CHAPTER XIThe Crater of Everlasting Light
The return of the Ophidian Pilgrims, as the Professor termed them, seemed unreasonably slow. The wardens, Ziliah, and the servants of the Capitol were all equally mystified over this unusual slowness. Cold, dry weather supervened, for indeed the stationary sun seemed sensibly to respond to the secular influences of the seasons, as we know them. We had all been too sufficingly engaged in studying our new surroundings, to regret or miss the absent Government, for a larger liberty had been vouchsafed us, though one thing was forbidden. We could not enter the precincts of the forest to the west of the Capitol.
We walked through the city, we explored the Capitol, we increased our acquaintance with the domestic habits of the populace, and the Professor and myself had accumulated notes on all of these things, to be incorporated in the work on Krocker Land which we fervently hoped to write, and which now—Alas!—may never see the light, for—the Professor is today a fixed official fact in that almost mythical land in the Arctic Sea. But I hasten.
Goritz had restrained with difficulty his almost uncontrollable impulse to perpetrate some outrage on the Capitol itself in his determination to accumulate a fortune of gold. We had averted this danger by very emphatic protests. We pointedout to him its danger and the folly of jeopardizing our safety when the means of getting back—I had almost said to the Earth, as if we had actually left it—were now almost null, or were at least desperate. We told him that the plunder in his room, if found—and I began to fear that the depredations on the tree shrines had already been detected and were, in some way, a cause for the delayed return of the pilgrims—would involve us all in grave difficulties. To our entreaties or threats he became deaf or obstinate, and I had followed him, in the sleeping hours, when he expected to achieve his robberies without molestation, only to intercept him chiseling at the gold plates that encrusted the Capitol.
In the meanwhile the Professor, whose popularity increased with everyone, had become attracted to a young Eskimo whose first astonishment over the Professor’s poll of red hair had been succeeded by a sort of personal adoration. He followed the Professor with an attachment and fascination that might have proved irksome. I made some inquiries of my informant, the acquiescent Ziliah, about him, and learned from her that he was a guide and the gatherer of radium. He alone apparently was able to penetrate the strange and ghastly country where the radium masses were collected, in that zone of the Unreal where lay the CRATER OF EVERLASTING LIGHT. His peculiar ability arose from his immunity to the influence of the radium itself, which invariably prostrated those who touched it, while the region itself forbade approach, by reason of those indeterminable emanations which destroyed the adventurers who entered it. For some reason, or, in some way, Oogalah Ikimya, the young Eskimo, enjoyed a unique invulnerability, and on his efforts Radiumopolis depended for its supply of radium. This distinction had givenhim a particular arrogance. He alone now dared the inexplicable dangers, or even knew the devious route that threaded the labyrinths leading to this unutterable place.
When I told my friends about this, we all felt a mad desire to see, even at a distance, this intolerable land, a mineral Gehenna. I knew of the man’s devotion to the Professor, and I felt certain we could gain his consent for us to accompany him. No one of us felt a keener impatience for the trip than Antoine Goritz. I told Ziliah of our wish. She grew pale with horror at the suggestion; her beautiful eyes pleaded with me to abandon the suicidal project; she pointed to Spruce Hopkins in piteous despair, she indeed flung herself at his feet, and invoked his commiseration of her should he be lost. Then she became tempestuous with scorn and indignation.
We could not go. The guards would prevent us. She would summon the magistrates of the city. Was she not Ziliah, daughter of the President, head man of the Council? We should not stir. NOT HE.
And that feminine transport over, she again importuned us, with terrible threats of our fate, not to consider it; so many had perished in the same outrageous pursuit; dead bodies marked the way; it was forbidden; the curse of the Crocodilo-Python followed those who went there; it meant madness, hysteria, death.
