CHAPTER XVMy Escape
You must have observed, sir, that in my narrative I have from time to time exhibited our variant and varying frames or states of mind toward the strange conditions we were approaching, and the still stranger ones we actually entered. You have been told that some of us dreaded to go on—myself for instance—that later, diverted or enthralled by the strangeness of it all, we wanted to go faster, that from shrinkingly divining some disaster we were lulled into the anticipation of great pleasure, and that when our actual danger was reached and surmounted it might seem we should almost have resigned ourselves to stay; resigned ourselves to that serenity of mind depicted by Doctor Johnson, from whose work the Professor derived the name he had given to the central vale of Krocker Land, where, “such was the appearance of security and delight which their retirement afforded, that they to whom it was new always desired that it might be perpetual.”
But it surely does not require much penetration of feeling, to say the least, or sympathy of mind, to see that our position would very soon become unendurable, from the same general repugnance in all of us and from particular motives in each. To begin with, we soon felt stifled in this recondite and obsolete and trivial civilization; the very circularenclosure which shut it in became a prison, and after all, if we were of the same zoologicalstirps, as these people, we had differentiated too much for pleasurable association. At no time have I felt so keenly that the breath of the modern man’s life must be the breath of the world where it moves the fastest and its breath is quickest.
Then there was the wonderful discovery itself to be published, the Professor’s notes, crowded upon the pages of a notebook he had most carefully preserved, to be given to science. Goritz before his death yearned for the gratification of indulgences to be purchased by his new wealth, and, as he thought, his new knowledge. I revolted at the surroundings, the snakes and the periodic sacrifices, and feared an inevitable distrust and collision. Hopkins loved Ziliah, but he had found in thisrara-avisa positive promise of supreme adaptation to the best life he could give her in the world. At any rate he wished to try it.
Our discontent increased, our impatience chafed our nerves, and in hastily stolen conferences we determined upon a supreme effort to escape. We were tormented by the espionage and ruffled manners of the Council of Thirty, who interminably buzzed about us, and had probably shrewdly detected our hidden restlessness. And the utter dullness of the life! Never before have I so unspeakably realized that even if you cannot live in the current of life, you must live near it, hear its murmurs, watch its waves, and rejoice in knowing those who swim either with or against it. We had all been dreadfully disappointed in the Radiumopolites.
Again and again we planned to break away under some pretence of revisiting our celestial home, hurrying off and disappearing completely, though now we had made up our minds to return with bigreinforcements of assistance and to turn over this new continent to the examination and gaze of science. It seems a cruel decision. But why not? Krocker Land could not in any case remain much longer concealed, and we were entitled to the fruits of our adventure, while we were reasonably confident we could make its investiture by our civilization safe, humane, undisturbing. I think differently now, but that was our conclusion.
“This Ascension business,” as Hopkins called it, was just humanly possible by the use of balloons, and it was apposite that at the Professor’s enthronement, the aeronautics of the Radiumopolites were displayed at last. It very oddly turned out that only the smaller race played with the balloons. The word is deliberately correct. These balloons were a kind of household furniture or means of diversion, as a bicycle is with us. They furnished inexhaustible amusement to the little people, but even there their use was limited to the very daring or thevery light. Almost every family possessed one. And yet more curiously it was in the balloon line that experiment and invention were actually stirring these ludicrous people to improve and add to what they knew. This activity sprang from the unsatisfactory discrimination their present aeronautical knowledge made between light and heavy weights.
This ballooning in Krocker Land is in every way anomalous and extraordinary, and like their knowledge of transmutation partakes of the miraculous, certainly the previously unsuspected. Science here is again in the presence of a New Departure. The balloons are filled with a gas having a far greater buoyancy than pure hydrogen and it is derived from gas wells, themselves of very moderate depth, but evidently supplied from far more deeply seated sources. It is incontestable.A balloon not three feet in diameter will levitate thirty pounds!
Except for the astonishing transmutation this physical fact invades the realm of the unbelievable more deeply than anything else.
No evidence of this wide-spread predilection appeared before the Professor’s enthronement. The suppression of the sport had something to do with the ceremonial rites of visiting the tree shrines, I believe, the winter solstitial feeding with human bodies of the saurians, and awaiting the spring planting of grain. The opening of the season, so to speak, is inaugurated by the ascent of the entire Areopagus, and after that the amusement becomes general.
All of the Aeropagites are not equally expert, and many, after a sufficient aerial excursion to meet the ceremonial requirements, which arede rigueur, subside and retire. But the art of sailing the air is traditionally a matter of pride, and the leaders do very well. It was an adventuresome trip for them to have attempted reaching the outskirts of Krocker Land when we met them softly settling down on the Deer Fels, and it later proved almost indubitable that they were the customary political bosses, Javan, Put, Hul, Peleg and Hadad, though a closer inspection of these worthies corrected some of our first impressions, expressed before in that chapter of this narrative.
