He stood upon a flat boulder, a sort of natural stone table, and a sort of stupor, a poetic amazement, held him stunned. The coast line south of him was full of beauty, the beetling cliffs, their verdurous and dependent edges, the far off headlands, bays paved with colored rock; the coast line north of him so recently formed upon the upturned and disordered face of nature, culminating in crystalline glory in the ice zone about Zit—the pathless waters before him, all, all united in some sort of appeal that eviscerated and smote him, and a nameless longing for companionship, the endless, depthless cry for love coordinate with the bursting fires of desire and devotion transmuted the wild man into something noble and ecstatic.
He left his equipment on the shore and ran forward—from stone to stone he leaped with unpremeditated cunning; his zig zag course, as he passed from one pebble to another, brought him at last to the verge of a tiny harbor entered by a neck of water, and fortressed by dark rocks draped beneath with tressy sea weeds.
His pursuit was checked; he could go no further. His eyes, bright with ardor and delight, sought out the line of pale icebergs, and then they fell below him upon the transparent and liquid beryl lapping languorously at his feet. And as they fell, upon their retinas sprang the image fair and true, of a sleeping woman’s face, dark and beautiful, amid dishevelled hair, rocking in a little boat, as in a cradle, on the quietly heaving bosom of the sea. It was Lhatto.
CHAPTER V.
The Meeting.
In the newly systematized psychologies the analysis of love carries our introspection to equilibrating shocks of feeling, of an accommodation between an objective irritant and a subjective impulse, to gratification of sense inwrought with the emotional satisfactions that arise from perceptions of fitness, sympathy, congruity and the like; and doubtless a process of ratiocination would make of love, or find in it, all this. But love remains, and can we not be thankful that it does so remain, a penetrating ecstacy that invades sense and thought, and issues, like an electric fluid, instantaneously from all the surfaces of our feeling, and thus transmutes that feeling, giving it glory and radiance; that it changes the being in whose enraptured soul its flakes of fire have fallen, making the limit of his excellence possible, the range and widest capability of his nature patent, and along with its energizing influence upon all his dynamic powers, awakening the spiritual fires as well; or, more aptly and truly, elevating the outlook, the intention, the design, thrusting upon him by a sort of imperious moral necessity, the sweeter aspects of his relations to beings, to himself, and widening his love by the whole compass of his possible emotional exaltation, so that he become protagonistic, chaste and fair.
At least in the best men this is so, and even by some sort of adumbration and suggestion, giving them momentary periods of nobility, of insight, of joyful self-sacrifice, also true in the poorer sort. Ogga was indeed a wild man, a prehistoric, a creature of the plain, living next to nature, supplying his daily needs by a harsh ingenuity, wringing from obstacles a concession to his daily requests, a being utterly removed from all modern conceptions of social physics, a being on whose uplifted face no word of revelation or literature or exhortation had ever fallen, one whose instincts, the germinal moments of whose mind, with its inseparable faculties of observation and deduction, had only become active and projected under the influences of nature. But then what a nature it was. It was the dying years of an extraordinary geological phenomenon, the Ice Age, when the splendid relics of the crystalline ice-cap yet clung to the higher elevations of the continent, when in their retreat there had been left a weird confusion of ice and river, and refuse masses of a denuded world, monumental in extent and meaning, when animals, strange, big, and desperate, ranged through the land, while in the scene, chosen for this imaginative creation, to these boreal stages of life and topography, were conjoined the insistent claims of warmer conditions on the south in the Fair Land; and again to the east entered the majestic desolations of the canyon country. In the chapter on The Place the marvellous variety of natural conditions under which both Ogga and Lhatto lived—for we have seen in their various and errant life, however specialized, they were meeting all of them—were those which appealed to their wonder, their fear, their admiration, awoke in them joy and amazement and desire, fed the springs of poetic impulse, stirred the sense of worship and dependence, and propagated the thrilling currents of question and imagination. They reacted more intricately, more coherently upon their moral nature by which, better perchance than through the agency of books and stories, lessons and education, the fine outlines of courage and devotion, self-sacrifice and concentration, grew in their character, and without vagueness or confusion, lifted them into a relief, stalwart and unique.
As Ogga saw Lhatto he loved her, and he loved her nobly. The whole process of approach, preparation, attack and capture was instantaneously traversed. How could it be otherwise! The physiological instant was critical and victorious. Ogga was young, the tides of blood in his veins bore with them the impetuous claims of nature. And who, born amongst men, shall not know beauty? Ogga’s eyes had only met the forest, the wild animal, the untenanted steppes, the sky, the ice, the river, but when they met the face of Lhatto, the charm of abiding there was unquestioned. It fed his heart with a satisfaction, and passion leaping to the cup, from whose fulness its own thirst should be quenched, suddenly became realized; importunate, defiant, triumphant, mature and regnant.