The Mountain of Fears

by Henry C. Rowland

“‘Be still, you fool!’ I cried, roughly.

“‘Wha—wha—wha——’ quavered MacFarlane.

“‘What’s the matter with you?’ I cried, impatiently. ‘Are you a couple of girls just out of a convent?’

“‘What is the matter?’ asked Vinckers, thickly. Tomba was sobbing hysterically.

“‘MacFarlane wakes up with a nightmare!’ said I, ‘and sets you howling like a maniac.’ My own fright made me irritable.

“‘Odd,’ muttered Vinckers; ‘odd—I had a nightmare, too.’

“‘Ye hag-ridden fule,’ snarled MacFarlane, ‘bawlin’ and yammerin’ like a bull! I had no nightmare mysel’!’ He rolled heavily in his hammock. ‘Fetch me a drink o’ water, lass—water!’ he added, in the vernacular.

“Vinckers sat up in his hammock, let his feet hang over the side and, dropping his head between his heavy shoulders, stared down the valley. There was a moon somewhere behind the mist; this mist, diaphanous, vague, of any depth, yet lifted well above our heads, shone, not white, or colorless, as a vapor should, but a golden yellow; everything seemed golden, was becoming more golden daily the longer we stayed in that place of mockeries, and the reason of this was based on something more solid than a sentiment. What was the name of that drug, Doctor, which when ingested gives the yellow tinge to the vision? Santonica?—yes, perhaps that was it; perhaps its alkaloids were contained in that fatty fruit; perhaps it was only that the moon was one of those ripe, luscious, golden moons one sees on the equator. At any rate, the light came not pale and ghastly, as it should have been, but a luscious golden yellow; and that made it the more unearthly, as it illumined and gave a golden color to these dream objects—the fan-palms, the vague rock-heaps, the vistas between which should have been ethereal, but, because of this succulent, sickly yellow light, were too material; and the aroma, which should have been dank, no doubt, but elusive, was a physical stench. Ach! a witch-fire would have burned in that place like a fat pine torch; one would have scorched one’s hands near a feu-follet; there was a ponderosity to this place of ghosts. Can you conceive a fat ghost, Doctor—a fat, unclean ghost, who has clanked around, dragging his ball and chain until the sweat pours down his fat face—a malodorous sweat—a sweat that physically offends while it frightens? Once in my youth, in Leipsic, I went into the anatomical laboratory, and there was on the table a fat subject—a woman—and she still wore some gold-washed rings and had some baubles in her ears of too mean value to appeal to the cupidity of whoever had fetched her there. Br’r’r’rgh! She was pathetic, of course, but I was not old enough to feel that then. I can never forget how much more awful she was to me than were the thin, meager, attenuated subjects who were consistent with the place. It was such a ripe, rotten ghastliness as this that was held in that valley which glimmered away at the foot of the Mountain of Fears.”

Leyden paused, quivering, shuddering. One did not need to see him silhouetted against the phosphorescence to see that he shuddered; he was in a tremor, and the light from the rook kamer striking his strong, keen, nervous face showed that it was damp, wet, viscid with a moisture other than the humor of the Gulf Stream. He was living the thing over again with all of his high-strung, Teuton nervousness; and suddenly it struck me that it was hardly decent to let him go on—that it was my duty to interrupt him, just as it has been my duty at times to interrupt the unpleasant indulgences of other morbid impulses. But, on the other hand, speech is the safety valve of the mind; also, it is just to sit passively and watch for the symptom which states the case.

“Vinckers observed this thing,” continued Leyden. “Vinckers was an unimaginative man, and consequently the impression on him was as it would have been upon a dry plate, or the tracings of a seismograph, or any other machine which records automatically without contributing anything of its own. Vinckers was rather low in the animal scale—by low I mean primitive; as a man he was a splendid specimen, but he was animal enough to get rather more from his instincts than from his reasoning—like most women. He watched this thing, this yellow light coming through the mist and touching with its sickly yellow tinge all of the fantastic objects in the picture that belonged to the imaginative school of painting. He looked quite steadily at the dream-trees, too symmetrical to be real; the fantastic rock shapes, too fancifully grotesque to be the work of nature; he observed the yellow light upon the sluggish stream, which flowed like molasses, and looked rather like it, too; the fringe of the forest—in fact, all of the component parts of the picture just as some morbid painting genius would have placed them—and Vinckers growled like a dog who sees something moving about the camp-fire invisible to his master.”