CHAPTER IThe Fiord
How well I remember it! The solemn, beautiful fiord, framed within the pine tressed walls, flecked with patches of sunlight, where its waters glistened with beryl hues. Shaded in the recesses of the cliffs where the lustreless flood softly murmured with the faintest rhythmic cadence against the rocky rims, immobile and caressed as they had been for hundreds of thousands of years, and in a few places yielding slowly to decay in shingled beaches. And the music of nature united with the appeal to the eyes of color and form, to entrance the visitor.
A rushing brook singing like a girl hurrying to some holiday joy, broke from the highlands, a silvery thread, then a braid of pearls, then a sloping cataract of splintered and rainbowed waves, then in silence for a while, catching its breath, as the girl might catch it, for a new descent, and then the renewed song, through a tiny gorge, its jubilation softened to a murmur, and then the flash and chorus of its outspread ripples as it leaped into the fiord. And that was the light soprano of the music around us, and under it rolled the bass notes, muted andsfuggendo, of the distant waterfall—foss—at the inland head of the fiord, and towards which were even then starting the pleasure boats, launches and steam yachts of the tourists.
The sense of smell contributed its intoxication tothe charmed surrender of eye and ear, for there was flung down from the tree-crowned cliffs the scent of wild flowers and the clean, resinous odors of the spruce. The wind singing, too, like a chord accompaniment to the cheerful ballad of the brook, and the heavy recitative of the waterfall, brought this fragrance to us, even as it swept in capricious rushes outward over the fiord to its gateway, through which the distant sea lay motionless like a blazoned shield, beyond theSkargaard.
A shelf of land, dropping off in a slope to the waters of the fiord and pierced by a roadway whose climbing curves led at last to the summit of the cliffs, and which ended on the shore in a dock, then gay with the summer glories of young girls and men, held the picturesque red houses of a few farmers, and the wandering walls of the comfortable hotel. The brilliant green of the cut lawn, like an enameled sheath, covered the little tableland, and venturesome tongues and ribbons ran flame-wise up crannies, ledges and narrow glades, to be lost in the shadows of the firs and the sprayed and silken birches high above.
Round a table on the broad piazza of the hotel, in an angle where we looked straight through the eyelet of the rocks to the sleeping ocean, a gold-backed monster like a leviathan covering the earth, slumberously heaving in the sun, I was sitting with three companions.
There was my best friend, Antoine Goritz, a man thickly bearded, with a broad, unwrinkled brow sparingly topped by light wisps of straggling hair, with a straight Teutonic nose, deep-set blue eyes under carven ivory lids, beneath eyebrows deeper tinted than his hair, and with a physical frame, strong, massive, large, effective, perhaps a trifle overdrawn in its suggestion of muscular power.
It was a titan mould, but the face above it washumorously still and observant. I often compared him to Sverdrup, Nansen’s captain, but he was a bigger man. Like him he possessed the docility of a child, the energy of a giant. Slow of speech ordinarily, as he was slow of movement, but in stress and excitement convulsed with his rapid, headlong utterance, and rising to a momentum of action that was irresistible and swift. He sat upright in a thick brown plaid with a blue sailor’s scarf around his broad neck and a straw hat like a coracle on his head.
Next to him sat Professor Hlmath Bjornsen, a very tidy man of ordinary build and stature, but oddly distinguishable by his abundant red hair, the crab-like protuberance of his eyes (he wore no glasses), his indented lips, which looked as if stitched up in sections, also undisguised by any covering of hair, his patulous, projecting ears. His homeliness was saved by the merit of cheerfulness at least, by a pug nose, a rosy complexion and a demure, winning sort of smile that was generallya proposof nothing, but was retained habitually as nature’s protective grace against the premature prejudices of first acquaintances. 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. He was a Yankee, an American of Americans, but of that Grecian phase which rejectstoto-coelo, the newspaper type, the Brother Jonathan caricature, the cheap idiosyncracies of the paragraph writer, unassimilable even with the more credible picture,
of one who wisely schemedAnd hostage from the future took,In trained thought and lore of book.Large-brained, clear-eyed—of such as heShall Freedom’s young apostles be.
of one who wisely schemedAnd hostage from the future took,In trained thought and lore of book.Large-brained, clear-eyed—of such as heShall Freedom’s young apostles be.
of one who wisely schemedAnd hostage from the future took,In trained thought and lore of book.Large-brained, clear-eyed—of such as heShall Freedom’s young apostles be.
of one who wisely schemed
And hostage from the future took,
In trained thought and lore of book.
