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THE MOUNTAIN OF FEARS
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BY HENRY C. ROWLAND
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To Windward
THIRD EDITION
“Crisp and strong, full of breeziness and virile humanity.”—Brooklyn
Eagle.
“A capital story told with a spirit and go that are irresistible. A
strong and dramatic novel. Shows literary genius.”—Newark Advertiser.
--------------
The Wanderers
THIRD EDITION
“A little breathless toward the end, the reader enjoys every moment
spent with Brian Kinard, the roving son of an Irish earl.”—Chicago
Record-Herald.
“Full of complications and surprises which hold the reader’s attention
to the end. An unusually good story of actual life at sea.”—Boston
Transcript.
--------------
Each with frontispiece in colors, by
Ch. Weber-Ditzler.
12mo. Cloth. $1.50
--------------
A. S. BARNES & COMPANY
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration: “I see that you go in for heads a bit yourself,” said
Lynch.––Page 99]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Mountain
of Fears
By
Henry C. Rowland
Author of “The Wanderers”, “To Windward”
and “Sea Scamps”.
Illustrated
[Illustration: Publisher’s Logo]
New York
A. S. Barnes & Co.
1905
------------------------------------------------------------------------
COPYRIGHT, 1905, BY
A. S. BARNES & CO.
Published October, 1905
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TO
DOCTOR LEYDEN
WHOSE ILLUMINATING PERSONALITY
AND STRANGE EXPERIENCES I HAVE
VENTURED TO INTERPRET IN THE
HOPE THAT WHEN HE RETURNS FROM
HIS QUEST IN THE “FORBIDDEN LAND”
HE WILL PARDON MY PRESUMPTION.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
-------
THE MOUNTAIN OF FEARS 1
OIL AND WATER 46
THE SHEARS OF ATROPOS 80
ROSENTHAL THE JEW 118
TWO SAVAGES 158
TWO GENTLEMEN 199
THE BAMBOULA 245
INTO THE DARK 270
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THE MOUNTAIN OF FEARS
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THE MOUNTAIN OF FEARS
“DOCTOR,” said my shipmate, Dr. Leyden, “have you ever made any especial
study of nervous diseases—_central_ nervous diseases—morbid conditions
resulting from a derangement of the central cells?”
I told him that I had done only such work in this branch as a general
practice would require, but that I had observed some few cases of
especial interest during a military surgical service in the East, and
proceeded to cite one or two instances of mental vagaries resulting from
gunshot wounds in the head.
Leyden leaned both elbows on the taffrail and listened restlessly. Our
little ship swashed through the short sling of the Spanish Main, the
Pole star gleaming ahead, the Southern Cross blazing astern, and all
about the white, flashing crests of the phosphorescent sea. Usually
Leyden was a good listener, but this night he seemed impatient, restive,
to such an extent that I finally paused, annoyed, for nothing is so
irritating as lack of attention to a solicited reply.
“Ach! but those cases are in the line of the ordinary!” he exclaimed.
“Pardon me,” I replied, “but the last case I have given was distinctly
_out_ of the ordinary.”
“I am awkward, Doctor,” said Leyden, apologetically. “I mean that the
relations of cause and effect follow the usual course—the histological
changes in the cell produced impaired function of the organ and these
primary changes were the result of trauma. But have you ever had
occasion to observe the reverse of this condition—the action of the
organ on the center—like a nightmare, where one has the liver poisoning
the central cells——”
I interrupted in my turn. Leyden was no doubt a skilled naturalist, a
close observer and a man of deep power of thought and analysis, but he
was not a physician, had never made a regular study of physiological
chemistry, and was, therefore, scarcely in a position to argue with a
person who had.
“Such cases are not infrequent,” I answered. “The ancient Greeks
understood that much, as we see from their terms. ‘Hypochondria’; under
the ribs—the liver probably poisoning the brain, if you like; then there
is the condition of hysteria often accompanying a movable kidney; the
action of certain drugs on special centers——”
“Such as _cannabis indica_?” interrupted Leyden, “which affects the
sense of elapsed time and makes the subject happy—or—what is that
principle, Doctor, which produces xanthopsia, or yellow vision, and
makes one sluggish and depressed?”
“Xanthopsia is an early symptom of _santonin_ poisoning,” I answered.
“The alkaloid is obtained from the unexpanded flower-heads of the——”
“Artemisia maritima—yes—I know the plant—but the active principle might
occur elsewhere?”
“Possibly——”
“It is wonderful,” mused Leyden, in the self-communicative tone that was
often difficult to follow—“the microscopic filament that makes or
unmakes a man; the minute neurons which carry such a potent impulse—like
the flash crossing a continent on a tiny wire to send two great nations
to war. The wire is short-circuited, the nation disgraced; the neuron
short-circuited, the individual disgraced. Such a thing once happened to
me, Doctor.
“This was in Papua, an awesome country which holds in its dark recesses
many of the things one wants—and most of those which one does not. I had
gone there with two other white men to look for gold. It is a marvelous
country, Doctor; I do not think there is any other like it; such a
country as was pictured in the old imaginative school of painting; a
valley, through which winds a mist river flowing intangibly from a
mirage through a canyon bridged by a rainbow; travelers’ palms,
tree-ferns, lianas, dream-trees heavy with strange fruits and brilliant
blossoms, in the distance mystic mountains rising as they recede, green
yet forbidding, the homes of genii; their summits fantastic—the whole a
beautiful, impossible, frightfully fascinating fairyland. This was that
place where we went to look for gold.