The experimental efforts at improvement arose from the discontent and envy of the heavier individuals over the glad pastimes and disportments of the lighter ones. You see the method involved the use of at least three balloons, one from each shoulder and one from the waist, and as three feet diameter was the maximum size, safely manipulated, those weighing over ninety pounds—and there were a great number of these, almost alladults of the taller race, and many women of the smaller—were simply excluded from this diversion.Hinc illae lacrymae, and hence also the energy of invention to overcome this disparity.
When the sports began, nothing could have been more interesting and spectacular. Groups would rise together, separate, and reunite. This air-swimming was effected by fans attached to the wrists. But the Aeropagites revealed a superior guidance, at least we imagined so, for when their floating shapes had thrown shadows on the illumined summits of the Deer Fels, they had been provided with those inexplicable tubes, and up to the moment of my escape these miracles had not been repeated. And the NEW tubes—where were they?
The proper state of the weather was indispensable and only in complete calms would the amusing exhibition take place. As in all exercises, bolder spirits attempted their excursions under perilous conditions in high or moderate winds, but these had often resulted in loss of life, the unhappy aeronaut falling or actually being driven headlong like a fly or moth beyond the valley into the solitudes and dangers of its encircling zones.
The harness—for it is nothing less—which the aeronaut assumes holds him easily and steadily to the three bubbles above him, and, as he generally can regulate his flight with his hands, his indeterminate control is over his descent. Few accidents occur. The balloons are symmetrized in position over him, the one at the waist being nearest his body and the two outside bags higher but on a level with each other. His control is entirely over the central balloon which he may quickly deplete by opening a valve. Variations of adjustment and of apparatus, as might be imagined, are numerous, and individual tastes or designs introduce greatdiversity. There may be four or five or even six balloons employed, but in this case they are made much smaller. The balloons may be of different sizes. Along the direction of increasing the number of maximum sized balloons lay the hopes of the bigger people, but there had been some bad mishaps, and the balance or adjustment proved difficult. The levitation became unmanageable, and the descents were often appallingly rapid and shockingly tragic.
When these air revels began—as they did at the Professor’s coronation—minus the crown—we momentarily seized upon the project of adapting this locomotion for our flight. It required a very brief inspection to utterly expose the hopelessness of this scheme and still more strongly occurred to us the prohibition from attempting to leave together. Such a wholesale evacuation, unless accomplished as one might sayde coup de tonnerre, would never be practicable, and as Hopkins ruefully reminded us, “Ziliah may be an angel, but I’d rather sour on her prospects of being a balloonist.”
Literally I was the only free man, now that Goritz was gone, and literally upon me devolved the task of getting back, rousing the world, and effecting my friends’ release. How should, how could I do it?
Always distressed by this inseparable anxiety, the trip to the Gold Makers suddenly appealed to my searching mind with a strong likelihood that the great river we had skirted might carry me safely, and, too, with a swiftness beyond our hopes to liberty, though when more seriously considered, it might prove, I saw, to be only theLiberty of Death.
Immediately, therefore, after our return I found a convenient occasion to discuss this project with the Professor and Hopkins. It struck them both favorably, though they rather shrank from recommendingit, as it was equally clear that if the river could be, as it were, employed at all, it would probably prove to be an obstreperous and mischievous servant. However, thatway lay my path.
Under the pretence—hardly ever now were we free from some dogging spy at our elbows—of wishing to report more faithfully the operations of the Gold Makers in that book which he was writing on Radiumopolis, and which somehow had now captivated the fancy of the Council, the Professor (King Bjornsen), Hopkins and myself revisited the distant village. Although we were not permitted to go unattended, it was easy enough for me to engage the Samoyedes in conversation, and ask them about their knowledge of the great river. They spoke quite freely about it, and proved not only willing to tell me all they knew, but discouraged my plan to navigate the river to its mouth, by a not altogether lucid account of the attempt of one of their fishermen to venture on the river beyond the rocky gateway frowning on them to the west, and of his receiving some sort of violent treatment at its hands, he being thrown ashore and returning along the banks of the stream, reaching home almost more dead than alive. So ran their broken and obscure story.
Where was this man? “Dead.” Were any of his family, descendants, acquaintances, intimates, living? “Oh—yes—he knew everybody.” After some painstaking examination, accompanied by an immense amount of irrelevant recollections of what he did after his return, how he died, and how he was buried, his size, his strength, his obstinacy, and a recital of the disposition of his slender estate, I uncovered a trail of associations leading to an old blind man who was yet alive, and who, it was supposed, knew a little more exactly than anyone else what this daring disciple of Izaak Walton had seen or experienced.
This ancient was located, but it proved a mountainous task to extract much intelligible information from him, partly because he was dreadfully deaf, hopelessly stupid, and so incoherent that the interpreters chosen to interview him appeared to be at their wits’ ends to make him out, and more particularly because he was himself suspicious of his examiners.
