L. P. Gratacap

“ Hopkins seized Goritz’s arm, the Professor Hopkins’ coat tail—what there was of it—and ingloriously, with crash and whisking flight from branch to branch, we four hopeless Argonauts slumped from the top of the lofty pine, with arresting scramblings and maniacal clutchings, to the bottom, and were spilled to the roadway; four voiceless, bedraggled, ragged, bushy-haired, wild eyed, grimy men, more savage in our destitution than the savages we had fallen amongst. ”

“ At that we all laughed, and that relief made us serious again, and with eyes open, pencils scribbling, and an occasional click of the camera (Hopkins was our photographer) we hastened down the now somewhat contracting valley. An elbow of land pushed out and diverted the stream and on this point, where the river turned, swerving back into its first course, and where an expanse of yellow sand and pebbles furnished an open space from which the lake, the receding valley behind us, a gorge before us, the open sky, and the encroaching flanks of higher hills were all visible, we halted. ”

“ The Arctic scene, the outlandish and piled up “Pluto,” the waiting, serviceable dogs, alert and incredulous, the swarthy, grimy, wrinkled, heterogeneous natives, ourselves on one side of the pictorial composition, Coogan, Stanwix, Phillips, Spent on the other, with the crew in an amazement of disgust hanging over the steamer’s taffrail, perched in the rigging, or sauntering near us, and that illimitable ice-packed sea, imperturbably plotting our destruction. Hopkins delivered the valedictory. ”

“ The pool of clouds over the valley whose inconstant movement alternately veiled and revealed the light beyond them, had parted, as though a sudden wind had pierced it and driven its parts in rapid and eccentric flight to all sides, as a stone dropped in a pond sends the waves shoreward, and, past the rift, we saw through the rising vapors, beyond the rigid, fan shaped prism yet involved in 243it, an incandescent surface like a mammoth shield, a shield covering acres of space, and over it again, and yet perhaps miles and miles further away, the solemn grandeur of an ice capped lofty mountain. ”

“ Except for the destruction of our dogs whom we had already begun to admire and to cherish, nothing seemed wanting for our perfect peace of mind except a little more confidence that this unknown world, now rapidly approaching, would offer us a decent foothold; that it would not be an ice-buried continent, the asylum of all the terrors of the north, awful in its solitude, remorseless in its scorn, brutal in its revenge. ”

“ Link, the ebbing tide of life returned, slowly indeed at first, so slowly that the friendly faces around me seemed only indefinite, leering masks, before which I shuddered. Warmth reasserted its sway, the warmth of life. I felt fresh, cleanly nourishment, the elixir of whisky slipping down my throat, and then a delicious thrill of comfort, and I became conscious, to find myself eating and drinking and around me the anxious, staring faces of Coogan, Isaac Stanwix, Bell Phillips, and Jack Spent. ”

“ These two good friends,” he waved his hands genially toward Goritz and myself, “know a good deal about zero temperatures, polar bears, walrus, starvation and ice floes; you have surveyed Spitzbergen, and as for myself—Well, honestly, I’m a tenderfoot but young, hardy, sound as a steel rail, a good shot, a prize rower, and once Prof., take it from me, I strangled a mad dog with these hands.”
Hopkins never looked handsomer than at that moment, his face burning with an expectant eagerness, the color rising to his temples beneath the waves of chestnut hair, his frame and figure like an Achilles. ”

“ Remember, Mr. Link, it was the night time of the polar world, and here all was bathed in light or silhouetted in shadow, while that Stationary Sun which filled the immense valley land with light, imparted to it warmth; it shone in its peculiar zenith, deriving in some way (by reflection from the crystalline walls to the west) its replenishment of light and heat from this stupendous source of both. We watched in a trance of amazement for hours. ”