“My two companions were failures—most gold-seekers are. I was not old
enough to be a failure myself. No matter what the faults of these
others, one did not deny their virtues. One was a Hollander, Vinckers,
an engineer, a brilliant man, but one ready to step over the edge of
heaven in sheer restlessness and a desire to see what was held by the
abyss; the other was a Scotchman, disagreeable, morose, taciturn, harsh
of speech and visage. Both held hearts of steel; they were the most
quietly courageous men that I have ever known. I ask you to remember
this, Doctor, in consideration of what came later. Their courage had
been tried and proved in many desperate situations.... Ach!”—Leyden
began to mutter again, shaping his thoughts with his tongue until I
could with difficulty catch this thought—“the filament—the neuron—cut
the sympathetic nerve in the neck of a horse and the animal begins to
sweat upon the affected side; puncture the floor of the fourth ventricle
of a dog—diabetes.” He raised his voice. “There is a little center of
thermogenesis, is there not, Doctor, the irritation of which will raise
the temperature——
“We wandered through this shadow-land, this illusory place of promise
whose inhabitants were ofttimes starving. Cannibals?—yes; many white men
have been that through acute starvation; chronic only tends to confirm
the vice. They were a strange, shy, kindly people—to us, who understood
such. The ‘Barbary Coast’ in San Francisco, the parks in Melbourne, or
the water-front in Hong Kong, are all more dangerous than Papua. We
wandered through these people, accompanied by kindness, a whole tribe
sometimes bearing our burdens until they reached a district dangerous to
them, but where we made new friends. We wandered through this dreamland
unmolested, walked with its fantastic peoples, black and brown and
piebald; strayed in and out to the click-click-click of our little
hammers, meeting dangers, it is true—the dangers which might confront a
child walking blindfolded through a botanical garden filled with perils
to its ignorance—and we tap-tap-tapped with our little hammers—right up
to the slopes of the _Malang-o-mor_—the ‘Mountain of Fears’—and we
tap-tap-tapped on its slopes of quartz and basalt, little thinking that
we knocked at the door of an evil spirit.”
The bluff bows of our little ship smashed the short seas into a flat
track of phosphoresence, and against the pale background I saw a tremor
of some sort shake Leyden’s square shoulders, and it seemed to me that
his voice was slightly breathless.
“‘The Mountain of Fears,’ so our Papuans called it, and threw down their
burdens at the edge of the stream and refused point-blank to stir
another step; more than that, they implored us to go no farther
ourselves, and a girl given to MacFarlane by a chief threw her arms
around the knees of the rough old Gael and wailed like a stricken soul.
An odd thing, that, Doctor, this cannibal girl given to the Scotchman a
month before by this chief, to whom MacFarlane had given a harmonica on
which he had first rendered ‘The Bonnie, Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond’ in
a manner which should, by right, have got him speared. The girl had
fancied him, slaved for him, followed him everywhere like a dog, and had
ended by _softening_ him—to such an extent that he ceased to curse and
his manner was less harsh—the elevating effect of a cannibal upon a
Covenanter!—another inversion in this hallucinating country where the
only actuality seemed the rapping of our little hammers.
“This girl, as I say, implored MacFarlane not to go on; for Vinckers and
me she did not care; none of the women had much fancied us, while
MacFarlane’s lack of comeliness was almost bizarre; they were
_obedient_, of course—but that was about all.
“MacFarlane leered up at the great forbidding mountain as it thrust
against the dome of the sky its summit of snowy quartz, a-glisten in the
bright sunlight thirteen thousand feet above the level of the sea.
“‘A cauld slope yon—too cauld for a lass in naething but a kiltie. Ye’d
best bide here ’til I come.’ He spoke to her in the vernacular, with
which we were all three familiar, and told her to await his return.
“It was hot in that valley—a stewpan, withering, stifling with the
equatorial reek which wilts one to the bone; the nights stunk of fever.
It was the southeast slope of the mountain which presented to us; and as
we gazed up toward it from the little nest of trees where we had made
our camp, the late sun blazed against its worn flank, and suddenly the
broad, barren belt between the forest and the formation of quartz above
the timber belt seemed to burst into flame and shone and sparkled and
glittered as if flecked with scales of gold.
“‘An omen!’ cried Vinckers. ‘The Mountain of Hope—not the Mountain of
Fears! Something tells me that we shall find gold there—veins of it,
knuckles of it—perhaps the bones of the mountain are solid gold; why
not, in such a country as this?’
“The sun dropped behind the high hills to the westward, swiftly, as it
does on the equator, and even more swiftly the gray shadow ran from the
foot to the summit of the great mountain. It was as if one saw the color
fade in the face of a dying man, and it seemed to me that a cold draught
struck down from the heights.
“‘The Mountain of Fears,’ said I—‘the Mountain of Fears,’ and as I
stared at the monster on whose bristling hide we planned to crawl,
parasites, searching for a spot to lodge our stings, the first shadow of
foreboding swept over my spirits, just as the swift shadow had risen to
throw its cold, blue light across the snowy quartz-field.
“In the valley we found the first signs of plenty; there were fruit and
game and a sort of wild yam in abundance; and here we decided to rest
for several days on the edge of the stream, for MacFarlane had a
suppurating heel where he had trod upon a thorn, and Vinckers was
suffering from a great nettle-rash upon his body. All three of us were
hungry and our blood ran too thin to encounter the cold nights higher up
the slope.