Large-brained, clear-eyed—of such as he
Shall Freedom’s young apostles be.
Spruce Hopkins boasted no particular thrills. His thoughts followed really a rather narrow gauge, and he could weigh with premature or precocious carefulness the two sides of a practical question when his decision would have halted perhaps at alternatives involving the emotions.
He had a superb figure, graceful, plastic, and eloquent of strength. His face leaned, so to speak, a little to the Brahmin type, but any introspection it might have accompanied or suggested was lost in the radiance of the eyes, the tempting sweetness of his smile, the full-blown glory of his infectious laughter, the spiced offerings of his genial tongue, the crisp charm of his wavy, glossy, chestnut-tinted hair, and that slight but irreduciblesoupconof swagger which gave him distinction.
And then there was myself; you see me, a hardy man (a blush rose to Erickson’s cheeks; he could not overcome some apprehension of my recalling his recent humiliation), a sailor man with a little land schooling, loving yarns, telling yarns, and—believing ’em.
“Why, yes, Erickson,” I interrupted, “I suppose you have been quite willing to believe some gilded tales that those friends, your late companions here in New York, told you, but even a captivating gullibility hardly explains how a young giant like you were found on your back, strapped to a table, and about to be skewered like a spitted pig.”
“Ah, sir, patience. You shall know all, but—at the end, at the end; even if I could resist a plausible story, I could not always resist what goes with a good story.”
“SCHNAPPS?” I interjected.
“Please, sir, patience. It is worth while. I have seen what no living man— Perhaps I shall never see again my fellow travelers, the three who sat with me on the hotel porch three years ago.” He bent his head, his bruised, rough hand was passed over his face, and I thought a flare of flame, shot from a cleaving coal, showed on it the glistening trail of moisture. “—what no living man has ever seen, a country more wonderful than dreams or legends or fairy stories have described or painted. Oh, sir, in that new world in the north, something of the imagery of the mythology of my forefathers seems repeated; very vaguely indeed. There I have seen Nilfheim, I have seen Hwergelmer and Muspelheim, the world of fire and light, but different, yes very different, and perhaps— Well, no, not Valhalla, but something like Yggdrasill, and if it was not Gladsheim, what was it?”
He resumed.
It was Professor Bjornsen speaking, with his big hands clutching his head on either side, buried indeed in the luxuriant wealth of his ruddy hair, with his staring eyes fixed on the table as if he saw through it, looking at the land of his prophecies, while we all listened, with our eyes measuring the cliffs up to the green fringes that ran, a dark zone against the sky, on their sun-blazed peaks.
“Signs, signals, came to the explorers of Europe long before Columbus set his face westward; long before, standing at the peak of his little caravel, he dared the perils and the powers of the bewitched western ocean, the woods and weeds of Cipango floated to the shores of Europe. There are signs and signals now, gentlemen”; the Professor brought his long fingers down with a smart, startling slap on the table that brought our own hands nervously to the sides of the unsupported glasses,lest they capsize in his assault of enthusiasm, while his disordered hair flamed aureole-like over his bulging forehead, beneath which smiled exultantly his piercing green eyes.
“Signs that an untouched continent is hidden in the uncharted wastes of the western Arctic Sea. A vast area of waters, a blank space on the map lies there, but that is simply the refuge, for cartographic lucidity, of our ignorance. What really lies there is reciprocal on the west of Greenland on the east, of the Franz Josef Archipelago and Spitzbergen north of us. There is there another large fragment of that original circumpolar continent that Science, in a moment of intuitional certainty, points to as the source of the world’s animal and vegetable life. And the signs? You ask me, your faces do, what they are. They are negative indeed but they are convincing. Payer reached 82°5´ North Latitude, on an island, Crown Prince Rudolf’s Land, and still further north he thought he could see an extensive tract of land in 83°. He called it Petermann’s Land. Driftwood on the east of Greenland comes from Siberia, circuitously perhaps around the pole, not across it, since the ‘Fram’ drifted from the north of Cape Chelyuskin in 1893 to north of Spitzbergen in 1896. The wood is Siberian larch and alder and poplar. Articles from the American ship ‘Jeannette,’ which foundered near Bennett Island, had taken the same course, being picked up on the east coast of Greenland. Professor Mohr held that they drifted over the pole. Why did not the ‘Fram’ drift over the pole? The set of the waters that way is obstructed, and that obstruction is a continental mass. Nothing surer.
