cleavages. The stern of the boat was hit by a big cake and
sank beneath the water. Lhatto leaped to her feet, sped forward upon
the ice shelf of the berg and falling flat, grasped the retreating
dug-out, which, sucked outward, almost pulled her after it. The strong
muscles and the roughened edges of the berg holding her back by their
asperities, catching in her loose and wrinkled dress, saved all.
Another moment the stress of peril was past, and Lhatto drew over the
rim of the ice shelf the boat still containing the captured seal. A
stranger and larger craft was now the vehicle of her further adventures.
Adventure was indeed certain, for relieved of its cumbrous and
dislodged pinnacle, the huge iceberg reeled slowly over and with a
pulsating boom that shook the gathered snows from its shoulders, in
storms of irridescent dust, it rose from its muddy fastenings and
floated; to follow perchance the spectral procession which in the
morning of the previous day Lhatto had seen far south, proceeding
outward on the trackless deep.
But apprehensions were for the instant forgotten. The woman drew
from the pocket of her trousers a long thin blade, that shining from
its concave facets revealed the substance of obsidian, or volcanic
glass. She squeezed the plush-like skin of the seal, draining away the
absorbed water, and then cut deeply into its back, and dexterously
working the stone knife, dislodged the fat in lumps. And these she ate.
The reassuring comfort of satiety, the new warmth bringing with it
courage, made Lhatto keen and anxious again. She reviewed the chances
of her escape. The berg was moving. That she could detect by watching
the sharp edges of its arête pass the features of the glacier beyond
it, and that it was likely to follow in the wake of the endless train
of emigrants whose majestic beauty was destined to vanish before
the tropic suns, dropping like despoiled queens their ornaments of
sparkling jewels in the hot waters of the south, was equally certain.
What means did she possess to effect her escape? The boat was intact,
food was there, the harpoon and paddle still remained, and her own
good heart and buoyant muscles, the quick concurrence of ardor and of
strength, were also hers.
The berg moved steadily out to sea. No time was to be lost; the sea
was as yet undisturbed, save by its own unquiet breathing, and even
this perturbation, near the shore, and shielded as her position was by
fences of icy peninsulas and drifting ice, was now scarcely noticeable.
If she left the berg and trusted herself upon the water, could she shun
the tides which had brought her there? To answer this question it was
essential for Lhatto to find out exactly where she was. The body and
mass of the berg, in steps and colonnaded loveliness, was between her
and the distance, only the shelf on which she stood offered any room
for foothold or support.
She looked intently upward. Above her she could see a shoulder of ice
projecting outward, and it seemed so disposed to the central trunk of
ice as to suggest that it surrounded it with a sort of lower platform.
If she could surmount this the wider circuit of vision would enable her
to form her plans. The task was not easy. The wall of ice at her very
face was steep and actually inclined outwards, and the nearest margin
of its pendent edges was thirty feet away.
Lhatto studied the problem, but it was an impossible physical feat
to ascend the glassy slope. The iceberg, with occasional shuddering
thrills which broke the snow loose from its higher parts, sending down
white showers upon the startled woman, was slowly veering seaward.
The circling eddies around its edges betrayed its motion. It even
seemed that the shelf on which she stood was being invaded by the sea
water. Her boat, a few minutes ago dry on the ice, was now partially
surrounded by water. Her dismay increased. Running almost hopelessly to
and fro, a waif of humanity in the great arctic world, straining her
eyes from the extremities of the tipping shelf where she stood, to see
if possible what surmounted the platform above her, which she desired
to reach, her eye noted a horn-like projection of cylindrical ice,
suddenly revealed by one of the discharges of the powdery snow above.
It was a stalactitic formation of ice extending outward like the round
limb of a tree. Lhatto’s eye detected here an opportunity. Wound around
the long harpoon she had brought, were many feet of strongly woven
cord, a provision made by her people in their hunting excursions, when
their prey dove or swam from them. It was attached to the harpoon
blade, and the device contemplated a separation of the blade from the
stock or handle which floated to the surface, though still united by
this long thong to the wounded animal, seeking escape below the water.
Lhatto quickly unwound this cord, severed it from the stock and blade
and threw one end over the uprising and ringent projection. In another
instant she had looped the other end about her thighs, pulled the noose
tightly around her limbs, and then, seizing the disengaged end, drew
herself upward as a trapeze performer does to-day in a circus ring.
When near the projection she caught it with one hand, let go of the
rope and flung her other hand upon it and then drew herself quickly
upward, flinging her legs upon the crust around her. She had gained an
ample space extending outward from the spire of the iceberg on all
sides. She could walk around the central mass and her eye traversed the
whole visible area of the shores.
Instinctively she looked upward to Zit. Its granite obelisk still
gleamed amid the ice, and a rare splendor of unbroken sunshine flooded
the marvellous picture. A second time the Woman sank to her knees and
from her untrained lips, from the speechless impulse of her heart,
there rose a prayer for safety, and she stretched out her imploring
hands to the distant mountain.
As she thus bowed to the sensible Deity before her, great wraiths and
swirling towers of snow seemed developed upon one edge of the vast
scene. They rose as colossal and advancing clouds, and closed with
immense strides the whole picture of the mountain. Cold winds descended
from their flanks, bearing a tornado of ice particles, whirring
snow-flakes and poignant sleet. Poor Lhatto! She trembled in the gale
and cold; the iceberg, pushed by the storm’s harsh hands, reeled
outward, and the descending blizzard rapidly hid the outlines of the
coast. The woman had caught the slightest glance eastward, but it was
enough to show her that the glaciated areas faded away somewhere south
into a barren region which seemed again succeeded by the Fair Country.