“We camped in a grove of trees which looked like the _papaya_ and bore a
fruit unlike any I have ever seen. It was shaped like an _avocado_, had
a pulp like wax, or bone-marrow, which was greasy to the touch, oily,
and held a faint flavor of sandal-wood. At first we tried it with
caution, for our native friends would not eat anything which grew in the
shadow of the _Malang-o-mor_; neither would they sleep in the narrow
valley, but retired each evening to the edge of the forest on the
farther slope.
“We rested and we slept, and we ate of the fruit, which I called
_myela_, because I did not think that it had ever been described, and I
called it so from its resemblance to marrow; also, we drank of the
stream, which was a deep ruby, spring-cooled and fragrant, but of which
none of the Papuans would drink excepting the girl, Tomba, given to
MacFarlane by the chief. She ate and drank and shuddered and watched her
lord narrowly, as if waiting for the curse to fall and wishful to avert
it.
“In the early morning we hunted the game or clicked with our little
hammers on the crumbling quartz through which the river gnawed its way.
There was gold in the country, gold in the stream; one could pan enough
dust in a light day’s work to pay highly for the labor. But we wanted
more than dust—we wanted the pure metal which none doubted we should
find on the virgin breast of the mountain, and our fancy saw us winding
back to the sea with our native tribe deep-laden with the wealth of
buccaneers—winding out through defiles of mountain and forest, heavy
with the plunder of the dread _Malang-o-mor_.
“Odd, Doctor; gold and dreams and sweat and death—how they all mixed
together to strike the average which maintains the trim of the world——”
Leyden’s voice had sunk to muttering again, and he shivered, despite the
humid warmth of the night.
“Daytimes we dwelt in Paradise and at night lay down to sleep, having
first drunk of the stream, which we christened ‘Lethe,’ because on its
banks we forgot the hardship and hunger of our long journey to the
valley. A Lethe it must have been, because each morning, when the late
sun looked over the shoulder of the mountain and whipped up the blanket
of mist stretched like a tent from the slope to the hills beyond, we
forgot the miasmas of the night and the fetid fever smells and spores
that spawned through the hours of hot darkness, and all of the while we
ate more of the fat, oily fruit and less of other and more wholesome
things, for this fruit of itself appeared to satisfy all needs, and we
looked at each other and laughed at the physical changes of the few
days, for we were growing fat and flabby as paretics. We slept a great
deal, too, days as well as nights, and the sleep was at first of that
delicious kind which one enjoys in the moments between waking and
rising—a conscious sleep, in which one feels the myriad renovative
changes of tissue, when each little cell seems to stretch and tingle and
feed against the waste of the coming day. Feed they did, for the flesh
came back, full and soft, to our gaunt frames, and we looked at one
another and laughed fat, gurgling laughs, and lay and smoked with our
heads in the laps of the girls, and the tapping of our little hammers
was heard but seldom on the flinty foot of the Mountain of Fears.
“The tribe had camped, as I have said, across the valley on the edge of
the forest, but each day they came to see us, and we laughed at their
surprise when they saw that all was well. We held them with beads and
baubles and food and friendliness—chiefly the latter, for natives, like
dogs, love to place allegiance with the higher mentality. One was
puzzled that physical need had not run counter to superstition, for
despite the plenty of the valley we found no trace of other inhabitants.
“Perhaps, we had been three weeks in the valley, when one night I awoke
dripping with perspiration and with a sense of nameless ill. ‘A
nightmare,’ thought I, ‘of which the color is lost and only the
depression remains.’ It held me broad awake—and then for the first time
I fully realized the nauseous reek of the fever-fog. One smelled odors
which seemed to emanate from the entrails of the earth. You know,
Doctor, the nauseous, charnel stench of rotting insects and vegetation,
with the fetid breath of the flower that issues from the mouth of a
great, carnivorous plant? You have seen these trap-like flowers, if one
may call them such, which grow in the botanical gardens of Demerara?
_Br’r’r’rgh!_ And as I lay, hot and cold and clammy, with a heavy weight
upon my chest, and thought of how we had lain and breathed that thin
effluvium, the vehicle for myriad infusoria and plasmodiæ, this
hypochondriac fear became reasonable, and I marveled that we were still
alive.
“Vinckers and MacFarlane slept heavily, torpidly, and their breathing
was the stertorous gasping of drunkards. We lay in hammocks of plaited
grass under a shelter of thatch; the girl’s hammock was beside
MacFarlane; and as I lay there, broad awake and still depressed, my
lungs half drowned in the dense humor of the valley and my ears ringing
from the clamorous insect mob without, I heard a stifled, whimpering
cry—the moan of a little child who has been whipped for inheriting
nerves. It struck a chill—there was a great deal that was chill in that
place of hot fears, cold passions, joyless content and light-hearted
sloth—a place where one’s skin crept clammily while the bones were
burning.
“‘Who is that?’ I asked, quite loudly, for I did not care if the others
awoke.
“There came in answer the whimper of one too frightened to speak. Did
you ever, as a child, Doctor, waken with the nightmare, afraid to cry
out, afraid to move, tortured by the whimpers wrung out in reasonless
terror? It was that kind of a sound.
“‘What is it?’ I asked.
“‘It is Tomba.’
