The tide grew stronger as if exultant in its remorseless purpose. The boat swayed and swung like a chip upon a descending stream, the dancing waters leaped about it, the long swells rose higher, and a growing cold caused the young creature to draw her wisely designed clothing closer to her form, while the unused paddle lay at her feet, and far beyond, as her appealing eyes looked northward, the great icebergs drew nearer.
Indeed the spectacle became each moment strangely beautiful and stupendous, and the despairing woman, in whom the dawning responses to beauty daily strengthened, forgot for a moment her extremity, in the superb picture that grew and grew as the now shooting currents carried her against its awful frigid majesty.
The day was far spent, the sun’s red disk hung on the very edge of the western horizon and the far away shores of the Fair Land, from which Lhatto had drifted, seemed drenched in purple, though above their peaks and domes of rock, a rosy light yet lingered. The sun, unattended by clouds but veiled in some unapparent mist, glowed garnet red, and its dissipated or obstructed rays dimly touched the ocean’s face with molten glints and splashes of bronzy gold.
North of the Fair Land, north of Lhatto lay the ice country, and it was thither her eyes turned with wonderment. She had heard of the ice country. Between it and her own Fair Land stretched the intermediate morainal zone, already described, where the hairy mastodon roamed in a dwindled but widely disseminated flora of low willows, birches, beeches, and gnarled ashes and spruce, where, in sheltered places, carpets of meadow sprinkled with color, spread between high beds of naked gravel, boulder piles, and clay. Her people had hunted there.
It was a strange climatic contiguity, the cold and ice-burdened north, the temperate or semi-tropic region of the Fair Land south, the neck of transition between.
It was not an impossible condition. In Dr. J. W. Gregory’s Great Rift Valley of Africa, a description is given of his ascending to the snow fields and glaciers of Mt. Kenya, and the reader is introduced to a succession of climates precisely such as prevailed in this reconstructed area of North America where the Romance of Lhatto and of Ogga was, as here described, evolved.
Mt. Kenya itself, garlanded with glaciers and snow beds, rises some 16,000 feet in the air almost beneath the equator.
The lowlands, miles away from its dark and arctic peaks, are tropical, where at 2 degrees South Latitude, the Athi River pours into the Indian Ocean. Nearer to the baffling peak, as the land rises, immense and dense forests spread an almost impassible skirt about it, the coniferous trees (podocarpus) and bamboo jungles indicate a cooler atmosphere, and through them hustle the chattering monkies (Colobus). Swamps, morainal hillocks succeed, the forests are replaced by herbs and bushes and scattering groves, with interspersed peat bogs, and then, beyond such a region of severer temperate conditions, rise the arctic highlands of the central confluence of ridges, chasms, and peaks, where a perpetual winter reigns. And all these progressive alternations are encountered in a radial circumference of fifty miles.
Already the hastening oceanic stream had carried Lhatto, as the night fell, nearly a hundred miles from the morning’s shore.
The night had indeed come; and Lhatto, who had long ago abandoned her desperate struggles to escape from the pitiless tide, crawled to the bottom of the boat, and crushing upon her head a cap of seal-skin, the last item of clothing left in her bundle, and eating ravenously of the meat and grain in her little basket, resigned herself to the strange possibilities now close upon her. And resigned herself without fear!