Finally it was made clear to us that whatever Oogalah Ikimya might say this influential and enamored young woman would prove hopelessly obstinate. Physical force would be invoked to restrain us. Oogalah himself rather welcomed this opportunity to show off his skill, his exceptional prowess, but his volubility and transports availed nothing. Hopkins executed what the Frenchmight call acoup d’amourand liberated us. His overture to the despairing or incensed Ziliah through me was rather compromising and risky, but its effect was instantaneous and certain. Opposition vanished when Hopkins explained that the lovely womanmight get herself disliked, and that any conceivable state of future happiness for both of them depended onhis having his way.
So it eventually ended, as the mountainous objections seemed to melt away like dew before the sun, that we found ourselves on the road that led westward from Radiumopolis, under the guidance of Oogalah Ikimya, who strode before us with rapid swinging of legs and arms, his face radiant with pride. We had cautiously promised to be careful, not to go farther than was prudent, to satisfy ourselves with a distant view of the blasted land, and to return as quickly as we went, for it was insisted that we should hold ourselves ready for the disposition of the Council, when the long delayed pilgrims returned, to settle our fate.
The noisy rumor of our departure for the Radium Country, and the haggling and delays that preceded it, Ziliah’s outbursts and excitement, the consultations over the permission to let us go at all, Oogalah’s gossiping activity about it, led to the population’s—which besieged us and surrounded us almost daily—outpouring on the day of our departure, so that for miles we were accompanied by a crowd watching us with increased wonder, and, among the older, with much ominous head shaking, and, with the younger, many sneering comments, a little cheering and some obstreperous farewells. The Professor evoked much enthusiasm—he always did. I do not know therationaleor the etiquette of love matters in Krocker Land, but I remember that Hopkins took the profusely smiling and opulently lovely, young and small Ziliah aside, andtried to make her understand—without my help—that their public parting should be very formal, no matter how ecstatic their private one might be. On top of that, considerably to his disappointment or chagrin perhaps, Ziliah hugged him pretty tightly when they stood on the terrace stairs as we left the palace, and the very observing public gathered about were neither amused nor interested.
It was rather funny I thought, but I admitted, I am sure, that as a display of superb manners it would be unmatched anywhere else in the world of so-called culture today. Atala came into my mind, though Spruce Hopkins was a good deal of a contrast to the sentimental Rene, and there was a certainaplomb, directness, vivacity and insistence in Ziliah that hardly suggested the Natchez maiden. And there certainly was no Outogamiz.
Well, at length we were on our journey. At first the highway, for, though seldom used, this western road was in a state of fine preservation, traversed a thick but low wood entangled with undergrowth. We had never entered this wood before and had been especially prohibited from entering it. Of course we tried to see all we could, but there was absolutely nothing remarkable about it. The land to the left sloped off into a marshy tract. The people were numerous also at this point, which interfered with our inspection, and I know now that Oogalah, obedient to instructions, hurried us along this section of the route—he first, the Professor second, then Goritz, then myself, then Hopkins—until we reached a spare, meagre country, beyond which rose the western ranges of the Pine Tree Gredin.
The land rose steeply, but it was almost bare, the parched soil supported a ragged growth, and in this appeared a few stunted pine trees. Apparently, for many miles north and south, this conditionprevailed, an unhappy and strong contrast to the pine tree zone to the east of the amphitheater, where the land bubbled with springs, was murmurous with brooks, and where the lofty, splendid trees spread a temple-like shade over the vast decline.
Beyond us already rose the faint shimmer of thePerpetual Nimbus, that wall-like screen of vapor that enclosed Krocker Land within the mountainous Rim that lies outside of this veil of cloud, though here, as I have already noted, the Nimbus was wavering, inconstant, and in patches of the distance absent. The Deer Fels country and the aquatic and marshy plateaux were from here scarcely distinguishable. A level tract of stony wastes was this, varied by occasional rugged hills, depressions that glistened balefully, dead ravines barely supporting the niggardly growth of sapless yellow plants that lurked here and there below boulders, or sought the moisture of a few sullen pools whose replenishment depended upon the infrequent but, we were told, furious storms.