“‘What is the matter with you?’ said I.
“‘I am afraid.’
“‘And what are you afraid of?’
“She found her voice then and began to tell me, but there my limited
knowledge of the dialect failed, for I had no such linguistic scope as
to-day, when one dialect more or less is simply a matter of ear and
comparison. There was something in her speech of devils and death, and
she kept repeating this and I do not know what besides—and then, as I
was trying to reassure her as one might a child or a horse, less through
the reason than the senses, the soothing of primitive sounds, a
startling thing occurred. MacFarlane, whose breathing had become more
labored, like that of a man rapidly climbing the ladder of consciousness
from deep oblivion, gasped once or twice and awoke with a scream.
Vinckers, roused with the echo ringing in his ears, awoke with a muffled
shout—a strangled, bleating shout such as might come from a slaughtered
animal. MacFarlane, but half awake, screamed again. At this Tomba’s
breathless terror found outlet in a shriek that swept out under the low
mist, struck the mountain-side and quavered away in countless
reverberations.
“Vinckers shouted again and leaped from his hammock.
“‘Be still, you fool!’ I cried, roughly.
“‘Wha—wha—wha——’ quavered MacFarlane.
“‘What’s the matter with you?’ I cried, impatiently. ‘Are you a couple
of girls just out of a convent?’
“‘What _is_ the matter?’ asked Vinckers, thickly. Tomba was sobbing
hysterically.
“‘MacFarlane wakes up with a nightmare!’ said I, ‘and sets you howling
like a maniac.’ My own fright made me irritable.
“‘Odd,’ muttered Vinckers; ‘odd—I had a nightmare, too.’
“‘Ye hag-ridden fule,’ snarled MacFarlane, ‘bawlin’ and yammerin’ like a
bull! I had no nightmare mysel’!’ He rolled heavily in his hammock.
‘Fetch me a drink o’ water, lass—water!’ he added, in the vernacular.
“Vinckers sat up in his hammock, let his feet hang over the side and,
dropping his head between his heavy shoulders, stared down the valley.
There was a moon somewhere behind the mist; this mist, diaphanous,
vague, of any depth, yet lifted well above our heads, shone, not white,
or colorless, as a vapor should, but a golden yellow; everything seemed
golden, was becoming more golden daily the longer we stayed in that
place of mockeries, and the reason of this was based on something more
solid than a sentiment. What was the name of that drug, Doctor, which
when ingested gives the yellow tinge to the vision? Santonica?—yes,
perhaps that was it; perhaps its alkaloids were contained in that fatty
fruit; perhaps it was only that the moon was one of those ripe,
luscious, golden moons one sees on the equator. At any rate, the light
came not pale and ghastly, as it should have been, but a luscious golden
yellow; and that made it the more unearthly, as it illumined and gave a
golden color to these dream objects—the fan-palms, the vague rock-heaps,
the vistas between which should have been ethereal, but, because of this
succulent, sickly yellow light, were too material; and the aroma, which
should have been dank, no doubt, but elusive, was a physical stench.
Ach! a witch-fire would have burned in that place like a fat pine torch;
one would have scorched one’s hands near a _feu-follet_; there was a
ponderosity to this place of ghosts. Can you conceive a _fat_ ghost,
Doctor—a fat, _unclean_ ghost, who has clanked around, dragging his ball
and chain until the sweat pours down his fat face—a malodorous sweat—a
sweat that physically offends while it frightens? Once in my youth, in
Leipsic, I went into the anatomical laboratory, and there was on the
table a fat subject—a woman—and she still wore some gold-washed rings
and had some baubles in her ears of too mean value to appeal to the
cupidity of whoever had fetched her there. _Br’r’r’rgh!_ She was
pathetic, of course, but I was not old enough to feel that then. I can
never forget how much more awful she was to me than were the thin,
meager, attenuated subjects who were consistent with the place. It was
such a ripe, rotten ghastliness as this that was held in that valley
which glimmered away at the foot of the Mountain of Fears.”
Leyden paused, quivering, shuddering. One did not need to see him
silhouetted against the phosphorescence to see that he shuddered; he was
in a tremor, and the light from the _rook kamer_ striking his strong,
keen, nervous face showed that it was damp, wet, viscid with a moisture
other than the humor of the Gulf Stream. He was living the thing over
again with all of his high-strung, Teuton nervousness; and suddenly it
struck me that it was hardly decent to let him go on—that it was my duty
to interrupt him, just as it has been my duty at times to interrupt the
unpleasant indulgences of other morbid impulses. But, on the other hand,
speech is the safety valve of the mind; also, it is just to sit
passively and watch for the symptom which states the case.
“Vinckers observed this thing,” continued Leyden. “Vinckers was an
unimaginative man, and consequently the impression on him was as it
would have been upon a dry plate, or the tracings of a seismograph, or
any other machine which records automatically without contributing
anything of its own. Vinckers was rather low in the animal scale—by low
I mean primitive; as a man he was a splendid specimen, but he was animal
enough to get rather more from his instincts than from his
reasoning—like most women. He watched this thing, this yellow light
coming through the mist and touching with its sickly yellow tinge all of
the fantastic objects in the picture that belonged to the imaginative
school of painting. He looked quite steadily at the dream-trees, too
symmetrical to be real; the fantastic rock shapes, too fancifully
grotesque to be the work of nature; he observed the yellow light upon
the sluggish stream, which flowed like molasses, and looked rather like
it, too; the fringe of the forest—in fact, all of the component parts of
the picture just as some morbid painting genius would have placed
them—and Vinckers growled like a dog who sees something moving about the
camp-fire invisible to his master.”
