Edison Marshall

“ The trouble with Ned's generation was that it was a godless generation: the same evil that razed Babylon to the dust. Ned and his kind had come to be sufficient unto themselves. They had lost the wonder and fear of life, and that meant nothing less than the loss of their wonder and fear of the great Author of life. To these, life had been a game that they thought they had mastered. They had laughed to scorn the philosophies that a hundred generations of nobler men had built up with wondering reverence. ”

“ Straight north, day after day! To McNab, a man who had cruised ten years on Alaskan waters, the air began to feel like home. It was crisp, surging cool in the lungs, fragrant with balsam from the wooded islands. Already Ned had begun to readjust some of his ideas in regard to the North. It was no longer easy to believe that his father had exaggerated its beauty and its appeal, its desolation and its vastness. It was a strange thing for a man used to cities to go day upon day without seeing scarcely a village beside the sea, a single human being other than those of his own party. ”

“ Sometimes the moon rose in a splash of silver, and its loveliness on the far seas was a thing that words couldn't reach. Yet Lenore did not like things she could not put in words. For all their beauty those magic nights dismayed and disquieted her. They too were of the realities, and for all her past attitude of sophistication, she found that realism was the one thing she could not and dared not accept. Such realities as these, the wide-stretching seas and the infinity of stars, were rapidly stripping her of her dearest delusions ”

“ But out here in this little, wind-blown craft, surrounded by an immensity of desolation beyond the power of their minds to grasp, it was hard to hold to their old complacency. Their old philosophies were barrenly insufficient, and they couldn't repel an ever deepening sense of awe. The wind, sweeping over them out of the vastness, was a new voice, striking the laughter from their lips and instilling a coldness that was almost fear in their warm, youthful blood. ”

“ Only the sea and the sky were left, and the craft struggling wearily, ever farther into the empty North.
Lenore found herself oppressed by an unreasoning fear. Realities were getting home to her, and she was afraid of them. It would have been wiser not to come, yet she couldn't have told why. The launch was wholly comfortable; she was already accustomed to the cramped quarters. The men of the crew were courteous, Ned the same devoted lover as always. ”

“ Sometimes, alone on the deck at night, Ned was close to the dearest reality, the most profound discovery that could possibly touch his life: that the dreadful spirit of God moved upon the face of these desolate waters, no less than, as is told in Genesis, at creation's dawn. ”

“ All at once this man, heretofore so sure, so self-sufficient, so incredulous of anything except his own continued glory and happiness and life, was face to face with the first fear—the simple, primitive fear of death. ”

“ For all his boasted realism, Ned Cornet had never got away from superstition. Man is still not far distant from the Cave and the Squatting Place, and superstition is a specter from out the dead centuries that haunts all his days. The coincidence that their craft, plying through these deathly waters, should bear such a name as the Charon suddenly suggested a dark possibility to Ned. ”

“ Her own personal charm would not fight for her should she fall overboard into the icy waters. Here was a region where recklessness could very easily mean death; and where life itself was suddenly revealed utterly beyond her ken. But there was no turning back. Every hour the Charon bore her farther from her home.
Mrs. Hardenworth, whose habits of thought were more firmly established, was only made irritable and petulant by the new surroundings. Never good company except under the stimulation of some social gathering, she was rapidly becoming something of a problem to Ned and Lenore. ”

“ Realities went home to them that they had no desire to admit. A fervent belief in their own sophistication had been their dominant point of view, a disillusionment and a realism that was the tone of their generation, denying all they could not see or hear, holding themselves superciliously aloof from that gracious wonder and simplicity that still blesses little children ”

“ Heretofore she had placed her faith in superficialities, finding strength for her spirit and bolstering up her self-respect with such things as pride of ancestry, social position, a certain social attitude of recklessness that she thought became her, and most of all by refusing to believe that life contained any depth that she had not plumbed, any terrors that she dared not brave, any situation that she could not meet and master. ”