I at last came away with the impression that the man had floated off peacefully on the swelling breast of the flood as it emerged from the broad lake-like embayment in the Gold Makers’ land, and had been carried along for a great distance at a rapid rate but not with much or any danger, until the descent brought him to a change in the bed or banks of the river (what this change was could not be determined), and that he had even survived this, but that later he jumped overboard from his raft (for raft it was), and reached the shore and, satisfied with his adventure, had made his way back by almost incredible exertions.
Singular as it may seem to you, sir, my deductions from this incomplete story, bristling as it might seem with unimagined, untold dangers, were, that the river maintained a full flow, was seldom interrupted by obstructions, had some serious breaks in its grade, which, however, did not involve actual falls, and, if violent at any point, was not unnegotiable, as you say. The fisherman evidently passed the worst place alive, but did not survive the shock. He lost his nerve and got ashore—and besides, in his case, there were most valid reasons for objecting to a lengthier transit.
This favorable interpretation, so far as it helped me to make up my mind, was really itself helped by a kind of desperation. It was impossible for me to remain in this solitude any longer. An almost fierce monomania of repulsion was growing withinme, and, of some natural hardihood myself, this excitant for action bestowed on me an almost unnatural indifference to danger.
Later I told my friends I had made up my mind. Whatever perils lay in my way I would cope with them as I could—but GO I would, and as an avenue of escape that seemed to promise the quickest release I preferred the river. There were many solemn and affecting conferences—continued as we had opportunity—and the preparations were, so far as the resources allowed, carefully made. They were indeed so wisely made that I reached the Siberian Sea safe and sound. The intervention of Luck or Providence in assisting him, is consciously or unconsciously expected by every Arctic explorer, probably by any explorer; and with the contribution of his best judgment, unsparing effort, and personal fortitude, he is inclined to put the blame of his failure—if he fails—on those two omnipotent factors. If he succeeds, a brave man is probably not less inclined to give them the credit.
We selected the best rifle of our little collection, stored all of our ammunition, depending on the ingenuity of Hopkins and the King to reconcile the Radiumopolites to this sequestration of their beloved thunder, the Professor entrusted to me some pencil scribbled papers, and then we turned our attention to my personal equipment. I believed that in a week’s time at the most I would be enabled to reach the coast. We all felt that, assuming a parallel conformation of the various zonal strips we had traversed entering Rasselas, their proximity on the west argued for a probable narrowing of their width. To have attempted the eastward route over the path we had taken had no attractions for me, and from the first we felt my absence would then be more quickly discovered, and myselfwilly-nillyoverhauled.
But later we turned our first plans upside-down. Hopkins said my departure should be a public event, that we would never be able to accomplish anything satisfactorily in this hidden, secret fashion.
“Take the bull by the horns; fly a high kite and put it up to ’em this way. Tell ’em the shade, spirit, spook, anything that’s handy of Antoine Goritz, has appeared to you, and told you to take to the water; that big things will be brought back that way; that the Serpent God wishes it—Oh, anything. Hand it out strong and lively and scary. I guess that’ll rehabilitate Goritz too, give him thesaecula saeculorumsort of effect, and it won’t do us any harm either to keep up our show of being on intimate terms with ghosts and such.”
“Will they believe it?” I asked.
“Sure. Why not? What else have they got to do? They’re made that way. All of these rubbishy people who came into existence before gas and electricity, the telephone, trolley car, pasteurized milk and incubators, will believe anything you tell ’em about goblins and witches and scarecrows and second sight and dreams and invisible voices. Try it, Alfred. It’s a cinch.”
Well, we did try it and it was, to put it that way, an unalleviated success. Still there was a fly in the ointment, in a way. Ziliah told Hopkins the little doctors were overjoyed—they wantedmeout of the road. I asked the Professor and Hopkins what they thought about that and they both agreed they could take care of themselves. This upshot of the matter was indeed a rather disturbing surprise, but—my departure was a triumph!
The resources of Radiumopolis were at my disposal—food, clothing, and although direction or information could not be furnished, the physical requisitions for combating hunger and cold weregenerously provided. This alacrity on the part of the little rulers was unmistakably connected with their expectation that the adventure would be the last ofme. They were obedient to the injunctions of King Bjornsen, but their subserviency was hypocritical in its protestations of devotion.