“ For weeks it had been growing colder, and now—to our astonishment a spectacle of dazzling beauty relieved the singular weird terror of this lifeless scene. We saw a gathering gloom from far away darken the peaks of the Krocker Land Rim; it spread and became revealed as a snowstorm. A wind brushed over us—another instant and the wide zone of 284delicate radiation was transformed into an indescribably glorious firmament of stars, shifting, dying out and renewed, and around us from the sky fell a shower of icy particles, a flurry from the tempest that was sweeping over the distant ranges. ”

“ On the fourth of July we were under Cape Lisburne, encountering the rush of the wind that seems harbored by that lofty cliff, and which like a physical avalanche pushed us over until the water rippled over the lee rail. Along the shores everywhere there was a broad avenue of open water, stretching from the skirt of shore ice to the heavy packs, sheeted with fogs and murmurously moaning, inimitably flooring that mysterious ocean whose furthest waters beat on the shores of Krocker Land. ”

“ We all looked at Goritz with surprise. He did not often turn on the oratory like this. It was a touch, I said to myself, of his old nature. The plea was well made and it kept us silent for some time, and I think the longer we measured its meaning the more it affected us. Suddenly Hopkins broke the silence.
“Say, where’s everybody? There isn’t a soul in sight.” It was true; the mound hill, the courtyards, the road, the steps, the doorway, the snake pasture, the parapets, which it seemed but a few moments before had been crammed with the chattering multitude, were deserted. ”

“ It was really difficult for me to desert the raft. In that long drive through the canon of Homeward Bound, the irrepressible instinct of companionship had nurtured a curious hallucination of impersonation, and the bundle of dead logs had assumed an indefinite but real vitality. Could not I shape or build from it a serviceable sledge, and still, transformed, keep it in my service? Then again, could I spare the time to effect this change? I had only my hatchet for an implement, and the thongs and strands, rope and cords that had so stoutly kept it intact for nails and iron bands. ”

“ The wind rose almost to a tornado, though there was no snow or rain, just a bitter cold searching wind. It smote the mountains. We could see the sky-rocketing volley of snow on their sides, and noted too that towards their tops there was no disturbance, indicating a semi-icy condition of the snow there, perhaps better, perhaps worse for going. And now in the turning of a hand the crowding ice packs were back. As far as we could see their humps and fields spread everlastingly, and the chorus of groans, wheezes, and queer hushing sounds that they all sent up was astonishing. ”

“ I saw men and women fishing in the broad river, and to my amazement found their boats were literally rafts—wooden logs bound together by ropes or thongs of leather and fibre. Hardly had I perceived this before the thought and hope flashed through my mind that on some such vehicle of transit I could trust myself to the stream, and that it was most likely that these hardy highlanders could give me the information I now needed as to the channel, direction, debouchment, and navigableness of the noble water in its course to the coast. ”

“ What can be the use of turning the whole world topsy-turvy, and of course as a consequence exterminating these innocent people. Do you suppose you could hold back for one hour the rampaging hordes that would pour into this little valley and inundate it with hungry, riotous savages? Put a mining town with its rum and its demons in the place of this contented realm with its picturesque life, its peaceful ceremonies, its long inherited customs that for centuries upon centuries have never changed ”

“ The depression is Krocker Land. If profound its climate is temperate. Life, the remnants of its first evolutionary phases, may be there—but mark me!” The Professor positively dilated, everything in him enlarged as if his bounding heart sent fuller currents of blood to all its outposts; his eyes were refulgent; I thought they were an emerald green; his hair rose in the thrill of his vaticination and his mouth opened into a vast exclamatory rictus, in which flashed his big white incisors like diminutive tusks. “Mark me, there too will be found the last evolutionary phases of the human race!” ”

“ Yet I was still conscious, and then, as if an omnipotent arm thrust from below raised us, I felt the raft pressed upward against the welter and inrush, and then a titanic convulsion, and the raft, and I dangling to the posts, were shot bodily out of the maelstrom, though scarcely lifted above the surface; and, enveloped in the hill of water that accompanied us, the raft swam out again upon the descending stream, in a turbulence of waves that made me dizzy with its confusion. ”