And the Nimbus—a paltry reproduction of the incalculable vaporous discharges that encircle at every other point this hidden paradise. The chasm here was indeed deep, but imperfectly continuous, and huge horsebacks of stone piled within it formed practicable though most broken and uneven bridges across it. The steam rising from the heated rocks below was not visibly referable to any water supply, as on the east, where the plunging rivers so abundantly furnished the means of raising this colossal stage curtain, and there was absent from here that tumultuous rolling ocean of clouds in the sky. Probably underground courses supplied the water, for, after we had surmounted one of the least precipitous and angular of the bridges and had gotten into the rising territorybeyond, we encountered a puzzling intricacy of profound cracks or fissures, and we could not only hear but could see the patchy lustres of running water in them.
From this point our guide turned abruptly northward, taking us through a terrible desolation of rocks, with the high snow-clad peaks of the Krocker Land Rim gloriously looming skyward on the left. I shall not forget that strange transit. It was hard work. We carried our own supplies, the water and a few instruments, and their weight was almost insupportably increased by the discomforts of the harsh, inhospitable land we traveled through, and, by some dizzying influence which began to strain our heads with headaches, to parch our throats, and to produce a most uncomfortable and absurd illusion of treading on air cushions. This last hallucination made us unsteady, and after a while it pestered us so much that we were compelled to stop at short intervals to rest.
Oogalah kept on well ahead, looking back at us every few minutes and distrustfully shaking his head, with incessant gestures for increased speed. We were not over anxious to hurry. The region was extraordinary and its geologic features, as connected with this unparalleled deposit, or vein, or lode, or whatever it was, of radium, were certainly worth noting. And then our heads! Hopkins diverted us by his misery.
“I’d like to look inside of my cranium just now. I couldn’t begin to tell how it feels; something, I should say, like what gunpowder men calldeflagrationis taking place there, popguns going off every few minutes, with a hurdy-gurdy accompaniment in my ears and a bad taste in my mouth.
“The Professor really ought to be very careful and avoid any extra exertion. In a bean as full as his, there probably isn’t much room for expansion,and I guess the right word for describing our condition is expansion—almost unlimited. My head may seem no bigger than usual, but I should say it had already grown large enough for distribution to a dozen headless gentlemen, enough to give each of them a head piece of ordinary dimensions. Whew—but this is fierce.”
The poor fellow had clapped both hands to his head as if to actually hold it together. 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.
“I say, Erickson, this has me guessing. What do you suppose that fellow’s made of? Rubber? Cork? Do you know I believe he’d put electrocution on the fritz. You’d be compelled to pulverize him if you ever expected to drive the life out of his body. One hundred yards more of this and I’ll either join the choir invisibleipse motu, as they say in the books, or just get one of you to pass me over with a wallop on the cocoa, or a fine slit along the carotid. I believe I could go so far as to commithari-kari, and not know it. It can’t be possible that you fellows don’t notice it.”
“Notice it!” I answered. “My head feels like a balloon. I almost wonder I don’t float off with it. We can’t last this way. It would be a sorry ending to this famous exploit, if we were all to burst like soap bubbles.”
Oogalah by means of elaborate pantomime to the Professor, and a few intelligible words to Goritz acquainted us with his assurance that a hill about one hundred yards away would bring us relief. We struggled to it, sick and staggering. To our amazement upon ascending it a little way relief came, and our tormented heads sensibly shrank—so it felt—to something like their usual volume. Then we noticed, guided by the Professor’s acumen in such matters, that while the region was unmistakably an igneous complex, the rocks we had passed over were entirely granitic, and the elevation on which we now stood was a basic olivine-peridotite, dense and black, and in some way exempt from the radiumistic occlusions which perhaps saturated the granitic batholith around it. I will not stop to discuss this, sir, but later we indeed established the fact that the enormous outflow of granite lava had brought to the surface innumerable radium bodies, distributed through it in molecular aggregates of considerable size, and that the unseen but voluminous discharge of the emanation so affected us, while the gabbro dikes, containing none, afforded an impermeable flooring for our passage.