Unluckily there was the most helpless ignorance of boat making to contend with, and the additional provocation to despair that there were no tools to make them with. This historic fisherman had tried to do the trick with a raft. I would take a raft too. What else? The Samoyedes built them well and strongly, and under my uncontrolled supervision a narrow raft made of two tiers of logs, crossed in position and bound together with the strongest ropes, was prepared. On this a woven hamper was firmly fastened, and in that were placed my provisions (tortillas, and dried meat) and extra clothing, and rugs, and a sleeping bag of sheepskin. A pack strapped to my back carried Goritz’s gold souvenirs, some radium masses, a compass, chronometer, matches and a selection of fishing hooks and lines. A gun was almost riveted to my side, so immobile did it seem. But thetour de forceof foresight was involved in the insertion of two short posts (five feet high) at the stern, though distant from the raft’s edge by about three feet, and distant from each other by three feet. To each of these posts, at the level of my shoulders, was reamed a hole for two looped leathern thongs, so adjusted that standing between the posts I could insert my arms in the loops, clasp my hands across my breast, and secure a chancery that nothing short of dislocation of the raft itself could break, or the avulsion of my own arms from their sockets, while in an instant I could free myself.
The Samoyedes rigged up a rude steering tiller which of course was indispensable. It consisted ofa girdle suspended from a cross piece, binding the two abovementioned posts, through which a stick paddle was swung. It was decidedly awkward, as it displaced me from my position of safety between the posts, and therefore at critical moments might prove quite worthless, if not a positive danger. Here I must count on my own agility and strength. Besides this tiller half a dozen poles and as many oars were tied to the posts projecting above them like short masts. These might prove very serviceable. But there was also a last Atlantean touch. Two of the three foot balloons were firmly tied to the crosspiece of the upright posts. It was the Professor’s suggestion, and I am positive that at a critical twist it saved matters.
That was about all, except that some further records were given me by Bjornsen and they were consigned to the great woven hamper. Well, some learned societies will be saved head splitting disputes, and no less head dizzying theories, the former perhaps not altogether harmless.That hamper never came through.
By the beginning of July I was ready for the plunge. The day was auspicious, clear but torrid, with the stationary sun wrapped in luminous clouds, and its overwhelming rival coursing a higher altitude in unchecked splendor. The great river assumed an enticing placidity; its tranquil current had even lost the chained bubbles floating from the shattering cascades that freed it from the Canon of Promise. And Radiumopolis had bodily transferred itself to the scene; the banks, the hills, the roofs of a few abandoned sheds were closely crowded, by a wonderfully variegated multitude, intensely interested, subdued into a faintly murmurous throng by the excitement of admiration. I was something more than a hero that day. Obeying the summons of the spirit of my former companion,I was to rejoin him along that trackless pathway of the great river, whose banks touched heaven, in whose inaccessible depths dwelt all the demons of death and terror.
There was a reservation of space, at the point where my raft swung uneasily, for the King, the Council, Hopkins and Ziliah, and the magistrates of the city, and only a Hogarth could have done justice to that commixture of physiognomies, the odd and contrasted figures, interspersed with the taller men and women, all wearing their regalia, and the massed battalions beyond them in holiday array. Some daring aeronauts circled in the air above me. Flowers did not figure in the festivals nor in the predilections of the Radiumopolites, though blue and yellow blossoms lit their landscapes with a smile of floral prettiness that was very bewitching, and their own blue and yellow tunics, or coats, indicated some sympathy with these colors. On this occasion I was presented with some flat pincushion-like mats made up of these flowers by some blushing girls, and from the laughter—gentle and decorous—that this evoked, I believed they evinced a warmer sentiment than regret. Of course my mission, as publicly declared, precluded my probable return, or, at least, it meant my long absence. By the Council doubtless, certainly by a few undisguised enemies in it, it was hoped that it meant my wholesale and irremediable destruction.
As I shook hands with all I came at last to the Professor (King Bjornsen) and Hopkins. Our hands closed tightly and we dared not look each other in the face. I heard Hopkins whisper, “Heaven help you,” and if prayer reaches the throne of Grace when it is consecrated by the heart’s holiest hope, that prayer, I know, ascended to its place. As the Professor embraced me, he loosened the belt of lead I had worn and replaced itwith a heavy gold girdle whose big buckle bore the carven Serpent. That, Mr. Link, I have never shown to anyone. Diaz, Huerta nor Angelica have ever seen it. It will amaze you. The Professor removed it from his own waist. There was a half hushed remonstrance. But the King’s gift was interpreted favorably, and as I received it a shout went up, and even the Council, for prudent reasons possibly, indulged in a titter of endorsement. My raft was pushed by willing hands into the stream. Its prow or front yielded to the gentle urgency of the current, and turned. I stood upon the hamper, and waved my hat—not the beehive contraption but a sheepskin fez—and again the Radiumopolites, now strangely stirred by this solemn gliding departure of a single man into the unknown, broke spontaneously into one of their sing-song, not quite unmusical, and not exactly musical, chants, which rising in pitch until it swelled to me over the water, almost seemed, I drearily thought, like a dirge. Its crooning wail still filled my ears when all details of the multitude were lost, and the shadow of the great gateway of rock, into which the river was relentlessly carrying me fell across the glassy wave that had now become my path to liberty.