Leyden turned to me insistently, claiming my corroboration of all this
that he had worked out through hypertrophied recollection. “Is it not
true, Doctor, that logic supplants instinct; that as soon as we learned
how to tell by deduction where the person we sought had gone we were no
longer able to lay our noses to the ground and decide the matter?” He
began to maunder again—his auto-philosophy which was so hard to follow.
“There are plenty of plants in nature which would poison the animals of
the section if instinct did not prompt them to avoid these; a man will
often eat of something and subsequently wonder at the cause of his
derangement; the animal will know and avoid this thing. At that time I
was conscious of a morbid physical condition, but was unable to trace
its source. Vinckers, lacking imagination, knew at once. ‘Heaven,’ I
heard him mutter, ‘was there ever such a mockery! We come to look for
gold and we land in—quarantine!’ It struck me as a new idea and I almost
laughed. Gold and death, sickness and disease! How appropriate that they
should be unichromatic! But it was Vinckers’ next words which struck me.
‘It is that accursed corpse-wax!’ he muttered, ‘that greasy stuff that
we have been growing fat on!’ _Ugh!_ You see, Doctor, he was able to
link physically cause and effect.
“MacFarlane began to mutter. Tomba brought him some water and he drank
thirstily, swallowing with the audible gulps of a horse.
“‘I’m feverish,’ he said, panting from the long draught, ‘verra nervous
and feverish. ’Tis a feverish place, this.’
“‘It’s rotten with fever!’ growled Vinckers, who, like myself, spoke
English better than the Scotchman. ‘It stinks of fever—smell it! We were
fools to stay here so long.’
“‘We are a pack of lotus-eaters,’ said I. ‘You are right, Vinckers; it
is this accursed stuff we have been eating—this adiposcere! We will get
out of here to-morrow.’
“‘Do you feel as if your inside was filled with lead, Leyden?’ asked
Vinckers.
“‘It is worse than that,’ said I—‘molten lead.’
“You see, Doctor, we had been living on this rich, fatty stuff, which
certainly contained a great deal of oil and I do not know what else
besides—narcotics, no doubt. You know the richness of an _avocado_? They
will tell you in some places that this fruit produces biliousness, but I
have never heard that it had a soporific effect, as undoubtedly had the
_myela_ fruit. Then we had taken no exercise.
“I think that night was hotter than most; we could not sleep, so up we
got and smoked and discussed our plans for the future—at least, we
started to discuss them, but even as we argued a lethargy came over us,
and one by one we fell asleep, though dreading to do so and striving to
keep awake through fear of another nightmare. An odd condition, Doctor,
this drowsy fearsomeness; no doubt like a patient narcotized before an
operation; dread fighting a drug until the latter triumphs and the
patient whimpers off into fear-filled somnolence.
“The sun came to suck away the fever-mist and with it much of our dread.
We laughed at the fears of the night and awaited the coming of the
Papuans, but awaited in vain. I think, Doctor, that Tomba’s scream had
floated across the valley, telephonic beneath the mist to reach the
listeners in the hills. At any rate, no human thing came near us that
day. Later, when the shadows began to lengthen again, we wandered out,
Vinckers and I, prospecting towards the native camp—I with a rifle,
watchful for game, Vinckers humming to himself an old Dutch tune,
careless in the full force of the sunlight, wandering behind me and
clicking on the rocks with his little hammer.
“I was strangely lacking in breath as I climbed the hillside; as for
Vinckers, he halted at the end of a hundred steps and would go up no
further. Back at our camp MacFarlane lay smoking, with his head in the
lap of the girl. I alone toiled up the slope, soft in heart and fibre,
the sweat pouring from me in streams, sodden, with the spring gone out
of my ankles and everything about me of a strange, sickly yellow hue
which darkened as my breath came faster.
“I found the Papuans departed, so back I went, blubbering with
breathlessness, muttering, fatigued, depressed, sluggish with sleep.
Vinckers I found with his back against a rock, sleeping heavily. As I
bent to rouse him my eyes fell upon a specimen which lay between his
knees, and I saw that the little hammer had cleft it open to lay bare a
thick band of virgin gold. Vinckers had tapped at the door of Fortune
and she had opened, and Vinckers had looked within and—fallen asleep!
Had the goddess ever a more loutish lover? He was sweating, too, in his
sleep, and I saw where the sweat had left a yellow stain upon his
neckerchief, and as the late sun struck him it seemed to me that his
skin also was of a chromish tint. You know the flabby pallor of the
clay-eater? It was like that, fat and flabby, but yellow rather than
pale.
“Back we went to the camp, where MacFarlane still lay and smoked or
slept with his ugly, shaggy head in the lap of Tomba.
“‘Gold!’ I said, ‘the mountain is full of it. It lies about loose here
on the hillside, think of what it must be yonder where the mountain
springs have done our hydraulic mining and washing in the same
formation!’ I pointed above us to the flank of the _Malang-o-mor_; the
late sun struck it aslant, throwing sharp, purple shadows into the
numberless seams and fissures eroded in the crumbling crust; it flashed
as it had each evening and glowed redly; high above, as the sun sank
lower, the quartz beds threw back the deepening azure of the sky.