There was no time to lose. Other bergs loosened from their moorings,
or started in more rapid motion, were crowding now upon the _massif_
on which Lhatto stood, the water spaces about her were filled with
cakes and hummocks, the waters themselves, violently disturbed, were
forming into waves, the blinding snow crowded the air, and the dismal
frightening moment seemed to seal her fate.
She turned anxiously and looked over the platform’s edge to see if her
one little hope, the small dug-out, was yet upon the lower shelf. To
her alarm, the greater part of this ledge had disappeared; a triangular
section still held the canoe, but the leaping waves were falling upon
it and it rocked upon the slippery floor, with every intimation of
quickly following the broken portions of the berg. Lhatto, stricken
with terror at the thought of her separation from the one link
connecting her with home and the sweet memories of the southern land,
looked hastily about her for some quick escape from the dilemma. She
had inadvertently approached the curling edge of the upper platform
and stood peering over it upon a bank of drifted snow. The plate of
ice beneath her broke with a sharp rattle, and Lhatto, buried in the
snow bank, was flung headlong upon the ice beneath. She emerged unhurt
from the protecting blankets of wet snow and leaped to the dug-out.
Another instant and she had coiled up the pendent strand from the ice
bough by which she had ascended, thrown it and the harpoon into the
boat, now slipping away with every new oscillation, and following both,
launched herself amid the wilderness of ice, in the bitter breath from
the frosty deserts of the glacier, in that desolate black moment when
the light of day seemed extinguished, and the power of night held her
prisoner in this sepulchre of death, with the shrill blasts whistling
about her, a thousand missiles of hail pelting her remorselessly, and
the inky waters, beaten into froth, curling their smitten crests about
her.
Then the natal heroism emerged; her spirit met the unexpected and
monstrous demand, her muscles stiffened into sinews of iron, and the
prescience of her mind, educated by numberless adventures, directed her.
The very proximity of the stalking bergs, somewhat aligned in rows,
protected Lhatto against the fiercer assaults of the wind, and
permitted her to secure shelter from the rising waters. She adroitly
directed her way between these stealthy and splendid argonauts,
shooting across open lanes of water between them, skirting cautiously
their quiet margins, even clinging to them, waiting for a propitious
moment to move safely onward in her course.
The instinct of direction in wild men and women is acute and
infallible. The obstreperous confusion of warring details in natural
features becomes with them a completely composed picture with all the
details properly distributed, and the relations of parts all accurately
designed. Lhatto had seen but little from the iceberg, and distance had
veiled it, but some compass of direction set instantly in her bright
mind, and she knew, even in this labyrinth, the avenue of escape. It
lay to the south-east.
The sudden tempest almost as suddenly abated, but all the startled
movements it had inaugurated continued its physical effects long after
its activity had ceased. The ice continued to pour outward from the
glacier, the water remained froward and dangerous. Lhatto, still aiming
to shield herself from the waves, had clung to the larger floats of ice
in such wise as to secure immunity from their attack, but she could not
much longer afford to drift with them too far to sea. She would have
again met that tide perchance which first brought her northward, and
besides she realized that, nearer in shore, a back setting tide might
help her on her difficult return.
The moment had come for her to venture out upon the broken waves, and
auspiciously as she shot her canoe from behind a barrier of ice to
which she had tenaciously held, the sun again opened the canopy of the
sky, and a light shaft flung athwart her boat seemed propitious to her
animated fancy.
She had already passed over miles of water from the glacier’s edge and
her encouraged heart grew hopeful. She left the friendly berg and
directed her boat eastward against the waves. She worked the sea-worthy
little dug-out with temerity and skill. She sat looking forward and
her keen eyes, helped now by the renewed sunlight, watched the crested
waves, their slanting or direct approach, and while she resisted
their tendency to carry her from the shore, she so far permitted them
to neutralize her advance, as was necessary to avert the danger of
upsetting.
It was a clever and strong series of efforts, and to the sympathetic
spirits watching her from some asylum in the skies her success must
have elicited approving nods.
Slowly as the night fell the lapsing wind faded away; the sun’s parting
rays piercing the higher atmosphere, left the cold world in darkness;
spectral and terrifying shadows stole over the ice fields and one
by one the stars in the firmament lit their everlasting vigils, and
Lhatto, still struggling with the waves, moved silently shoreward,
almost despairing with fatigue, but calling, in her brave primeval
heart, upon all the powers of the blue black dome above her to bring
her safely home.
All that night the tireless arms worked, and the nursed boat overcame
the distance with increasing ease; the tide, mutable with new
affections, now helped the exhausted maiden in place of opposing her,
the wind, soothed into pity by the moving spectacle, brushed her
onward with alternating puffs, and the surges on the far away shore
made themselves heard so as to direct her path. Birds from the shore
piped above her head, and ever and anon an earthy odor swept over her
bowed head, to lure her hope with reviving thoughts of life and flowers.
But Lhatto slept. Her prostrate form lay backwards in the boat, the
paddle had dropped from her nerveless hand, her seal skin cap had
slipped from the clustering hair, dark with moisture, that pressed down
upon her narrow and arched brow, the darting eyes were closed, and
as the sun again toiled upward in the east, his light, touching many
things with beauty, touched none more gently than the sleeping girl,
saved from the sea anemone, or the thronging fish or the myriad coral
beds, to be the mother of new men.
[Illustration]