There was now nothing to be thought of but self-preservation amid unknown and unsuspected dangers. I seized some bread—tortilla—a hunk of the dried, not unpalatable meat, and drank some wine. This interjected meal raised my spirits. A momentarysang-froidreplaced my nervousness, and indeed, so great was my exultation at the thought of regaining the vanished world, of liberation from an unendurable stagnation and the bald, horrible misery of a silly paganism, that I became almost cheerful. That mood did not last long. Already I had passed the portal of the deep canon. Thered sandstone walls rose in sheer precipices above me, and were rising visibly higher beyond. A few shrunken pine trees clung here and there to shelves of rock, while through some upward openings, and leading into transverse valleys, I caught glimpses of the dark green motionless tops of the serried trees that here marked the amphitheater of the Pine Tree Gredin.
The grimness of the swiftly developing descent almost appalled me now. I was on the back of a resistless flood not yet maddened into a fury of impetuous violence by opposition, nor quickened into the onset of a galloping torrent by sharper changes in its gradient, but doubtless bringing me and my smoothly drifting raft into just such wild vicissitudes. Could either one or the other survive them? The clumsy boat beneath my feet was a willing servant. It responded to the strokes of the tiller, and my dismal forebodings were momentarily forgotten in the amusement it gave me to swing the raft from side to side of the still broad waterway. As the light became dimmer, and a half crepuscular dusk crept into the deepening fissure over whose topmost edges the sky hung like an illuminated ribbon, I felt the grip of a solemn dread, the precurrent rigor of that deadlyrigor animaewhich palsies the heart.
Still on and on, in a course that scarcely deviated from a straight line, and thus safely conductedus(to me my little barge shared, as a sentient thing, our common danger, and it alleviated my solitude to fancifully, as children do, personify it, talk to it, praise it) toward that distant goal, the ice-packed shore of Krocker Land. The bed of the stream lay in a rectilinear joint and the weathering on either side had not greatly widened the aperture above. The picture changed only in detail. The frowning sides, walls scarcely relieved by any vegetation or,which, if there, was too far above me for my eyes to detect, offered no distinction in color. Nature had not here spread her palette of blending hues, those that over the silent expanses of the Grand Canon of the Colorado transfer the colors of sunset to the immutable stone. It was the utter sternness, the harsh, immense uniformity of the still increasing precipices that crushed the soul. I seemed like an atom in the void, a plaything of nature; for a moment, and for a moment only, seen in this outraged solitude, to become then a part too of the lifeless panorama.
The cliffs rose now a thousand feet or more, and sensibly receded, the dislodged blocks from their summits building an awful fringe of titanic boulders, angular monoliths, at the water’s edge. Beyond me stretched the unvarying avenue, the shooting river seeming far away, motionless and fixed like a congealed mass, though every particle of it was flying onward with fresh acceleration. There could be no doubt of that. Points observed on the shores were more and more rapidly passed. This hastening pace became to me a portent of disaster. The angry river, placable at first, luring its audacious victim onward, now in sullen mastery, with a rising temper, as if impatient over its own leniency threatened to hurl the petty intruder, the graceless little egotist, into eternity. It would have done with him, washing his lifeless corse on its sullied waters to the depthless ocean, a memento and a warning, if so paltry an object could be either. Thus I seemed to divine the storm of its gathering wrath.
So far the great volume of water had been accommodated in the channel, and the surface of the river was almost smooth. But with the increasing speed the channel narrowed, and the water became turbulent. Waves rushed on and out from the shoresand rolling backs of water chased each other in the center of the stream. Fortunately, though the waves washed the raft from end to end and sometimes drove me to the protection of the upright posts, the river maintained its straight course, and we still rode gallantly onward. There were sudden dips, down which we slid with alarming velocity, that made me shudder, but nowhere a rock, a breaker, no treacherous bend, no falls, not even yet the dashing turmoil of a rapid. What invention of malice was this?
Suddenly my eye noticed a prominent bulge in the river, perhaps three or four miles ahead. It lay about midstream. Here was some formidable interruption? Was there a sluice-way on either side of it? If so I could avoid it; the balloons helped my buoyancy. The raft trembled. Ah, already it felt some premonitions of the tussle. Yes, a decided—no, not a bulge after all; it was a drop, the river fell over a ledge, but apparently a low one, so low that the deep volume filled it up, making the transition from above to below it inconsiderable, and below—I could just see—was retardation, and expansion; the river moved there over a flat! Curious, such relenting!
“Have no fear, Old Boy,” I shouted, stamping the logs beneath me to awaken their attention, “stick together, take a brace and over we go, safe and sound.”
The spot seemed to rush towards us. For an instant I hesitated. Should I scoot to the sides and avoid the plunge? Was it a trap? The tortuous flow sideways might smash us against the rocks, and then—Ah! then,requiescat in pace. Down the center, sink or swim, there was no help for it—once over, thrice saved—a wetting perhaps, perhaps a mouthful of water.