“‘Perhaps it is gold,’ said I, ‘that bright stuff which glitters so; at
any rate there is gold to be had for the taking, while we lie here and
bloat and rot and waken screaming in the night. To-morrow we must go
up.’
“‘I’m no fit mysel’, lad,’ said MacFarlane. ‘I hae the fever; I maun
rest.’
“‘You will rest here through eternity,’ said I, ‘if you do not come away
at once. You are yellow as a Chinaman and there’s not a line left in
your face.’ And with the aid of the girl I set about preparing a meal.”
Leyden sucked in his breath sharply—filled his deep lungs like a man
coming out of the dense, polluted atmosphere of a crowded car or clinic.
“That night I awoke thrice, and each time a cold terror was clamping my
heart, until I seemed to shrivel in the utter obliteration of all else.
The dread was featureless; there was no dream, only this crushing,
numbing, withering fear which froze sound and motion; and I lay and
listened to the quick, faint _tick-tick-tick_ of my heart-beats and
waited to die—and, instead, I slept again, even while sweating with
fear. The last time I remained awake; and as conscience dawned fuller
this fear sat upon the distorted objects of the place, the swinging
bulks of my companions, the dark roof, and as I looked out into the
lambent, mellow-lighted valley fear walked beneath the vague,
symmetrical palms and the shimmering umbrella-trees and lurked in the
recesses of the fantastic rocks. Fear walked on the water of the oily,
sluggish river that flowed with the sheen of molten gold through raw,
eroded banks where the lips of the rocks protruded like the ragged edge
of an ulcer.
“I lay inert, paralyzed, and presently heard a faint, shuddering sigh;
presently a moan, deep, hopeless, almost expiring.
“‘Are you awake, Vinckers?’ I managed to whisper, and my tongue could
hardly articulate the words.
“‘Yes—are you, MacFarlane?’
“‘Ou aye, ou aye—what is it—oh, what is it, man?’
“‘Have you had the nightmare?’ I asked.
“‘Yes—without the dream—only the fear—what _is_ it?’
“‘Ou, lads, we maun leave this place as soon as ’tis light——’
“‘Hush!—ah, hush!’ whispered Vinckers. ‘I am burning up—come over here,
Leyden—I am afraid to move—I was never afraid before—never in my
life—ah—what was that!’
“‘Ah, tush, man!’ MacFarlane’s rough voice choked. ‘D’ye want to drive
the heart of a man from his body? Tomba, lass, Tomba!’ There was no
reply.
“‘Tomba!’ said I, sharply. ‘Tomba—Tomba!’
“‘Hush!—ah, hush!’ whispered Vinckers.
“‘Why shall I hush?’ said I, and my voice was shaking. ‘Waken her,
MacFarlane.’
“The Scotchman thrust out his great arm slowly, and in the faint yellow
light I saw him snatch it quickly away; heard the choking rattle in his
throat; felt my own heart flickering like a candle burned low.
“‘Ou—ou—ou——’
“‘Hush—hush—s’h’hh!’ whispered Vinckers.
“And then, Doctor”—Leyden’s voice had sunk until one scarce caught the
bitter mockery—“I did the bravest act of my life. I slid out of my
hammock.” Leyden laughed in a way that sent a chill through me.
“Can you understand, Doctor? Do you know what fear is? Did you ever
awake suddenly from a dreamless sleep with a devitalizing fear crushing
the very blood out of your heart? No dream—no recollection—only the fear
sometimes hung like a black mantle over the nearest object, no matter
how familiar. Purely reasonless—the organ acting on the cell; an
inversion of effect on cause. In our own case, if one presumed that our
diet, or water, or the fever, or any other extrinsic cause had deranged
the organ—perhaps the liver—and thus poisoned the cell—the single center
of Fear—as some drugs affect other centers—murderous—erotic—as Charcot,
I believe it is, demonstrates that the odor of certain perfumes will
throw the hypnotized patient into paroxysms of fear——
“I never did a thing so difficult as to get on my feet and walk to the
hammock of that poor girl. She was quite dead—and the wet frost of the
fear which had killed her lay moist and chill on face and breast. I did
not dare to light a match to look at her; there is a limit, Doctor, to
the courage of every man. I was never really frightened before; I can
never remember being really frightened since; and my profession is one
of countless risks to life. This was something far, far worse—the reason
stampeding with the will——
“Then the lethargy crept on again. I crawled back to my hammock and,
still fighting the fear, fell asleep. The others slept before I—and I
could hear them whining and whimpering like young puppies taken from the
litter.
“I was the first to awaken when the light came. My fear was gone and I
lay drenched in perspiration, yet comfortable, unwilling to rouse
myself.
“‘Oh, the awfu’ nicht!’ moaned MacFarlane, and covered his face with his
gnarled hands. Vinckers did not speak, but shouldered his kit.
“‘Let us go,’ he said, and we filed away from the place without looking
back at the cannibal girl in the plaited hammock, her drawn face covered
with the Scotchman’s only neckerchief.
“We wandered down the valley looking for a place to ford the stream and
begin the ascent. We had no carriers, no goods, no especial hopes, but
these things did not trouble us. We wandered along the banks of the
dream-river and beneath the symmetrical trees, and filed between the
fantastic rocks, which, from habit alone, we tapped with our little
hammers; and still the sun had not looked over the edge of the eastern
rampart of the valley, and we journeyed in the shadow of the Mountain of
Fears. The Mountain of Fears—the Mountain of Fears—and nothing but peace
on every hand! Nothing of harm—no danger of man or beast, nothing of
heat, nothing of cold—a misty, dreamy peace; the dreads of the night
supplanted by an apathetic shame which forbade discussion of these
things. As for Tomba—why, she died of fever, poor girl—what else?
