Sive per Syrtes iter aestuosas,Sive facturus per inhospitalemCaucasum, vel quae loca fabulosaLambit Hydaspes
Sive per Syrtes iter aestuosas,Sive facturus per inhospitalemCaucasum, vel quae loca fabulosaLambit Hydaspes
Sive per Syrtes iter aestuosas,Sive facturus per inhospitalemCaucasum, vel quae loca fabulosaLambit Hydaspes
Sive per Syrtes iter aestuosas,
Sive facturus per inhospitalem
Caucasum, vel quae loca fabulosa
Lambit Hydaspes
His unappeased wonder over a bit of unraveled criminality will vanish in the excitement of discovery, of adventure, of revelation, but at the other end, as the book drops from his hand, finished and admired, he will approve our reticence at this end, for then he will know HOW Erickson got into his difficulty, and WHY.
Erickson’s story was published in theNew York Truth Getter—of course the reader never saw it there—prepared from his verbal narrative, his notes, and memoranda, and so expressed in English as to retain the glow, enthusiasm, amazement, and graphic delineation of the original. It was told to me in my library overlooking the sunlit tides around Throg’s Neck; in the short winter afternoons at times, at times through the long winter evenings, with Erickson hanging over the hearth where, as Max Beerbohm puts it, “gradually the red-gold caverns are revealed, gorgeous, mysterious, with inmost recesses of white heat.” Past all dreams of wizardry, more remote from thought than any visions of magic, stranger than the hallucinations of invention, was this picture of the unreal and terraced world descending in titanic steps to the heated regions of the earth’s mass, peopled with an impossible people, alive with animal abundance and clothed in the vestal glory of innumerable plants. In it were enacted thosetransmutations which Science predicts as the last triumph of human knowledge, and in it a wealth transcending the maddest hopes of Avarice had accumulated in an Acropolis of SOLID GOLD!
There in the frozen north, walled in by ice, hidden in fogs, almost impenetrably concealed or protected by storm, lay this incredible continent of wonders, unsuspected by the world of one thousand million people around it, the goal of whose ambition it had already reached, the course of whose evolution it illustrates, and who had, in these latest years, begun to grope blindly for its guessed at shores.
Azaziel Link.
men, sitting on a veranda, watch a boat sailing on a fjordTHE FIORD
THE FIORD
THE FIORD