Then, too, we were now approaching the splendid prism of light that shot upward, yet obliquely, in a vast pulsating diffusion of a delicate radiance that grew, as we advanced, more and more intolerable. Our progress consisted now in crossing, as quickly as our stumbling movements would allow, the granitic intervals that separated the ranges of low basic hills. On these latter we regained our strength and composure, and prepared for the succeeding dashes that carried us over the perilous interludes. It was amazing to watch theinsoucianceand activity of our guide. He did not even protect his eyes. It seemed as if some physiological peculiarity rendered him immune to the terrifyingdisorders that signalized to us, instantly, the presence of these puissant particles of radium, or else he had become so from his long continued exposures, a theory quite incomprehensible to us.
But even to this dogged and halting march there was a limit. Oogalah himself had enough rectitude of purpose to realize that, and perhaps too he felt vainglorious of his superiority. He indicated almost sternly a final towering hill, a continuation of the broken cordillera we had been following, which should be the terminus of our exploration. We—at least Hopkins and myself—would not have cared to overpass it. We were deadly faint and exhausted when we reached it, and but for the magnanimous help of the Eskimo, who carried our packs, I think we would have swooned and fallen by the way. The Professor seemed the least susceptible to the mysterious influence, and this amusingly vexed and confounded Hopkins. Brute willpower and his insatiable fever of desire to obtain the transmuting substance which raised before him the vision of boundless wealth, kept Goritz on his feet. With the Professor it was the energizing power of scientific curiosity. The paralyzing effect of suffocation was really noticeable.
Well, after a few minutes’ rest, with Goritz impatient and the Professor aflame with wonder, we started up a portentously narrow hill, and a high one too. Oogalah pointed out its pinnacle as our destination, and then turned westward into that dizzying and unearthly country wherein lay the trough of radium. Around us fell the radiance of its wonderful emission, but we found that the climbing path—it had been worn well into the rock by previous pilgrims—clung to the eastward scarp of the hill, and was therefore actually in shadow—a welcome relief. Perhaps five hours were consumed in this toilsome ascent, but when we reachedthe last winding trail, and had clambered to a small shelf immediately under the ragged apex, we looked over a scene of unparalleled terribleness.
The pen of Dante or the pencil of Dore alone could have done justice to its weird and frightful desolation, not entirely expressed in lifelessness, but in the awful grimace in it of tortured and disfigured matter. The blacks, purples and reds, smeared over it wrote in it a sort of agony of disgrace and unseemliness and pain. I wonder if the landscapes of the Moon resemble it.
For a long way in the foreground, where we saw with astonishment the running figure of Oogalah, stretched a broken platform of white quartzite, and through this sprang the strangest confusion of lines, skeins, dashes and drippings of black, purple, brown, and traceable here and there, as of the tracks of a bleeding animal or man, chained drops of red. It was not beautiful certainly, it had no ornamental or decorative features; it was, rather, scoriaceous and blasting.
Beyond this rugose platform rose two mounds, one ashen and white—the Professor said it was a bleached, corroded and kaolinized granite—the other a purplish, livid mass streaked with threads or blotches of yellow (sulphur, the Professor thought), and these hills ran north and south, becoming reduced to sprawling and unwholesome heaps of slaggy consistency which ever and anon encroached on the quartzite zone and even encumbered it, as if tossed upon it in drifts of scattered nodules.
Through the gateway, between the two first mounds, we saw even now the form of Oogalah passing, but he was no longer erect. He was crawling on hands and knees, and over his head hung a towel. Hopkins and myself shuddered for him. His venturesome undertaking seemed to ussimplysuicide. He intended to bring us each amass of the mineral—a small piece. When he gathered this miracle-working substance for Radiumopolis, we were told, he first camped behind one of the peridotite hills, then issued upon his dangerous mission, collected what he could, returned to his camp, and for weeks kept at it until his supply was sufficient. The store made, he removed it in the same laborious way, stage by stage, until he came to the safer country, where he was met by numerous assistants who transported the radium homeward.
