The Mountain of Fears

by Henry C. Rowland

“‘Let us go,’ he said, and we filed away from the place without looking back at the cannibal girl in the plaited hammock, her drawn face covered with the Scotchman’s only neckerchief.

“We wandered down the valley looking for a place to ford the stream and begin the ascent. We had no carriers, no goods, no especial hopes, but these things did not trouble us. We wandered along the banks of the dream-river and beneath the symmetrical trees, and filed between the fantastic rocks, which, from habit alone, we tapped with our little hammers; and still the sun had not looked over the edge of the eastern rampart of the valley, and we journeyed in the shadow of the Mountain of Fears. The Mountain of Fears—the Mountain of Fears—and nothing but peace on every hand! Nothing of harm—no danger of man or beast, nothing of heat, nothing of cold—a misty, dreamy peace; the dreads of the night supplanted by an apathetic shame which forbade discussion of these things. As for Tomba—why, she died of fever, poor girl—what else?

“We wandered down the valley and soon we came to a ford; there we crossed and toiled on up the slope of the mountain—up, up, up, panting, sweating, breathless, not clear as to purpose, but struggling to get up because—we did not know! As we climbed we tapped at the stones, because we were used to tapping and chipping with our little hammers, and when we halted for the night we were high up on a wooded plateau, and the air was fine and thin and sweet with healthy odors of moss and fern and clean flowers. We were on the hip of the Mountain of Fears.

“We crouched on the edge of the precipice and peered down into the valley as the sun slipped over the crest of the opposite hills and drew after it the curtain of mist which hid the greasy river and the unreal trees and the jumping rocks, which from above looked like Titan children frozen at play. The mist hid all of these things, but now we were above instead of beneath it. Before it grew denser it formed a thin, flat pale through which one might look and see these objects, symmetrical and bizarre, fantastic and uncouth, which lay beneath, as one looks down through the thin water-line of a clear but stagnant pool and sees the fairy-like structures of an alien element. ‘To-night,’ thought I, ‘we shall not slumber in that cistern.’ It seemed to me in that thin, bracing air, that we had wriggled to the surface like the larvæ of mosquitoes, and, after incessantly gyrating up and down, had crawled clear and grown our wings in the drier medium. But even while thinking these things the sun slipped down behind the opposite hills, the mist thickened, a cold draught sucked around the side of the mountain, and I heard Vinckers let out his breath with a shudder. I had noticed that each evening we grew depressed as soon as the sun was gone.

“‘What is the matter?’ I asked.

“‘Oh, God!’ he shuddered. ‘Don’t you see that it is all getting yellow again—a nasty, greenish yellow?’

“‘Ou aye,’ said MacFarlane, ‘but it has been yellow all day!’

“It had a yellowish tinge to me, Doctor, but I had tried to persuade myself that it was something in the spectrum of that equatorial sun and the vivid greens which filled the valley. There was no denying that as the sunrays left the air the yellows came out with frightful intensity, and to my imagination it seemed as if we were cursed with the curse of Midas—a curse because we had profaned the Malang-o-mor, except that it was not necessary to touch a thing to turn it into gold. Of course, at that time I knew nothing of such things as xanthopsia, and my mind rebelled at aught of a superstitious character. The result was that I became worried and confused—like a dog listening at the receiver of a telephone to a sourceless voice. With Vinckers and MacFarlane it was different; they were of the unimaginative type which goes at one leap from stubborn disbelief to frenzied superstition—and just because everything was turning yellow they would not raise their voices above a whisper.

“We had practically nothing wherewith to camp; in fact, we had come to wandering through that dream-country with only dream-needs—the needs of an opium-eater or any other slave of the lamp. Of course, we had some of the fruit—the stuff that grew on the Mountain of Fears—I have never seen it anywhere else. We made a shelter and crept in to sleep.

“I suppose that it was hot enough, but for a month we had dwelt in the steam-room of a Turkish bath. Being younger and stronger, I had given my poncho to Vinckers, who had felt the chill of the higher air. Perhaps it was this circumstance which brought me through the night with my reason, for the cold wakened me before that moment of low-ebbing vitality which comes between midnight and dawn. I awoke shivering, dew-damp with the terror of the night before, and as I lay there waiting I heard the other two twitching and muttering. I suppose that I should have awakened them.