THE VALLEY OF RASSELAS
That was a marvelous moment, Mr. Link. We were dumb with admiration, and we stood still, rooted to the spot, immobile in a transport of amazement. Nothing was said until the Professor half audibly murmured, “The Valley of Rasselas,” and the captain of our guard pointing to the glorious picture muttered to himself. Familiar as they were with the scene these unemotional men appreciated our astonishment, and allowed us to measure with our eyes the grand prospect. There was a wayside house near at hand, an adobe structure of red and yellow; beyond it the road dipped, suddenly passing through a hewn gateway in the cliffside which we had reached and which, with varying heights and undulating limits, enclosed like a mammoth parapet the scene of peace and loveliness before us.
To this house we repaired. It was evidently located there as a proscenium box for the contemplation of the ravishing picture. On its porch, most fitly placed, we sat on low benches and attempted to record the details of the view, by our eyes hardly recorded before, so lost had they been in the enveloping, slumbering beauty. The cordiality of our hosts was perfect; we munched spiced tortillas and drank from absurd spherical mugs a pleasant, ruby colored wine, a sort of Tokay. And this, sir, is what we saw.
It was a flat land over which wandered three separate rivers, fed by the spouting falls that rushed over the cliffside from many points, the gathered waters of all that tracery of streams in the pine forest. Between these rivers spread vast meadows or fields, thickly patched by motionless—so they seemed—herds of sheep and goats. Braiding lines or hedges of trees and shrubs parceled the green plains into checkers and, as the eye passed outward, these hedges, massing themselves in perspective, banked the horizon with a continuous wood. And there was a floating colorfulness in the picture besides, a roseate-blueness, that we later discovered came from an abundant wild flower like our iris which nestled over acres of land in the wetter spots. And far, far away with a spectral splendor rose into heaven shafts, or one monstrous shaft, of light. It glowed and pulsated, changing from an opalescent pearliness to the hardened glint of steel, anon streaked with bluish ribbons like a spectrum. Nothing could be more wonderful.
Playing against it rose what seemed a volley from steaming cauldrons, folded, unfolded, and drifting. Following this magnificent radiation into the sky it was lost in a wide halo or pond or lake of strangely scintillating light; an overspread roof of light it seemed, forming that stationary sun, that from end to end, from side to side of this polar bowl lit its manifold circumferential areas. Thither our fascinated eyes rose, and then it became manifest that the overflowing permeating glory of this scene resided in the play of this light, apparently forever veiled by nets and skeins and shifting aureoles of clouds, that somehow formed a floor beneath it, so that its emergent rays, as in our sunsets or sun risings, shot outward, coronal-like, and as they encountered the perpetual play of clouds and vapors as perpetually painted them in colors. A superb and marvelous meteorology, for this Valley of Rasselas thus remained, for long periods perhaps, bathed in the beauty of a royal sunrise or a royal sunset.
This screening from the downpour of the light of the stationary sun was certainly a beneficent provision, for while there might elapse periods when its unchecked blaze smote the valley, the harsh ordeal of enduring it was constantly intermitted. It was clear too that the rainfall was excessive, both here and in the pine forest we had traversed; that this navel of the world was a watery kingdom.
Even as we gazed the pageant of the sky mysteriously changed, and with its changes the complexion of the picture earthward underwent delicate transmutations too. From gay to sombre, from a wide refulgence to a twilight grayness, from a flecked radiance to the transient darkness of clotted clouds, from a burning splendor of illumination, by which things lost their definition, and the dazzling excess of light blotted out details, to half light, whereby a clearness of outlines developed, allowing us to measure the distance, and to pick out house and tree, bush, stream and rolling mead. We were enraptured by reason of this protean aspect, and watched and, still lingering, gazed, unsatisfied.
The Eskimo men understood our delight and it brought on their rather apathetic faces a smiling approval. They chattered and gesticulated and surrendered themselves to a renewed appreciation of this age-old cradle, in which they had grown and lived, strangely associated with the older race, perhaps of some Semitic stock, strangely altered from their rude forebears and separated more strangely still with their associates from the thronging world of men outside of this entrancing cell of earth, and yet bearing the impress of traditions which that outer world had created. How could it be explained? Here was the new and crowning marvel of the centuries—Krocker Land!
A floating tree trunk had indicated to Columbus the vast unknown of the western continent and the scattered prognostications of geographers had led his scientific thought steadily forward to its prediction and—it was found. A mountain’s darkness brushing the horizon had crossed his vision as Admiral Peary looked westward through his glass, and betokened yet untrod tracts of earth; the vagaries of the tides submitted to scientific computation had proven to Harris their positive existence, and now to us, four froward, unknown men, it was vouchsafed to establish in facts these symptomatic guesses.
But our discovery was enriched by unsuspected marvels; this immense polar depression, like a dent in the crust of the earth, the peculiar succession of dropping zones, their physiographic contrasts, the stupendous circular—so we supposed—rift which framed them, its igneous depths, that incessant up-pouring of steam devising a curtain of cloud around this screened continent, the perpetual chain of changes in the precipitation of the condensed vapors renewed again by evaporation, the survival of saurian life, the meteorological perplexities introduced, the bewildering fact of an ethnic evolution in these small people, their peculiar association with a dependent Eskimo race, the suggestion of Adamic traces, the apparent control over advanced chemical agencies, this indigenous tree and serpent worship hinting at ancestral influences lost in the shadows of the very beginning, and then, more incredible than the wildest dreams of fiction, this impossible stationary sun, sustaining this little segregated world, feeding it with light and heat, an unimaginable oasis in the incalculable desert of Arctic snows and ice. WHAT WAS IT? Upon what miracle of matter were we advancing?