The boiling water lashed us, and something likea moan came to me from the shores, almost as if the baffled river gnashed in its impotent disgust. I steered for the rounded mound in front; a straining creak from the grinding logs, a sharper bolt ahead—I clung to the posts, and the neglected tiller dragged behind—another sprint and I saw the shelving face of the water below the drop tossing furiously. Over, with an upward jolt; that was the greatest danger of all. But the sturdy frame held together, and then in a tussle of bristling waves, noisy, each one striking over its neighbor’s shoulder at us, and I hard at the tiller, we raced down the slope, inundated, wrenched, even pitched a little, but quite safe, quite sound. I could not restrain my impulse to shout, though a moment later, as the mocking echoes smote my ear, fear stilled my voice, and stunned conscience whispered: “Pride goeth before a fall.”
The raft swam later into the center of a lake-like space, in a welter of bubbles and foam from the cascading water. The cliffs here declined, and to the north a pass led upwards at whose termination on the waterside two deer were actually drinking. Had they heard me shout? Their undisturbed assurance denied it. But now they caught sight of me and were retreating with backward glances as they halted on the grass-lined trail. I was in the Deer Fels.
I steered my craft, which had now gained the prestige of an actual companionship, toward the shore, drew out one of the poles, and poled it carefully inshore at a sandy brink not far from the footprints of the deer. I was very quiet now, so as not to frighten away the animals who watched me from a high point. Their presence delighted me, and reinforced my courage. Had they been at my side I could not have raised a hand against them, so fraternal and human did they seem. But oh, for avoice to answer my own! I talked to myself, but not loudly. I dreaded to wake those jeering echoes.
The sunlight streamed through the pass, and I went up a short distance very softly, for the deer were vigilant, but still remained where I could see them. I lay down on a grassy knoll and dried myself. Then I returned to the raft and picked out some food. Much of it was wet and the contents of the hamper needed overhauling and drying. I made a fire, finding some chance sticks and wood, and in the one kettle left to us, and which Hopkins had given me, I actually made a stew which tasted divine.
Then I climbed to the top of the ridge and looked about. I could see the pine trees’ shadow eastward, the rolling hill land of the Fels about me, and beyond, westward, the big plateau of the aquatic trough, and then I thought I caught the pale, fluctuating, gushing pillars of the Nimbus and, as had often happened from other points, glimpses of the pinnacled and snow-capped Rim. I momentarily doubted my own resolve. Should I abandon the raft and travel over the land to the coast? But that awful crevice of the Nimbus rose threateningly to mind. I feared it. Before it the untried terrors of that descent to the coast by the imprisoned plunging stream actually looked inviting. Perhaps too the worst was over. And then the quickness of it. Twenty-four hours more and I would be released. Released? How? Thrown on a pitiless coast, beleaguered by the endless ice! What madness was this. Safety, a kind of animal happiness, at least, had been mine in the sleeping vale of Rasselas. But now—? I shuddered, and the swarming rogues of despair and foreboding rose in clouds like gnats from a shaken bush. It was an instant when a man’s heart seems to weaken into water.
I had slowly retraced my way, and there I stood at the edge of the waterway, one foot lifted to step upon the raft, to all appearances a man calmly bent upon the fulfillment of his purpose. And yet all the while I was beset with conflicting and warring thoughts. It was so as I took the sleeping bag and a rug or so and tied them to the posts, arguing almost unwittingly that, were the hamper swept away, I would thus savethem. And then blindly I crammed my pack—ready at any crisis for my back—with food. It was even so as I took my place on the raft, as I pushed it off from the shore, as I maneuvered it into the streamway, even as I took the tiller and guided my boat on to the fastest current. The automatic force of some ulterior prevention just kept me in the chosen line of work, unconsciously and yet irreversibly. Strange!
Again the darkness of the canon walls fell around me, and then only the subdued mind rose and reformed, as it were, visibly, my unalterable determination. And indeed now there no longer was room for incertitude. The rush forward keyed every sense into a vivid expectancy. The bed of the river had become more gorge-like, the uneven and projecting cornice edges of the rock on either side sent back the bounding water, and the surface around me was filled with leaping waves. The course though, most luckily, remained almost undeviatingly straight. To have engineered a curve or any sharp deflection would have been almost impossible at the rapid swing the raft was taking in the descent, which, however, hardly varied from my previous experience. It was difficult enough to keep “my keel” steady, with the constant tendency of the logs to throw themselves across the stream. It was buffeted by the “rollers” sent inward from the shores, and the rapid pull of the midstream was itself interrupted or diverted bythe development of short waves, that chased down the center of the channel, and that indicated obstructions or inequalities in the bed over which the water was impetuously pouring.