“We wandered down the valley and soon we came to a ford; there we
crossed and toiled on up the slope of the mountain—up, up, up, panting,
sweating, breathless, not clear as to purpose, but struggling to get up
because—we did not know! As we climbed we tapped at the stones, because
we were used to tapping and chipping with our little hammers, and when
we halted for the night we were high up on a wooded plateau, and the air
was fine and thin and sweet with healthy odors of moss and fern and
clean flowers. We were on the hip of the Mountain of Fears.
“We crouched on the edge of the precipice and peered down into the
valley as the sun slipped over the crest of the opposite hills and drew
after it the curtain of mist which hid the greasy river and the unreal
trees and the jumping rocks, which from above looked like Titan children
frozen at play. The mist hid all of these things, but now we were above
instead of beneath it. Before it grew denser it formed a thin, flat pale
through which one might look and see these objects, symmetrical and
bizarre, fantastic and uncouth, which lay beneath, as one looks down
through the thin water-line of a clear but stagnant pool and sees the
fairy-like structures of an alien element. ‘To-night,’ thought I, ‘we
shall not slumber in that cistern.’ It seemed to me in that thin,
bracing air, that we had wriggled to the surface like the larvæ of
mosquitoes, and, after incessantly gyrating up and down, had crawled
clear and grown our wings in the drier medium. But even while thinking
these things the sun slipped down behind the opposite hills, the mist
thickened, a cold draught sucked around the side of the mountain, and I
heard Vinckers let out his breath with a shudder. I had noticed that
each evening we grew depressed as soon as the sun was gone.
“‘What is the matter?’ I asked.
“‘Oh, God!’ he shuddered. ‘Don’t you see that it is all getting yellow
again—a nasty, greenish yellow?’
“‘Ou aye,’ said MacFarlane, ‘but it has been yellow all day!’
“It had a yellowish tinge to me, Doctor, but I had tried to persuade
myself that it was something in the spectrum of that equatorial sun and
the vivid greens which filled the valley. There was no denying that as
the sunrays left the air the yellows came out with frightful intensity,
and to my imagination it seemed as if we were cursed with the curse of
Midas—a curse because we had profaned the _Malang-o-mor_, except that it
was not necessary to touch a thing to turn it into gold. Of course, at
that time I knew nothing of such things as xanthopsia, and my mind
rebelled at aught of a superstitious character. The result was that I
became worried and confused—like a dog listening at the receiver of a
telephone to a sourceless voice. With Vinckers and MacFarlane it was
different; they were of the unimaginative type which goes at one leap
from stubborn disbelief to frenzied superstition—and just because
everything was turning yellow they would not raise their voices above a
whisper.
“We had practically nothing wherewith to camp; in fact, we had come to
wandering through that dream-country with only dream-needs—the needs of
an opium-eater or any other slave of the lamp. Of course, we had some of
the fruit—the stuff that grew on the Mountain of Fears—I have never seen
it anywhere else. We made a shelter and crept in to sleep.
“I suppose that it was hot enough, but for a month we had dwelt in the
steam-room of a Turkish bath. Being younger and stronger, I had given my
poncho to Vinckers, who had felt the chill of the higher air. Perhaps it
was this circumstance which brought me through the night with my reason,
for the cold wakened me before that moment of low-ebbing vitality which
comes between midnight and dawn. I awoke shivering, dew-damp with the
terror of the night before, and as I lay there waiting I heard the other
two twitching and muttering. I suppose that I should have awakened them.
“The moonlight, which should have been clear on the mountain, was yellow
as in the valley below; the moon was still high, and we lay in the
shadow, but as I waited it passed the zenith and began its swift
descent, and soon the lower rim was cut by the edge of our leafy roof.
For an hour no sound had come from the others, no stir; they had lain
like dead men; and in my abject nervelessness I was afraid to
investigate, but waited until the moon should sink lower and look
directly into the place. MacFarlane was nearest me, and as the moon sank
lower the yellow light crept up his body, which was motionless, as if
carved in stone. It reached a hand lying palm downward on his thigh, and
I saw that the back glistened with moisture. The sharp, golden moon-ray
crept higher, and I watched breathlessly for his face, my own still in
the shadow. His straggling beard turned golden; I saw his yellow teeth
gleaming, the bristling lips drawn up and the breath hissing between in
quick gasps. ‘He is having the nightmare,’ I thought, and might have
found courage to awaken him, but at that moment the light shone full in
his face, and I saw that his eyes were wide open, fixed, staring,
brimming with an anguish of dread before which my soul shrank. He was
staring straight in front of him at Vinckers, who was stretched out at
his side, and as I watched, the moonlight fell on _his_ face and showed
_his_ eyes also wide open and staring straight into those of MacFarlane.
“For perhaps five minutes—five hours it seemed to me—these two lay
inert, stricken paralytic from dread, gazing each one into the crazed
eyes of the other, motionless, soundless—while I, watching from the
shadow, saw the water trickle down their yellow faces in little, golden
drops. Then, with a consciousness of the danger of this thing, I tried
to break the spell—and did!
