A Woman of the Ice Age

by L. P. Gratacap

Fear indeed holds an awful sway in the primeval brain, stultified and dizzy before the unaccountable events in nature, its life and death, its storms and its silence, the stars, the depths of the earth, and all moving things. But an exalted phantasy sways there too. A sudden realization of fate and supernatural impulse, of swimming and winged and footed destinies carrying one on to prejudged conclusions, premade ends, prefixed disasters.

So Lhatto sat and dreamed and waited, and the biting air sank into her breast, and she fell asleep, almost undisturbed, acquiescent to all that might happen. And the same stars in the moonless night shone on her then, in the Ice Age, as they would shine on the same waters to-day, in the Age of Knowledge. And so Lhatto glided on unconscious, to the ice and the snow and the glaciers.

As the sun broke over the eastern rims of land, as its rays fell upon the half blinded eyes of the waking woman, a chill like a physical impact shook her frame. It was a strange and picturesque scene, one of unimaginable wonderfulness and beauty which met her eyes, and startled her into the widest wakefulness by the piercing cold. And it also was a scene of fantastic fearfulness and danger. The current had brought her to the lips, to the opening mouths and throats, the manifold necks and elongations, the waters fleeted with icebergs, the radiant cathedral spires, the minaretted roofs, the spouting super or englacial rivers, the dirt accumulations spilled from its lapsing morainal crusts; at the beryl wall of the Great Glacier, covering the North country, where it slid from the distant plateaux, even from the ice encased Mountain of Zit, rigid in frost, amid its dead and frozen hills, where it moved with breaks and bounds and dull detonations into the sea.

As the sun climbed the cloudless sky the immensity of this continental ice sheet was revealed to Lhatto. The very centre and composed inspiration of it all was the great towering mountain with its jutting and defiant peak of rock, where, as was shown before, the superb elevation was itself broken up into radiating chasms whose rocky sides rose in black keels of relief above the snow-filled gorges they defined, while surmounting them all, a keen shaft of granite, roseate in a hundred lights, or wrapped in pendulous and waving veils of mist, rose steeply to the clouds.

The extreme velocity of the current had abated and the dug-out floated slowly forward into this chaotic splendor of icy things. A vagary of the tide branching sideways brought the boat and its bewildered occupant into a sea of icebergs, ice-cakes, hummocks and toppling mounds of ice, where before her rose the very front of the high glacial stream pushing steadily into the water. In this amphitheatre of wonders, the crystal prison of the Ice King, full of structure and full of the most diffused and entrancing colors, here and there, in sockets and rifts, acute with passionate intensity, the boat rested, bobbing on the fluctuating waves.

Lhatto stood up on the dancing raft. Her limbs cramped with cold and the long stagnant sleep, seemed scarcely able to support her. But stamping and rubbing brought the life back to them, and the blazing sunlight brought back vitality to her body, even as it also started the ice streams, and to each tension of the ice masses supplied the loosening warmth that hastened their solution.

Before Lhatto was a terrace of ice, its minor irregularities masked by distance, with a height of many hundreds of feet, gashed, riven and melting, running for miles and miles interminably backward and sideward. At its feet, washed by the water, thousands of ice floats rose idly, or were rocked with waves produced by the falling into the sea of new additions to their number. Rivers were flowing in places over the ice front, discolored with mud, while leaning boulders of rocks at points were balanced on the edge of the glacier, or at other points protruding from the midst of its face, waited momentarily their own discharge into the ocean.

Beautiful and sublime ships of ice seemed stationary about her with their deep keels yet anchored to the sea bottom, sculptured and dissected, with snow drifts piled high upon them or arching in white cornices from the sides. An incessant murmur entered her ears, now and then punctuated by a sharper note of cracking and splitting, while the surges from the falling bodies, accompanied by most audible splashes, kept her boat tipping and turning, and rendered each movement she ventured to make, uncertain.

It was the panorama unrolled before her eyes landward beyond the blue and green precipices of the immediate glacier that drew her rapt attention. The rocky signal surmounting Zit soared above the ice fields, whose united surfaces, softened into an unbroken expanse, like huge shields, encircled it with gleaming armor; its lower attendant mountains secured a precarious freedom from the dominant oppression, some raising their heads in dark crests, above the snows, and the others banked over their highest reaches with fillets or reflecting bombs of snow. Below all these elevations the universal ice, written with a thousand details of serac, gorge, moraine, crevasse, and noonituck swept its dazzling and incredible domain.

Lhatto was beginning to feel a cruel hunger and she was very cold. The warm shirt, the seal skin dress, protected her, and over her feet she had also drawn a pair of sealskin boots, all so providently provided in her bundle of clothes, that it was almost certain that she had not been entirely without prevision of her coming necessity. But now it was hunger, too, that added its terrors to her isolation. She suddenly cast a satisfied glance upon the dead seal, already almost forgotten, lying in the boat. Beneath its plush-like covering lay the rich nutritous fat that feeds the fires of life beneath polar skies, with instantaneous and adequate fuel.