It was only by the stiffest exertions that I was enabled to keep the raft headed true, and, as it was, over the rougher passages it was swept with water. I was drenched, the spray and waves splashed and rose upon me. I now realized the indispensable assistance given by the posts and the unbreakable loops, one of which at least was constantly in use. The management of the tiller, in this half imprisonment, was awkward, but in spite of strains, shiftings, violent jolts and lunges the raft shot well along the center, and did not seriously deviate from an axial position.
It was evident, too, as we swept onward, though my attention was too eagerly fixed on the recurrent predicaments in the water to be able to notice it carefully, that the canon above had enormously widened. I mean that the upper walls had receded through progressive weathering; the tunnel-like grimness had somewhat softened, and more light fell on me. Fortunately there were changes in the gradient of the rocky floor, and while some were on the wrong side of the account, others introduced agreeable relief. These latter were more level stretches where the turbulence disappeared, and the raft floated evenly, and was easily kept obedient to her helm.
I had been running safely enough, though the margin of safety, it must be said, was often a very narrow one, for some ten or twelve hours, and the loss of sleep, constant anxiety, the wetting and the indifferent sustenance had been slowly telling on me when my weary eyes detected a new, perhaps a crowning danger.
Before me the walls of the canon seemed to close—theyalways did so in the manner of a perspective coalescence—but this was now different. There was a break in the continuity of the channel. The stream turned to the left, and I saw a wall of rock before me. At such a point a whirlpool effect was inevitable, and this, apart from the danger of a wreck on the rocks in the rapids, I had most dreaded.
I noticed the elbow was rounded towards the south, forming a sort of pool, and reminding me of the Niagara whirlpool, but it was not so large, and, as the raft began to be seized by a stronger current, it was also evident that the bed sloped again, and that the stream attained a dangerous velocity. The waves spanked and broke over the raft, the distance was white with foam; I was rocked as in a cradle, and I felt that I must abandon the tiller, insert myself between the posts, and hold on to the loops. If the raft escaped or survived engulfment I might then be saved. The balloons were intact and their attachments unbroken. They were doing some service, though a slight one, as they dragged behind me, restraining my descent.
Another feature appeared ahead in the rapidly nearing vortex, about which all doubt was now removed; I could see its powerful rotation. This new feature was a periodic uplift of the water from the pool in a broad spout or fountain, ejected obliquely and falling on the waves beyond the whirlpool itself. At first this outburst alarmed me. Its discharge seemed so unaccountable and so violent. A moment later I felt it might mean my safety.
On like an arrowwesped—the raft had become a companion—and fearing the tiller might in some way become entangled or deflected and in the turmoil of our certain submergence play some fatal trick that would disable me, I cast it loose. Icould see it swing past the raft, and dance madly on the combing surges. Then it was lost but I strained my eyes to detect, if possible, its emergence in the spout ahead. I thought I saw it, but now in the clutches of the ravenous tide, I became blind with unmistakable terror. The noise of the chaotic water around me seemed like a low roar, mingled, too, with an interminable hiss, and in the gloom of the desolate stony chasm the menace almost darkened my mind and made me unconscious.
A boom struck my ear, low, definite, smothered; I attributed it to the regurgitant geyser from the whirlpool. A leap forward, a choking rattle from the logs beneath, and then a wrenching twist that threw my feet from under me, and the water rose solidly over my head. I could reach the air by pulling myself upward on the straps about my arms. I saw the balloons tugging desperately and two reports like the bursting of a bomb immediately followed. They were in tatters. Again I sank; this time it seemed like doom. 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.
I hardly realized I was alive, but in a few minutes every sense attested its reality. Ifeltthe pack on my back—I had very early secured it there—Iheardthat the creaking, groaning logs were still intact, Ilookedbefore me and saw the hamper had been swept away, Itastedthe cold water in my mouth. I was saturated, it almost seemed, and I was faint,perhaps from shock, in a measure. The sturdy posts which had been my refuge were unshaken, and now, straight before me in a shouting turmoil, the waters put on to me a friendly guise, and seemed just delirious over my escape. So quickly does the temperature and spirit of the heart find its reflection in inanimate nature. For now, though I had been despoiled I was safe, and my gun, my cartridges, some food at least, my fishing tackle, the evidences of Krocker Land, many notes, the compass, matches—in a watertight box—and, thanks to my forethought a rug and a sleeping bag were all with me, as most helpful friends.
The recovery had been so unexpected that I felt gay as a child, and as the French say, everything about me wore for a little whilecouleur de rose. The stream itself, ample and full, sprawled out in a wider bed; before me a break in the canon walls, on one side, indicated some tributary valley and affluent and—I was rummaging my pack—here was a bottle of undiluted, unwatered wine! I almost emptied it. A tortilla and some strips of dried meat completed my banquet. I was myself again. The poles and paddles lashed to the posts were still there, and one of the former was soon in my hands, for the guidance of the boat. The best I could do now would be to keep her off the shores, turn and wriggle as she might in the middle stream.
