“This was in Papua, an awesome country which holds in its dark recesses many of the things one wants—and most of those which one does not. I had gone there with two other white men to look for gold. It is a marvelous country, Doctor; I do not think there is any other like it; such a country as was pictured in the old imaginative school of painting; a valley, through which winds a mist river flowing intangibly from a mirage through a canyon bridged by a rainbow; travelers’ palms, tree-ferns, lianas, dream-trees heavy with strange fruits and brilliant blossoms, in the distance mystic mountains rising as they recede, green yet forbidding, the homes of genii; their summits fantastic—the whole a beautiful, impossible, frightfully fascinating fairyland. This was that place where we went to look for gold.
“My two companions were failures—most gold-seekers are. I was not old enough to be a failure myself. No matter what the faults of these others, one did not deny their virtues. One was a Hollander, Vinckers, an engineer, a brilliant man, but one ready to step over the edge of heaven in sheer restlessness and a desire to see what was held by the abyss; the other was a Scotchman, disagreeable, morose, taciturn, harsh of speech and visage. Both held hearts of steel; they were the most quietly courageous men that I have ever known. I ask you to remember this, Doctor, in consideration of what came later. Their courage had been tried and proved in many desperate situations.... Ach!”—Leyden began to mutter again, shaping his thoughts with his tongue until I could with difficulty catch this thought—“the filament—the neuron—cut the sympathetic nerve in the neck of a horse and the animal begins to sweat upon the affected side; puncture the floor of the fourth ventricle of a dog—diabetes.” He raised his voice. “There is a little center of thermogenesis, is there not, Doctor, the irritation of which will raise the temperature——
“We wandered through this shadow-land, this illusory place of promise whose inhabitants were ofttimes starving. Cannibals?—yes; many white men have been that through acute starvation; chronic only tends to confirm the vice. They were a strange, shy, kindly people—to us, who understood such. The ‘Barbary Coast’ in San Francisco, the parks in Melbourne, or the water-front in Hong Kong, are all more dangerous than Papua. We wandered through these people, accompanied by kindness, a whole tribe sometimes bearing our burdens until they reached a district dangerous to them, but where we made new friends. We wandered through this dreamland unmolested, walked with its fantastic peoples, black and brown and piebald; strayed in and out to the click-click-click of our little hammers, meeting dangers, it is true—the dangers which might confront a child walking blindfolded through a botanical garden filled with perils to its ignorance—and we tap-tap-tapped with our little hammers—right up to the slopes of the Malang-o-mor—the ‘Mountain of Fears’—and we tap-tap-tapped on its slopes of quartz and basalt, little thinking that we knocked at the door of an evil spirit.”
The bluff bows of our little ship smashed the short seas into a flat track of phosphoresence, and against the pale background I saw a tremor of some sort shake Leyden’s square shoulders, and it seemed to me that his voice was slightly breathless.
“‘The Mountain of Fears,’ so our Papuans called it, and threw down their burdens at the edge of the stream and refused point-blank to stir another step; more than that, they implored us to go no farther ourselves, and a girl given to MacFarlane by a chief threw her arms around the knees of the rough old Gael and wailed like a stricken soul. An odd thing, that, Doctor, this cannibal girl given to the Scotchman a month before by this chief, to whom MacFarlane had given a harmonica on which he had first rendered ‘The Bonnie, Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond’ in a manner which should, by right, have got him speared. The girl had fancied him, slaved for him, followed him everywhere like a dog, and had ended by softening him—to such an extent that he ceased to curse and his manner was less harsh—the elevating effect of a cannibal upon a Covenanter!—another inversion in this hallucinating country where the only actuality seemed the rapping of our little hammers.
“This girl, as I say, implored MacFarlane not to go on; for Vinckers and me she did not care; none of the women had much fancied us, while MacFarlane’s lack of comeliness was almost bizarre; they were obedient, of course—but that was about all.
“MacFarlane leered up at the great forbidding mountain as it thrust against the dome of the sky its summit of snowy quartz, a-glisten in the bright sunlight thirteen thousand feet above the level of the sea.
“‘A cauld slope yon—too cauld for a lass in naething but a kiltie. Ye’d best bide here ’til I come.’ He spoke to her in the vernacular, with which we were all three familiar, and told her to await his return.
“It was hot in that valley—a stewpan, withering, stifling with the equatorial reek which wilts one to the bone; the nights stunk of fever. It was the southeast slope of the mountain which presented to us; and as we gazed up toward it from the little nest of trees where we had made our camp, the late sun blazed against its worn flank, and suddenly the broad, barren belt between the forest and the formation of quartz above the timber belt seemed to burst into flame and shone and sparkled and glittered as if flecked with scales of gold.
“‘An omen!’ cried Vinckers. ‘The Mountain of Hope—not the Mountain of Fears! Something tells me that we shall find gold there—veins of it, knuckles of it—perhaps the bones of the mountain are solid gold; why not, in such a country as this?’