“ Professor Bjornsen was a man learned in rocks, minerals, mines, geology, the hard and motionless properties of the earth. He was scrupulously neat, and his frequent inspection of himself, especially his hands, was equally disconcerting and amusing.
Spruce Hopkins was the next man, alongside of myself, and probably he would have been the first man whom an approaching stranger would have looked at the longest, and concerned himself with knowing the most. ”

“ The summer was reigning, and the verdurous garb of green and colored things was drawn like a veil over the rugged grounds, soothing them into a transient loveliness. We could see the rivulets from the snowbanks coursing everywhere, and could hear from the glacier the gurgle, rush, and tinkle too of hidden rivers, while towards the coast, in the daytime, the sun revealed a shield of wide-spread waters where the floods from the melting ice poured over the shore, and cut long, wide lanes in the rapidly vanishing shore ice. ”

“ We drove in triumph through the dismantled gateway, pierced by the convulsion of those yellow sticks of doom. Out on the white field, on which perhaps only the wind had left its imprint, which no eye but that all-seeing orb of day had ever scanned, whose silence only the winds, the waves, the storming ice had ever broken, and which now, the first time since Eternity began its reign there, was rudely assailed—we imagined it as an astonished deity—by yelping dogs and four hurrahing mortals! ”

“ The water washed in long flows over the sides of the berg, and the berg itself rocked and shook, threatening to start our ice-yacht into motion, and to carry her and her precious cargo into the whirling, fighting ice about us. Fortunately it continued to grow colder, and the snow, besides offering us means of banking the yacht, stem, stern, and prow, and ramming her bowl-shaped sides with a stiff embrace from which a jolt would hardly free her, provided a bed for the poor dogs, who were frantic with misery, howling and whining in disgust. ”

“ Considerable water flowed into them from crevices in the walls, and the place was overshadowed at one point by a projecting ledge that formed a portico to a cavernous recess. Leaden colored fish rose and sank in the water of the lakes, and we thought the gulls, who must have penetrated to this remote asylum from Beaufort Sea, had been attracted by them. It proved to be a dreary, bare hole and instilled in us a feeling half despairing and melancholy.
“This isn’t the gayest place in the world,” said Hopkins. “Our insect friends certainly didn’t come here for recreation. ”

“ And with all of us the inscrutable sensations were becoming insufferable. Goritz insisted on keeping on but we overruled that. It was just possible that our resting a while might accustom us to the strange influence of atmosphere, and enable us to proceed without this torturing plague of heat and noise and dilation in our poor heads. We sat down. Oogalah quickly discovered our reluctance, and was back with us in a trice, gesticulating and vociferating as well, absolutely unaffected, which brought to the suffering Yankee’s face the most comical expression of disgust and surprise. ”

“ The “yellowness” of the live journalist, turning with an instinctive scent to follow to its end every new trail of incident, sniffing in each passing rumor the presence of hidden and serviceable scandal, and ruthlessly breaking through the sham obstruction of modesty to snatch the culprit or to free the victim, cannot certainly be referred to the torpor marked by the jaundice of the invalid, nor to the weakness of the last stages of an emaciating fever. Perhaps if the reproach is to be made, or can be made, intelligible, the yellow color finds its subtle analogue in a mustard plaster. ”

“ Backward the steaming wall of vapor was lit with a soft radiance, and resembled an ever-changing cloud land. Above, the sky was clear and blue; the distance was a revelation 161of beauty, ponds and lakes separated by low hills, whose summits held coppices of trees and shrubs, sparkled and shone in far flung chains and groups, and below, in a softly radiant vale, the slim, long outline of a little lakelet, embosomed in tall, waving reeds or grasses, like some titanic jewel, gleamed, crystalline and keen.
Ducks were swimming on its surface, and skimming with beating wings its tiny waves. ”