“Dr. Rink has reported a throwing stick, used by the Eskimos in hurling their bird darts, not like those used by the Eskimos of Greenland, and attributedby him to the natives of Alaska. The path traversed by this erratic could not have been directly eastward from Alaska, threading an impenetrable and devious outlet in the Canadian archipelago, neither was it over the pole, as any pathway there would, constructively, have reached northern and not eastern Greenland. Again that invisible obstruction, as patent, as real, as the influence of the undiscovered Neptune in the perturbations of Uranus, which led Leverrier and Adams to make their prophetic directions for its detection.
“Sir Allen Young, appreciating the nucleal density of the land towards the pole, and speaking of Nansen’s promised attempt to drift over it, said, ‘I think the great danger to contend with will be the land in nearly every direction near the pole. Most previous navigators seem to have continued to see land, again and again farther and farther north.’
“Peary has seen Krocker Land. Over the western verge of the horizon its peaks rose temptingly to invite him to new conquests. That was a segment, a tiny fraction, a mere hint of the unknown vastnesses beyond. But the most convincing symptoms—Ah, a feeble word to designate a fact—of this continent are the observations of the United States’ meteorologists. Dr. R. A. Harris, a competent authority, has shown that the tides, mute but eloquent witnesses, testify to its existence. The diurnal tides along the Asiatic and North American coasts are not what they would be if an uninterrupted sweep over the Arctic Sea prevailed. Their progress is delayed and along narrow channels is accelerated or heightened, as past the shores of Grant Land. Why? Again that undiscovered country.”
“Harris, a clever fellow. Met him in Washington just two years ago this autumn—a crackerjackat mathematical guessing. The way he can figure and run off a reel of equations on anything from the rate sawdust makes in a wood mill to a mensuration of the average dimensions of turnips is surprising. If he says Krocker Land is there—why, then I guess IT IS,” was Spruce Hopkins’ comment, while we all turned our eyes from the cliffs to catch the Professor’s rejoinder, and Goritz leaned towards him, fixing him with those luminous orbs of his that betrayed his suppressed excitement.
“What does this man Harris say?” asked Goritz.
“He says,” answered Bjornsen, thrusting his hands in his pockets after he had looked them over in his habitual manner of inspection, “he says this. The diurnal tide occurs earlier at Point Barrow than at Flaxman Island; the diurnal tide or wave does not have approximately its theoretical value; at Bennett Island, north of Siberia, and at Teplitz Bay, Franz Josef Land, the range of the diurnal wave has about one-half of the magnitude which the tidal forces acting over an uninterrupted Arctic basin would produce; the average rise and fall at Bennett Island is 2.5 feet, but the rise and fall of the semi-daily tide is 0.4 at Point Barrow, and 0.5 feet at Flaxman Island. And he makes this point.” The Professor drew a red chalk from his vest pocket, stood up, and pushing our glasses aside, drew a squarish outline, broader on one side, with a tail standing out at its lower right-hand corner. He drew a circle a little above its long side, and scribbled Pole within it, then a jagged scrawl to either side, representing the coasts of Asia and America, with an indentation like a funnel for Behring Straits.
“He points out that the ‘Jeannette’, an American ship sent out by the proprietors of theNew York Herald, stuck in the ice here”, he jabbed hiscrayon, which crumbled into grains under his pressure, to one side of a projecting point of the outline, “and that the ice drift carried her eastward”; he made a flourish under the fascinating trapezoid that we now understood embodied the suggested continent; “while the ‘Fram’ stuck here,” again a red splotch above the diagram, “and was carried westward toward Greenland. Again why? Because at a critical point between their two positions the ice current is divided by the influence of a terminal promontory of Krocker Land. It splits, so to speak, the trend over the pole of the ice drift, turning one arm of it eastward, the other westward. His creative vision goes farther. A point of this new land lies just north of Point Barrow in Alaska, that causes the westward tide at the point; and he thinks it is distant from Point Barrow five or six degrees of latitude, 350 to 420 miles. Harris claims the ice in Beaufort Sea, north of Canada, here—” Another flaming signal was scrawled on the white tablecloth below the right-hand corner of the fascinating outline that now, assuming a magical premonition of some great geographical reality, kept our eyes fastened on it almost as if it might sprout before us with mimic mountains and ice fields.
“Harris says that the ice in Beaufort Sea does not drift freely northward, and is remarkable for its thickness and its age. He says the ice does not move eastward, for you see,” the Professor flung his hands over the cryptogram on the tablecloth like an exorcising magician, “you see Beaufort Sea is a sea, land-locked by Krocker Land, that here approaches Banks Island. Are you convinced?”