But we could see from our elevation beyond these dead heaps, beyond, into the vale of Acheron, as it were,
Quam super haud ullae poterant impune volantesTendere iter pennis;
Quam super haud ullae poterant impune volantesTendere iter pennis;
Quam super haud ullae poterant impune volantesTendere iter pennis;
Quam super haud ullae poterant impune volantes
Tendere iter pennis;
a further dead valley declining into the deeper chasm from which sprang the auroral light. This chasm was evidently indefinitely prolonged northward; from it rose the coronation or rays which seemed converged upon a marvelous blazing precipice on the further boundary of this irregular, narrow, longitudinal canon. Into the canon itself it was impossible to look. It was enclosed in the upper valley which we could see, and which presented a spectacle of stony desolation. Its sides were evidently precipitous on the east, and pretty generally hidden from us, but on the west it presented to us a long, receding slope of rock palely illuminated beneath the light streaming in a broad and thick flood over it. These rock exposures were curiously discolored, and also curiously spotted with glow-spots, from included radium perhaps.
Clefts or rents tore down their sides, and ragged, serpentine embrasures interrupted the cliffs that bordered it. Black recesses contrasted with thebright surfaces, and sharp crests (arete) bristled here and there in jagged series, where the cliffs attained elevations of probably thousands of feet. It was a vast abyss and was split more deeply by a secondary and later fissure which had uncovered the central masses of radium. Nowhere could we discern any evidences of aqueo-thermal activity, no steam spirals anywhere. The vapor line was eastward along the crack where the Perpetual Nimbus appeared. Beyond, far beyond, rose the snowy tops, the glacier ridden summits of the Krocker Land Rim.
It was enthralling. 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. There were perceptible pulsations in the emanation, and it was altogether remarkable to observe that these were recorded in the variable sun, obviously susceptible to these changes. Its reference (the sun’s) to the radium masses, here uncovered, was now indisputable.
It had now in the advanced season become apparent that the earth’s secular changes were not quite dissipated in the Krocker Land basin by its unique feature of the Stationary Sun. 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 ofdelicate 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.
Hardly had we recovered from the shock of this unexpected display when we heard the voice and saw the form of Oogalah approaching our position, from the opposite side of the hill. He had executed his errand and was returning, and the expanded bag in his hands showed that he had accomplished his purpose. We had seen him disappear in the defiles beyond the crumbling hills. He showed the strain of his work and the effect of the unnatural influence of that exposure, but in a short time, after resting, his strength and composure returned, and he was ready for the home journey. He afterwards told me he had never looked into the chasm, or chasms, whence the radium emissions or radiations proceeded. He had not cared to. Once on the field of his dangerous occupation, groveling to the ground, he moved cautiously over the rocky flooring, and extracted the mineral masses from the veins wherein they seemed to be segregated,hammering them out. Formerly he had been able to pick the nodules up loose from the granite ledges. That was no longer possible. He had exhausted the supply of free lumps, and now he was compelled to practice this superficial mining. He knew that the surface finds were abundant further down the slopes of the defile, but he dreaded the experiment of entering further into the disorganizing influences of the lethal chamber. He had once been rash in that way and had swooned, and only the brush of some cavorting wind current from above, such as we had ourselves felt, had sufficiently revived him to enable him to regain his feet and to escape.
On our return Goritz monopolized Oogalah. Heplied him with questions, and evinced the most excited interest in his work. Poor fellow—the poison of the lust for gold,sacri fames auri, had entered his mind and heart. A magnificent man, Mr. Link, sturdy, resourceful, remorselessly self forgetful, and most simple in tastes, a lovable brother, if ever there was one, but sir, never the same after that unlucky find of the gold belt, when we crossed the first barrier of the Krocker Land Rim.
