AN UNEXPECTED VISION
By degrees the rain slackened down to a fine Scotch mist. Heavy fog
veiled the mountains, and the sea was a vast void at his right hand.
There was hard sand underfoot, making good walking; then it coarsened
to loose gravel, and then alternated from one to the other. He groped
inland through the fog in search of a better roadway, blundered into a
bog of innumerable little rivulets, and got back to the beach again.
Every few minutes, it seemed, he had to wade or jump a creek that
rushed down from the hills. The sky was invisible; he could see
nothing beyond the hazy circle of a few yards. It was a gruesome and
ghostly sort of pilgrimage, over an invisible landscape, which would
have been wildly terrifying if he could have seen it, amid the
shifting mist clouds, where the only life seemed to be the rushing,
crashing surf beside him.
The weight at his back grew painful; the cord was cutting a groove in
his shoulder. He readjusted it repeatedly, sat down to rest, grew
chilled, started again, and plodded on till it seemed to him that it
must surely be midday.
He opened one of the tins of baked beans in his pocket and consumed
them cold, without wasting time on the probably impossible job of fire
making. Again he tramped ahead, wet through, sweating with exertion,
conscious at times of a queer elation and optimism. Considering all
things carefully, it did not seem likely to him that Eva Morrison
would have gone in the _Chita_ with her father—a girl alone with three
men. She must have remained in Valparaiso, and this growing conviction
cheered him wonderfully. However the adventure should turn out, he
felt sure that he would get back to Valparaiso somehow. He still had
over five hundred dollars on him. It seemed a great resource, and he
felt that luck had done its worst possible and that nothing ever could
daunt him again.
All day he kept up that persevering trudge. Now and again the mist
cleared a little, and he caught glimpses of the forested mountain
slopes and the desolate islands out across the channel. He crossed a
great headland like Punta Reale, and rounded what seemed an immense
bay. The going was nearly always hard and sometimes terrible, with mud
or fog or tumbled rocks, and he had no idea of where the sun stood, or
how the day was passing. His watch had been drowned and refused to go.
It was still daylight when he caught sight of the white gleam of a
clump of birch trees on the slope above him, and he snatched at this
piece of luck. He split and peeled off great rolls of bark, cut chips,
and broke open a dead trunk to get at dry wood inside. With these
aids, he was able to get a good fire under way, in spite of a heavy
drizzle that started just then as if it meant to last.
But he was now growing used to being wet, and all he wanted was warmth
and food. He broiled slices of the salt beef along with the roasting
potatoes, and made a tin of vegetable soup hot. It was bad, but it was
delicious. Lang swallowed it all greedily, and, to add to his comfort,
the rain almost stopped when he dropped, hungering for sleep, on the
piled heap of wet spruce branches.
He slept like a log, careless of wet clothing, but was awakened before
daybreak by heavy rain. The fire was drowned out. There was no use
trying to relight it. He huddled wretchedly under his blanket for some
time, while a wet, gray light came slowly up. He finally ate a cold
roasted potato and cold corned beef from a tin, gathered up his
stores, and set out doggedly.
That day was very like the preceding. The ground was bad, the shore
line growing rougher. It rained for three hours, and then settled into
a woolly, clinging fog. About the middle of the day he contrived to
build a fire, made hot soup, and slept an hour, and made the better
speed for it afterward.
His strength was holding out better than he ever would have expected.
He felt capable of going on and on, fallen into a sort of mechanical
movement. His mind grew lethargic; he almost forgot at times where he
was, what he was heading for. The memory of the emeralds, of Morrison,
of Eva was dull in his brain. Hour after hour he plodded on in his
numb stupidity, indifferent as any animal to the wind and wet, when he
suddenly trod upon something that startled him like a blow.
It was the black, scattered cinders of a fire.
In the sudden shock he thought first of Carroll. But the second glance
told him that the fire was old. The ashes were scattered, wet, beaten
into the earth. They did not look quite like wood ashes, either; they
were full of black charred pieces of stone. It looked like coal. It
_was_ coal, and Lang remembered now that Morrison and Floyd had found
an outcrop of coal on the coast and had used it for their camp fires.
He had hit the spot; it could not be otherwise. He stared about
through the blanketing fog. He made a wide circuit, found nothing
more, hurried forward, and came to the edge of a deep and steep
ravine. As he stood there he became aware of a strange, cold smell in
the air, not like the odor of the mountains or the sea.
He could not see what was at the bottom of the ravine, and he walked
up and down the bank a little way, then turned back. Returning to the
fire spot, he looked about for the coal outcrop that had fed it. He
wanted it for his own fire, for he was not going to leave that spot
till he had found out what lay around him.
He looked for a long time before he found it, a hundred yards up the
hillside, amid scattered growths of stunted cedars. There were
shallow, shelving veins of the black, slaty-looking stuff, and clear
marks where fragments had been broken away with a tool.
It would take a hot fire to start that inferior coal, and he had
infinite trouble in finding kindling—birch bark and dry wood. What he
could find he piled right against the coal seam, for he could see no
object in making his fireplace elsewhere.
He sacrificed one of his candles to light the damp wood, spilling the
flaming wax on the kindling, and eventually the coal began to snap and
flare gassily. It was evidently bituminous, and of the lowest possible
quality, but it burned at last with a strong heat that was greatly
superior to that of the wet wood.
Lang prepared his usual supper, longing for the fog to clear. There
was an orange glow through the smother as the sun went down, promising
clearing weather; but as it grew dark and the moon shone the air was
like cotton wool. The fire burned red, eating into the coal seam,
exploding startlingly as lumps of stone burst, and Lang wondered in
vain if this coal meant proximity to the glacier gate. Morrison had,
he thought, made many camps all along the shore, and this might be
miles from the final one.
He lay awake for a long time, but finally slept lightly and uneasily.
He dreamed of the _Chita_, which might be lying offshore within a mile
of him even now.
He awoke suddenly with light shining in his face. It was brilliant
moonlight. He sat up. The sky was all clear, but for a faint film of
fairy haze.
He was on a long rocky hillside, sprinkled with dumps of small
evergreens, sloping to the sea, and rising the other way to the black
density of forests. All that held his eye was a river of white, a
vast, dear sheet of radiance that split the forested mountainside.
He jumped up, dazzled, and ran toward its nearest point. He came to
the edge of the ravine. There was a valley below him, a gravelly
beach, the wash of the sea, a sound of running streams. A few hundred
yards shoreward the valley was cut sharp across by what seemed a snowy
wall. It was a glittering gate, going back and rising—rising
perpetually toward the sky, luminous and white against the low moon,
as if a flood of light itself had been poured out from the heavens and
frozen into solidity.