We looked at each other a trifle slyly and disconcertedly, and Goritz laughed, but it was Spruce Hopkins who suddenly turned to the Professor, caught his arm and held him for a moment withoutspeaking but with his face yielding slowly to some growing impression of wonder within him until he became quite grave.
“You see, Professor, I feel about this thing this way. I guess you’re not far wrong about this new land; it’s exciting enough to think of it. I calculated there was room up there for a little more glory after I heard your lecture before the Philosophical Society at Christiania last November; glory for some of us, such as Peary and Amundsen, Scott, Shackleton, Nansen, Stefansson, have won, and I thought it over. I fell in with Erickson and Goritz at Stockholm and we canvassed the matter, sort o’ stuck our heads together and thought it out; then we sent for you, and the demonstration seems straight enough. Some rigmarole! Don’t get angry Professor, that’s my way and, anyhow, I’m not going back on you, not so much as the thickness of a flea’s ear, and I think you’ll allow that can’t count; but the more I looked at the matter the more I wondered if there was anything about it the least bit more substantial than glory.
“And that wasn’t all, either. I think I’d like to get back again.”
“Yes, Professor,” it was Goritz speaking, with his head tilted back, as he followed the scurrying flight of sparrows amid the tasseled larches of the oppositegaard, “dead bodies are rather indifferent to glory. If we are great enough to get there, we must be great enough to get back. It would be no consolation for us to have our relatives and friends sing;
‘Sa vandra vara stora manFran ljuset ned til skuggan.’”[1]
‘Sa vandra vara stora manFran ljuset ned til skuggan.’”[1]
‘Sa vandra vara stora manFran ljuset ned til skuggan.’”[1]
‘Sa vandra vara stora man
Fran ljuset ned til skuggan.’”[1]
1.Thus our great men wander from the light down into the shades.
1.Thus our great men wander from the light down into the shades.
1.Thus our great men wander from the light down into the shades.
Hopkins smiled; he was neither hurt nor confused. He shook his head assentingly, and hisfaint drawl prolonged itself somewhat in his mocking rejoinder:
“That’s all right, Goritz. As a corpse you probably would attract a little more notice than either Erickson or myself, but buried fathoms deep in an Arctic sea, or just rolled over by a nameless glacier in this nameless land, your own chances for a newspaper obituary might shrink to very small proportions. You might not even have your dimensions mentioned.”
Goritz looked approvingly at the American, and benignantly raised his hat and bowed.
But the impatient Professor was in his chair, his hands spread out before him; his smile had vanished, his encroaching eyes had retreated, his serrated lips were puckered, his eyebrows frowned, and altogether he assumed such a sudden portentousness of suppressed eagerness and concealed thought that we rocked with delight and the momentary restraint was forgotten. And with our laughter there stole back into the Professor’s face its usual smile, but it had enigmatically deepened into a sort of mute expostulation.
“Listen,” he said, and he waved his hands, inviting us to a closer attention; his voice fell; I thought his peering eyes glanced to either side to avert the proximity of eavesdroppers. “There is good reason to believe that this new world of the north is neither inclement nor barren. I believe it is a place of wonders; in it rest secrets, REVELATIONS.” There was now a sorcery in the Professor’s voice that made us lean toward him, drawing the circle a little closer, like conspirators over an incantation. “What they are no once can tell. You ask, Why? I believe this. I can hardly explain; my faith in this is a growth, a coalescence of many strands of feeling and many lines of study. My conviction is complete. I admit that extrinsically,as I may say, it is unreasonable; intrinsically it is now as inexpugnable as a theorem from Euclid, or the evidence of my own senses.
“That there is a new world south of the pole is maintained by Science; it is the unalterable belief of the explorers, the hydrographers, the geographers. But what may that world be like? What was it like? Long millions and millions of years before our time the Arctic north was the procreant cradle of ALL LIFE! From it streamed the currents of animal and vegetable creation; it was warm; forests of palms flourished along river and lake-side, and within them roamed the creatures of tropical or semi-tropical climates. Paleontologists from Saporta to Wieland, from Keerl to Heer have pointed this out, with an emphasis that has varied with temperament or knowledge, from conviction to surmise. G. Hilton Scribner, a clever Americanlitterateursays”—the Professor ludicrously grasped for something in an inner coat pocket and revealed a little book, exquisitely bound, of scraps and extracts, and read from a page whose smoothness he had marred by folding a leaf—“he says, ‘thus the Arctic zone, which was earliest in cooling down to the first and highest heat degree in the great life-gamut was also the first to become fertile, first to bear life, and first to send forth her progeny over the earth.’