“‘Vinckers!’ I croaked, and before the sound of my voice had died away
Vinckers screamed—a rasping, throat-splitting scream, straight into
MacFarlane’s face. MacFarlane gurgled and his eyes opened and shut
rapidly. Vinckers screamed again—and at this something inside me which I
was striving to hold in check, some irresistible impulse, seemed
suddenly to tear away—and sweep my will before it—at least, this is a
nice way of putting it, Doctor——”
Into Leyden’s voice there had crept again that biting mockery which was
almost jaunty in tone.
“It is so,” he continued, “that one auto-analytic—a student of
psychology—his own—might refer to these subjective symptoms. The brutal
stranger watching this phenomenon would spell it in five
letters—P-A-N-I-C—an elemental emotion which can be the source of much
learned argumentation—and stamp the lives out of women and little
children—and grab all of the lifeboats—and _has_! Yet it is an emotion
quite common to certain low types of humanity, the kind who do their
thinking with their spinal cord—and it is one of those lovely primitive,
primordial, brutal, unregenerate and degraded emotions of which certain
others of its type, such as ungoverned lust and anger and revenge, are
much admired by many modern devotees, the bestial primitive—to my mind
all of these things sweep together through the same sluice.”
There are no words which will convey the bitterness of Leyden’s tone;
mockery soared high in comparison.
“_B’r’r’rrgh_! how I loathe all such unicellular impulses in a man—a
finished animal product! And that night on that mountain I yelped and
howled in fear with those other two hairy animals—and I think that we
fought and bit and struggled, for the next morning we were masses of
minor wounds. Yet so far had we harked back on the trail of our savage
forbears, driven screaming before that primitive and degraded passion of
fear, that none of us was badly hurt!—which was even more shameful. I
suppose, Doctor, that our terror was too elemental and reasonless to
lead us to use weapons, whereas our limbs lacked the strength to enable
us to kill each other with our naked hands; so that, instead of digging
out each other’s hearts with our finger-nails, we suffered most from
skin-scratches, upon which the flies settled. Ach!—I should like to say
an obscene word, Doctor! Let’s smoke!—let’s have a drink!
“Oh, yes—we all came away the next day. Nothing happened to us—just as
there was nothing to be afraid of. Please tell me that it was all due to
a toxic action on the center of Fear—that is what I tell myself—and what
a savant of Leipsic was good enough to tell me. Nevertheless, when I met
MacFarlane in Sydney four years ago I crossed to the other side of the
street—and he looked once and then away. There are some things in a
man’s past difficult to face; most difficult in mine is that last night
on the broad hip of the Mountain of Fears.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
OIL AND WATER
WE were skirting the Island of Margherita, which belongs to Venezuela
and produces pearls of small size but excellent quality. I was smoking
an after-dinner cigar with Dr. Leyden, the collector, who earns his
living by supplying museums and professors with specimens from the
animal, vegetable, and mineral worlds.
“Did you ever notice, Doctor,” he asked, suddenly, “how African blood is
curdled by being mixed with Anglo-Saxon?”
“I had always thought,” said I, “that African blood mixes badly with any
other.”
“No. With Latin blood it will combine like whisky and soda, but the
Anglo-Saxon plasma exerts upon it an action like that of alcohol upon
albumen——” He paused and absently followed the course of a school of
flying-fish that flickered suddenly from the swash alongside and
skittered away across the dancing waves.
“What suggested this topic to your mind?” I asked, curiously, for we had
been discussing the relative naval strength of Germany and the United
States.
“That island.” He nodded toward Margherita as it rose, rough in outline,
but with the misty softness of distance, from the quiet, pink and purple
sea. The sun was resting on the rim of the sky-line, and its late rays
bathed the lavender slopes of the mountains, that rose in tumbling
confusion, their summits blazing with high-lights and their feet already
clothed in slanting shadows.
Almost as we watched, the sun slipped under the sea; a multi-colored
breeze rippled the face of the water; opalescent flashes sparkled here
and there from the sails of the little Portuguese men-of-war, and then
the day-light began to wane, as it seemed, in rhythmic beats.
“Odd,” continued Leyden, clinging with Teutonic persistency to his
theory, conscious but unaffected by his exquisite surroundings. “The
popular idea is that an individual having a drop of African blood is
more negro than white, even though the white predominates, as in the
case of a quadroon or octoroon. This is wrong, Doctor. The white is by
far the more potent strain, but, because it is more apt to color the
mind than the skin, it is not recognized as such.”
“Primitive organizations are usually more virile,” I began.
“It is not of the physical but of the mental that I speak!” he
interrupted, a bit testily. “It is an undeserved compliment to the negro
and an unjust insult to the white to claim that a man having an equal
amount of both strains is more black than white, but if the white strain
is Anglo-Saxon or Scandinavian, then he is both white and black, and all
of each, for they will mix no more than oil and water.”
He was silent again, and I waited, for I knew that he would presently
back his theory by an illustration.
“You know Margherita?” I asked, presently, to help him get under way.
“Better than is necessary,” he replied, and was silent again. The swift
tropic twilight had almost faded; the slopes of the mountains were
somber with mysterious shadows; a huge cumulus cloud, still crimson
about its edges, was stranded on the highest peaks, and above it a
dainty crescent moon was swiftly growing brighter.
“Let us go aft,” muttered Leyden. “These cattle make too much noise!”