“Notes, sketches, tables of temperature and magnetic variation, casual phenomena. Oh, I found out strange secrets! The whole story’s here. I’d sooner have left my bones up yonder than not bring her back the proofs.” He opened out the chart and hung over the grimy, tattered sheet as though it were some work of art triumphant—a perfection of beauty unimagined in the world before. As he sat there hugging the shabby heap between his knees, you would have thought that stained and sea-soaked store must be splendid with color, or resonant with the organ music of the deep and of great winds harping in the waste—fit record of a pilgrimage no soul had made before.
“In my heart,” he said, “I hoped, when I took her these, she might, at last, realize—”
A torn and dirty book, with corners worn round and curling, and a look about its tough, discolored pages as though it had come down a thousand years. “My diary.” He turned a page. “She couldn’t have read it, wouldn’t want so much as to touch it. Still, it was for her that even at the last I carried it rather than food.”
Opening the other side of the shallow chart-box that was fitted with grooves in which sheets of stout drawing-paper were slipped and firmly held in place, he drew what that first glance seemed to reveal as a meaningless smudge of violent color. “There it is!” and no sooner had he said the words, than nervously he was sheltering the thing behind one knee. “You are sure that old fellow isn’t hanging about?”
She glanced out. “Quite sure.”
Cautiously he brought the paper up from its moment’s hiding, but his low voice dropped to a deeper register, “That’s what it’s like!”
From the hoarse triumph in the tone she knew that however clear before his actual eyes had been once this picture in his hand, they saw it now no more.
“That’s what Borisoff and the rest died to have a glimpse of. This is what I found, instead of the palæocrystic sea. Here is where the ice-hills rise. There’d been a storm. The low cloud-masses—they were incredible! Like that! And the zenith clear, except for the banners of light.”
Plain he had no guess that the colored crayon was both marred and bettered; that the picture he had set down, with some fair skill, had been less moving, less poetic, even less true than this, that chance had wrought with a blind but faithful artistry. For as Hildegarde stared at the prismatic haze, a kind of wild meaning dawned there upon the paper. Yes, surely, chance had craftier hands than any but the greatest among the sons of men. For the picture brought that almost religious conviction of the truth that great art gives. Just so, and no otherwise, must this thing have been. The dome of the sky up yonder was an inverted bowl of brass. And in the heavenward hollow of it a giant brood of serpents flamed and writhed above a wild white waste, warmed here with violet, cooled there with silver and pearl.
“And that,” she said, only to have assurance of his voice again, “that’s what the world is like up there?”