“And Wieland, a remarkable Yale scholar, an authority on fossil cycads and Chelonia, the latest to speculate authoritatively along this line, writes”—another creased page was turned to—“‘in a word, that the great evolutionarySchauplatzwas boreal is possible from the astronomical relations, probable from physical facts, and rendered an established certainty by the unheralded synchronous appearance of the main groups of animals and plants onboth sides of the great oceans throughout post-Paleozoic time.’”
“But Professor,” it was my remonstrance that now interrupted him, “that was millions of years ago. It’s a dead world up there. Surely you don’t think—”
The Professor broke in with a deprecatory gesture of regret at his own impatience. “I know. True, true, for the most part, but perhaps not for all—not for all. It’s a deep matter.”
Professor Bjornsen’s eyes were glistening with enthusiasm; his manner became extravagantly mysterious, and his words boiled out feverishly from his scarred lips. “The north, to whose enchantment the whole world bows; a strange, magical region, lit by the supernal splendors of heavenly lights, and wrapped in eternal snows, was the Eden of our race. It was thatnavelof the world related in all mythologies from India to Greece, from Japan to Scandinavia; it was the Paradisaic earth center, the fecund source of every manner of life, endowed by the Creator with original unrestrained powers of exuberance. Here man originated; here was his primal home, here his first estate, dressed as he was in every faculty of mind, and enriched by all the gifts of nature. As President Warren, another American, eloquently wrote twenty-six years ago—”
Again the Professor dove into his pocket, produced his amazing little scrapbook, while we all gazed at the excited gentleman with a new fascination and astonishment. Here was the man of crystals and mensuration, of ores, adits, drifts and strata, riding the high horse of mystical and religious analogy, and somehow we felt ourselves drawn into the vortex of his cerebral excitement! We were quite dazed in a way, and yet felt an elation that kept us spellbound.
“Ah, here it is. He wrote, President Warren, ‘the pole symbolizes Cardo, Atlas, Meru, Hara-berezaiti, Kharsak-Kurra, every fabulous mountain on whose top the sky pivots itself, and around which all the heavenly bodies ceaselessly revolve.’
“Assume this; assume that here the finger of God first impressed this insensate whirling globe of unconscious matter with the touch and promise of life and Mind. Is it likely that all vestiges, all signs, all remainders of that consecrated first endowment should have quite disappeared, succumbed ingloriously to the stiffening embrace of cold, congealed in an eternal sleep beneath the glaciers and the snows? I think not, my friends,I think not.”
“But,” it was the protesting voice of Goritz who now voiced our incredulity, “haven’t the expeditionists, the geographers, the explorers—hasn’t everything we have been told, everything we have read, all we know about it, and that’s a good deal, from Franklin to Peary made it clear that at the pole there is nothing but death, desolation, and ice?”
“Antoine!” Here the Professor turned abruptly to the big Dane, thrusting his umbrageous crown of red hair almost into the thin locks of his friend, and whispered hoarsely, “Ah! Antoine, the secrets are hidden in that uncharted land beyond the ice packs north of Point Barrow. The reservations of life are there. You have all heard,” the rufous glory now moved towards Hopkins and myself, “of Symmes Hole? Of course you shrug your shoulders; it was preternatural simplicity you say, the mad dream of a fool, uproariously derided. Yes! Symmes was not a fool; he was a brave man, a soldier, chasing a reality through the distortions of an hallucination. There isnohole; the earth is not hollow, but—there is a depression; there mustbe. The depression is at the North Pole somewhere. It has not been found, and the Arctic seas have beenparcouriredby explorers, as you notice, Goritz. 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 exclamatoryrictus, 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!”
Here was a climax, and the mental stupefaction of the Professor’s audience was exactly reflected in the prolonged silence that ensued. It was entertaining, however, to watch Spruce Hopkins’ fixed, expressionless perusal of the Professor’s face, and the immobile glory in the Professor’s answering stare. Hopkins spoke first:
“Well! I like your certainty about that depression, Prof. Can’t see it noway. You’re making things interesting enough, but surely that depression isn’t the gospel truth. Is it?”
The Professor relaxed; he laughed, and his laugh was the most curious blend of a chuckle and a whistle, utterly impossible to describe except by reproduction. It always affected Hopkins hilariously; he said the two elements in the Professor’s laugh were satisfaction and astonishment; the chuckle meant the first, the whistle the second, and the state of the Professor’s mind could be well gauged from the predominance of one or the other. Just then the chuckle had the best of it.