He became secretive, avaricious, moody, impatient, a delirious dreamer, and then most unaccountably suspicious. It was a revolution in character that would have puzzled an expert in psychology or nerves to explain. To me it was a pretty bad shock, and when at last the unhappy man—but let that wait. It displays a measure of the pernicious power of the temptation of money to corrupt (the word in Goritz’s case is misapplied), to alter nature and temperament, and all because he expected to enjoy its pleasures in the world we had left; for gold in Krocker Land for any of ordinary uses, like ours, was literally not much more desirable than so much earth. To the Radiumopolite it administered, it is true, a mild esthetic pleasure. There was some recondite recognition in his ingenuous nature of its beauty at least, and its unchangeableness. To the rulers, the doctors, the chiefs, it may have seemed more; at any rate they devoted it to the purposes of distinction and religion.
Goritz on our way back was most impatient to examine the strange mineral Oogalah had brought us, but the man refused to let him, intimating, quite fiercely, that it should be distributed among us when we got back to the Capitol, and not before. This refusal really arose from his intention of giving the Professor the largest piece. As Hopkins averred,the Professor had Oogalah “buffaloed” an epitomized substitute, certainly not intelligible, for a lengthier explanation of the Professor’s extraordinary influence over the man.
I remember we were all silent on our way back; we were dazed, and the journey had been rapid and arduous. The Professor himself had indeed, for weeks past, neglected to speculate on the wonders about us, and we now seldom received from him those lectures with which he had first instructed us. Perhaps he was overwhelmed by the incredible realization of the prophecies he had made to us on the sylvan banks (how far away and distant they seemed) of the beautiful fiord in Norway, under a summer sky.
Once again within the charmed borders of the Valley of Rasselas we found the highway deserted. It was a contrast to the eager multitudes that had escorted us when we left. Past the mysterious swamps on the right from which, at one moment, I thought I heard a queer sucking wail or bark, as of some big animal, and on into the city, and yet no encounters! Past the bathhouses, over the wide serpent pasture with its populous cribs, up the wide western terrace of steps of the Golden Capitol, and not one welcoming face—only the listless snakes sluggishly gliding or coiled in varnished mats.
To these omnipresent, pervading inhabitants we had become, in a manner of speaking, accustomed; we found them in the streets of the city, and through the courtyard of the Palace, over the parapets, ensconced in niches in the walls, rising hideously from the pavement of the inner halls, or unexpectedly and unwholesomely slipping over the mats of our rooms, or dripping like dark thongs from their cornices. Hopkins detested them.
“I tell you, Erickson,” he would exclaim, “an externalizeddelirium tremensof this sort isworse than drink. Beats me how people ever came to think well of these critters. They’re the most painfully unpleasant denizens of this earth that I have ever encountered—to me. Tastes differ of course, but I can’t help feeling that nobody really likes ’em, and pretences to the contrary are just plain lies, or the deponents have never enjoyed the advantages of a public school education, a hot bath, towels, soap, the morning newspaper, pure food, clean shirts, and the white things that generally go to make up white civilization—in other words, Alfred, they’re just savages like these big and little demons all around us.”
“How about Ziliah?” I might ask mischievously.
The handsome fellow would smile bewitchingly. “Say Erickson, if Ziliah and I ever go to housekeeping we’ll cut out the snakes—I will—and I’ll start up Anti-Snake missions, until we get the people converted into regular Christians—the real Irish sort. Then I’ll come the St. Patrick act on them, and exterminate the varmints, and coming generations, hereabouts, will call me blessed.”
We were somewhat more astonished to enter the western doorway of the Capitol and still find no one, but we could see darkly through its dingy length—the radium lamps were covered—and noted a crowd outside of its eastern entrance. At the same time something like beating cymbals and tanging drums came to our ears, and then unmistakably the shouts of people.
“They’ve come back,” shouted Oogalah in his lingo, and he rushed past us, mad with expectation.
We followed him with almost equal precipitancy, and the bag of radium mineral that had cost us all this effort was forgotten. Oogalah dropped it, we neglected it in the sudden excitement, and—it was never again found.