a man in torn clothes sits on the shore of some water. There is a gun at his sideERICKSON’S ESCAPE
ERICKSON’S ESCAPE
ERICKSON’S ESCAPE
And now the river widened, its banks receded and dwindled. To the north the high Rim advanced upon the sea, and black promontories rose in august severity in the glare of day, desolate and grim, their skirts fringed with the white surf ofinrolling waves. Beyond them open water and then ice floes, endless prospect! To the south the Rim declined abruptly into a wide detrital platform of sand and clay banks, and huge boulders, and, here and there, like white ships, the icebergs that had stranded. I was in the Kara Sea. Beyond that dread, compassionless horizon lay Siberia—but could I reach it? The awful chill of a realization of my abject helplessness for the first time overwhelmed me. I was alone in the Arctic Ocean, a mere atom before the uncontrollable forces that a whim of the weather might suddenly summon forth on their wild errands of destruction; or else a waif cast on a desert shore to be left with pitiless irony, in the calm scorn of merciless Nature, to perish.
I’m not a praying man, Mr. Link, but somehow I asked GOD then to help me.