My composure now returned, and permitted me to consider my predicament more calmly. Where was I? A few minutes after I asked myself this question, the lateral valley opened to view. It was a rough, rocky streambed in which now a probably much shrunken tributary to the river—Homeward Bound—on which I was, made its way from a bare, rugged upland. But here I caught a glimpse of the sluggishly ascending vapors and clouds from the Perpetual Nimbus. I could not be mistaken.The wall of wavering whiteness seemed to stretch southward. The confirmation of the Professor’s hypothesis was complete. The Valley of Rasselas was an enclosed pit, on all sides of which the terraced zones we had traversed on the east, would certainly be found. Here on the west less developed, compressed and narrower, they still existed. Radiumopolis at least was excentrically placed in the valley, but the valley itself was excentric also. Then I would soon be crossing the Rim, and apprehensions of new difficulties swarmed in my mind. The canon I was in cut across the great circular fissure which surrounded Rasselas, and the position of the whirlpool perhaps marked the crossing. Could it be possible? It was an extraordinary geological situation I was sure, but its explanation could wait. What terrors of rapids, falls, or cataracts, or more whirlpools lay before me? I looked ahead. The light from the stationary sun had gone, but the friendly luminary that now more than replaced it, was burning in the sky, and it showed my future course.
To my delight, on either side the canon walls declined; indeed, it seemed that far off they became simply high banks and nowhere were there perceptible disturbances in the stream itself. The great volume poured its almost unruffled torrent over a very ancient bed, and the whole aspect of the river assumed a peculiar sedateness, as it were, compared with the rushing, headlong haste it had shown above the whirlpool. And there! On either side rose the snow crowned pinnacles of the Rim! The encircling mountain fence of Krocker Land was opened here by a valley, and in that valley, deeply entrenched, Homeward Bound was placed. And now a new and beautiful feature developed. Brooks or streams, fed perhaps by melting snows or ice, leaped into my river from the still high cliffs.I could count a dozen or so, the splash of the falling water breaking the surface of the river into waves, and the noise of their motion and impact filling the canon with a half musical roar. It was a fascinating picture.
The river turned, not abruptly, but swinging southward in a long arm or curve, and then a vista developed that, for an instant, filled me with fresh alarm. On the left side the cliffs fell away, and their place was taken by the face, it looked so, of a small glacier. I was at sea level perhaps. The wall rose somewhat on the right, and intermittent threads of water still seamed their sides with lines of light and whiteness, but to the left there appeared the wide mouth of a glacialcoulisse, and from the ice mass in it, little bergs floated in the now much retarded and widened river. The bergs scared me. A white or yellowish turbidity spread from the glacier, the contribution of rock-meal brought by the river that issued from beneath it.
It was quite possible to guide my raft by the paddle I had, and, though the Homeward Bound maintained considerable current still, it had but little directional force. In half an hour I was opposite the glacier, and amongst its bergs. I gazed eagerly seaward, trusting I might catch some glimpse of the coast that must be near at hand. But the view closed again, there seemed to be a contraction of the river, the walls rose on both sides, and now the river’s flow was but little more than the propulsion caused by its residual momentum.
The ice serpent wound upward into the snow recesses of the mountains. Opposite to me its riven front glowed with beryl and sapphire veins; the white calves lazily caught the motion of the stream, and almost, it seemed to me, resented my intrusion, so suddenly did they gather about me, either in derision or in menace. I did indeed feelpowerless among them. Ice cakes flecked the stream. I was in a treacherous company. Anxiously I steered my craft through them, but in the mist that sprang from their sides, I would sometimes fail to see them and an inauspicious bump would send me sprawling. I felt that the moment of release was approaching. Soon the pale, haunted, Arctic Ocean would hold me. I felt its immensity already, and now that the excitement of the scramble for liberty, this arrowy voyage down the strange and majestic chasm of a great new river of the earth, was behind me, my heart quailed before the UNKNOWN, that confronted me with what—Deliverance or Death?
The mountains sloped away on either hand, or were, in fact, already behind me, for I was now floating with a diminished current that aided my avoidance of the torpidly drifting bergs. I was in a canal, literally cut through an ancient gigantic moraine, the vast scourings of an ancient ice sheet. It was not long delayed—my emergence on the ice-bound shore of western Krocker Land. The banks declined and slowly disappeared, yielding now to the broad fringe of a coastal plain where the river, encountering a varying resistance, had succumbed to the vagaries of mere idleness, and swung in broad loops to the sea. Yes—there it was—to quote the graphic words of Nansen—“that strange Arctic hush, and misty light, over everything,—that grayish white light caused by the reflection from the ice being cast high into the air against masses of vapor, the dark land offering a wonderful contrast.”