“Mr. Hopkins,” he said, “you are a very intelligentman. Don’t you see that a rotating and solidifying viscosity cannot become solid without forming a pitted polar extremity?”
Hopkins withstood this assault with admirable stolidity; he even looked injured.
“My dear Professor; really your statement is too simply put to appeal to the complicated convolutions of my gray matter. Your manner is juvenile. Such a subject should be treated in a becoming obscurity of terms.”
After our amusement had subsided, Bjornsen explained his view. It was easily understood. The earth had cooled down from some initial gaseous or lava-like stage, and, if the congelation had not progressed far or fast enough at the poles, centrifugal force at the equator would have withdrawn enough matter to effect a depletion at one pole or the other, with the consequent result (I recall how particular the Professor was over this point) of forming a graduated, evenly rounded and smoothish concavity, if the polar areas were not too rigidly fixed; or a broken, step-like succession of terraces if they were. Later we were triumphantly reminded by the Professor of this prediction. Then too he involved his theory with demonstrations of the vertical effect of rotation, producing inverted cones or funnels in liquids, as is familiarly seen in the discharging contents of a washbasin. We were not convinced, and our evident apathy or dissidence chilled the Professor into a taciturnity from which he was scarcely aroused when cries from the water’s edge of the fiord announced the return of a fishing fleet, a phalanx ofjaegts, the single masted, square sailed, sturdy boats familiar to tourists in sea journeys along the fair Norwegian shores. It was welcomed with shouts and salutations, and the waving of flags and handkerchiefs, in which we joined.
But the hidden springs of wonderment, the latent impulse in young, strong men for adventure, discovery, perhaps some marvelous realization of the unknown, had been stirred within us. The Professor would have been gratified if he had known how restlessly Goritz and myself rolled about in our beds that night, or how with sleepless eyes, flat on our backs, we rehearsed his strange statements, or in dreams encountered polar bears, threading our way through devious leads to the wintry coasts of a NEW CONTINENT. The imagery of the north was familiar to us. We had both visited Spitzbergen and the Franz Josef Archipelago. As Hopkins had said, we had met him at Stockholm and discussed together the sensation of the hour, Bjornsen’s lecture at Christiania. We were all three of us idlers—I by compulsion—but firm in body, ambitious in spirit, and half exasperated at our uselessness in the world’s affairs. Goritz was a rich man, an only son, heir to the fortune of a successful fish merchant in Stockholm; I had a bare competency, and Spruce Hopkins, a vagabond American, seeing the world but yearning for sterner work, had already gained in Europe an unenviable reputation for reckless extravagance. It was at Hopkins’ suggestion that we had invited the Professor to meet us at the fiord, and we were all wondering how far we might go in this strange experiment of finding Krocker Land. Should we go at all?
Whatever satisfaction the Professor might have felt over Goritz’s and my own agitation, his most sanguine hopes of producing an impression would have been inflamed to exultation had he known that the Yankee had not slept a wink, had not taken off his clothes, but had just, as he characterized it, “stalled on everything,” until he got his bearings on this “new stunt.”
The Professor’s equanimity was restored when we met him in the diningroom at breakfast the following morning, and he most good-naturedly accepted professions of contrition at our mental obduracy. But it was the American who confounded him by his sudden determination and a precipitant proposition to “get away on the first tide.”
“Prof.,” he exclaimed clapping the smaller man on the shoulder with a cordial gaiety that shocked Goritz, “I’m willing to take the chance. It’s a big stake to win, though,” his whimsical smile propitiated the Professor completely. “I’m not buffaloed on all your talk about the tropical climate we’re likely to meet. Of course, I’ve looked into the matter a little, on my own hook, and just now the plan of action is something like this. 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.
The Professor nodded his approval and assent.
“We’ll make a strong quartette; quite enough for the jaunt. These big outfits are a blunder. I’ve always thought that was the mistake the English made. Plenty of dogs, rations and a few mouths go farther, with less strain and less risk. And another thing, friends,” he wheeled round from the Professor, and addressed us, “no big ship, no‘Fram’, no ‘Roosevelt.’ We’ll get the stiffest and most flexible and biggest wooden naphtha launch that can be made; stock her; carry her up on a hired whaler from San Francisco, bunk at Point Barrow, pick our best chance through the leads in the open weather, and then with dogs, sleds, and kayaks, take to the main ice and scoot for the happy land of—Krocker! Eh?”
Goritz and I heard the extraordinary daredevil plan with consternation. It seemed the limit of foolishness, and absurdly ignorant. We waited for the inevitable crushing denunciation of such folly from the informed lips of the Professor. To our amazement the Professor grew radiant, seized Hopkins’ hands, shaking them vigorously, his pop-eyes starting out with the most amiable encouragement, while his beaming smile endorsed Hopkins’ lunacy with mad enthusiasm.
“Right, Mr. Hopkins! Right—the very thing. No reserve, no retreat, no store ship is necessary. I had convinced myself of the absolute propriety of just such a course of action, but I expected to find it a hopeless task to persuade anyone to believe me. Krocker Land will supply us with everything, and the ice course will be far more simple and easy than Nansen’s trip from 86° to Franz Josef Land, or Peary’s over North Greenland; a straight-away run with a few water breaks. No great hardships. At least,” and the Professor in a burst of audacious nonchalance knocked over a few glasses and a water carafe in his swinging ambulations, “none greater than the ordinary experiences of an Arctic traveler. I congratulate you, Mr. Hopkins, on your perspicacity—American shrewdness. Ah! American—what you call GAMENESS. Eh? Let me assure you that had you been a hardened, experienced North Pole explorer you would never have hit on this; NEVER. You’d have stuck to the oldplans. And the only reason you are right now is that Krocker Land is an exceptional proposition, to be negotiated by exceptional methods. I promise you exceptional results.”
For a few moments Goritz and I were dumb with astonishment, and I think Goritz was almost choking with indignation. Somehow he suppressed his threatening outbreak and only muttered, “I suppose we will never want to come back—never need to?”
A ripple of comic commiseration crossed Hopkins’ face:
“Come now, Goritz. WHERE I COME BACK is justhere,
‘Sa vandra vara stora manFran ljuset ned til skuggan.’”
‘Sa vandra vara stora manFran ljuset ned til skuggan.’”
‘Sa vandra vara stora manFran ljuset ned til skuggan.’”
‘Sa vandra vara stora man
Fran ljuset ned til skuggan.’”
The situation was so funny, with that tantalizingly humorous face of the Professor looking on in perplexity, that Goritz burst into laughter, in which I joined, and his evanescent rage was swept away.
But the Professor answered his implied sarcasm quite literally.
“Antoine,” he said, both hands raised imploringly, “trust me; we shall find food in Krocker Land, an abundance; the launch can return to Point Barrow with a small crew, and when we want it on our return—why—”
His indecision or uncertainty or the blankness of his mind about it was quickly relieved by Goritz.
“We’ll send a telegram ordering it over, andwait—for it?”
“Oh it’s no joke Goritz”—Goritz admittedsotto vocethat it certainly was not. “We can get back without it, our kayaks will answer. And you forget the People of Krocker Land.”
“Why Professor,” I protested, “we haven’t heard of them before.”
The Professor assumed a surprised air, became portentously solemn, and then—I never felt quite certain whether he actually winked at Hopkins or not—gravely answered.
“The people of Krocker Land, Erickson, are an assured certainty. An unpeopled continent is as much alusus naturaeas an unfilled vacuum.”
“Certainly, Erickson. Didn’t you know that? Somebody must be provided to pocket the revenues from whale blubber and walrus ivory, not to mention the conservation bureau for glaciers, the output of icebergs, and the meteorological corps for the standardization of blizzards,” and Hopkins hid his face in his hands to stifle his screaming mirth.
But the Professor was neither ruffled nor amused; he went on oracularly:
“Erickson, the expectation is a little discouraging. Well I’ll say from your point of view it is almost impossible of belief that an unknown people exists in an unknown land near the North Pole. Now Stefansson’s discovery of the so-called Blond Eskimos has nothing to do with my confidence in this matter. It rests upon a broad deduction, ana priorinecessary assumption. If the original Eden, the primitive center of dispersion, on the basis of the unity of the human race—if—”
Behind the Professor, whose labyrinthine locution, sounding higher and higher, was attracting some general attention among the guests of the hotel, stood Hopkins with two tumblers of water in his hands. He raised them suddenly above his head and dropped them. The crash was startling, and it was followed by an equally unexpected yell of pain from Hopkins, who apparently slipped, fell, seized the tablecloth and dragged to the floor a varied array of glassware and cutlery in a clatter that was deafening.
Confusion, explanations, reparation and a tumultof amusement followed, and in it disappeared the Professor’s voluminous harangue. It was never resumed.
Hopkins recovered his seriousness, and we attacked the novel project he had suggested, critically. All that next day we argued over it, thrashing it out with the illuminative references Goritz, the Professor and myself could make to our own experiences, Hopkins listening and pertinaciously sticking to his original suggestions. His plan grew more and more attractive; its reasonableness developed more and more under examination. Of course all four of us were now thoroughly excited; the lure of discovery almost maddened us, and the necromantic charm of the Professor’s amazing predictions, which we actually were unwilling to resist, instilled in us the wayward and fantastic hope that we were on the verge of a world-convulsing disclosure. We have not been disappointed.
The project finally took this shape: Hopkins and Goritz volunteered to bear all the expenses connected with the expedition; Hopkins would go to America, consult naval architects, and have a naphtha-propelled launch devised, combining, as to its hull, features of the “Fram” and “Roosevelt” in a diminutive way. Goritz would follow and buy the supplies, clothing and equipment. Then would come the Professor with instruments and books, and finally myself with three chosen men—Hopkins demanded they should be selected in America—who would be the captain, engineer and crew of the launch on its return to Point Barrow, and who would look for us the next summer. How preposterously sure we were that we would find land and game! But how ineffectually paltry after all were our expectations compared to the reality.
When everything was ready—the end of a year’stime was fixed for the date of our departure—we would have the launch set amidships on a whaler, and sail for Point Barrow, our prospective headquarters on the North American continent.
The last question Hopkins put to the Professor before we parted was about the mineral wealth of the new land, which had now incorporated its actuality with every sleeping and waking moment, seeming as certain as any other unvisited realm of Earth which we had seen on maps, but never visited.
Of course the Professor was quite equal to this demand upon his imagination.
“Mineral wealth? Probably immense. The mother lodes of the gold of Alaska have never been found. They lie north of Alaska; the geological extension of the mineral deposits of Alaska is naturally in that direction, and the enrichment of the primary crystallines with the precious metals can be reasonably asserted to surpass the mythical values of Golconda or California.”
“That suitsme,” was Hopkins’ laconic comment.
At last the whole scheme was pretty thoroughly worked out, down to its details. Correspondence would be maintained during the summer. The Professor left for Christiania, Goritz and myself for Stockholm, and Hopkins steamed away to Hull on the English ship “North Cape.” Our conference had lasted just a week.
How wonderfully lovely was the day and scene when he left us that June morning three years ago. If portents of our success could be discerned in its delicious, enveloping glory of light and beauty, then surely we might be hopeful. The great gulls were sweeping with deep undulations through the upper sky, exulting in their splendid power, the summer wind faintly stirred the dark spruces, whose gentle expostulation at its intrusion reachedus with a sound like the washing of waves on a faraway shore. The granite rocks of peak and cliff flashed back the unchecked sunlight; the road, like a white ribbon, spun its loops to and fro over the hillside, through meads where the glistening red farm houses stood, that seemed like rubies set in an emerald shield while the waters of the fiord slumbered at our feet, a liquid mass of beryl.
It now seems to me as if a quarter of a century had passed since then. And, if events are the measure of duration to the subjective sense, it might seem even farther away. I recall Spruce Hopkins, radiant and handsome, amid a throng of new acquaintances—he gathered friends about him as frankly and quickly as roses attract bees—among whom not a few young women offered him their mute but eloquent admiration; I remember him leaning over the rail of the steamer’s deck and reciting in a rollicking drawl:
“When the sea rolled its fathomless billowsAcross the broad plains of Nebraska;When around the North Pole grew bananas and willows,And mastodons fought with the great armadillos,For the pine-apples grown in Alaska.”
“When the sea rolled its fathomless billowsAcross the broad plains of Nebraska;When around the North Pole grew bananas and willows,And mastodons fought with the great armadillos,For the pine-apples grown in Alaska.”
“When the sea rolled its fathomless billowsAcross the broad plains of Nebraska;When around the North Pole grew bananas and willows,And mastodons fought with the great armadillos,For the pine-apples grown in Alaska.”
“When the sea rolled its fathomless billows
Across the broad plains of Nebraska;
When around the North Pole grew bananas and willows,
And mastodons fought with the great armadillos,
For the pine-apples grown in Alaska.”
(Editorial Apology. The foregoing chapter in its diction and in certain studied phases of construction will disturb the reader’s sense of congruity, perhaps. He will be inclined to doubt its authenticity as the exact narrative of Alfred Erickson. The suspicion is partly creditable to his literary acumen. The editor admits substantial emendations useful for the purpose of imparting a literary atmosphere.)