I was lost in such reflexions when an exclamation from the Eskimo—sounding like ibbley—and a hand clapped on my shoulder straightened me into attention. The pool of clouds over the valley whose inconstant movement alternately veiled and revealed the light beyond them, had parted, as though a sudden wind had pierced it and driven its parts in rapid and eccentric flight to all sides, as a stone dropped in a pond sends the waves shoreward, and, past the rift, we saw through the rising vapors, beyond the rigid, fan shaped prism yet involved in it, an incandescent surface like a mammoth shield, a shield covering acres of space, and over it again, and yet perhaps miles and miles further away, the solemn grandeur of an ice capped lofty mountain.
It was a glimpse only; an instant later the refluent clouds had flung themselves together again, in the ceaseless to and fro, and, as I thought, rotary motion, that conveyed such a changeable expression to that peaceful hidden vale.
That glimpse, Mr. Link, is the memory of a lifetime, it was a picture so inwrought with the occasion and my own feelings as to remain with me a deathless vision.
“I suppose this extraordinary pseudo-sun,” said the Professor after some moments’ silence “is the most astounding thing we have seen. It is certainly unaccountable. Its power to illuminate, warm and enliven this little continent within the circle of the Perpetual Nimbus surpasses comprehension. On what theory of physics—for of course it is not an extra-terrestrial phenomenon—can it be accounted for?”
“How about this Radium. There’s light and heat in that isn’t there?” asked Hopkins.
“Of course, as we know it in its bromide salt. But the radium couldn’t be a fixed object in the sky, and, if on the earth, what fixes its rays or converges them on one spot, and what is the radiant material of that spot itself?”
“I have been thinking,” said Goritz, standing up, while our Eskimo escort gathered around us, and listened with a gravity that half persuaded me they understood us, “I have been thinking that there is a vortex of dust up there in that nebulous mass, that heat and light reach it from some terrestrial source and are again reflected earthward. Would that meet the problem?”
“Perhaps,” assented the Professor, and even as he spoke the light everywhere about us diminished, so that the valley became hidden in a most dismal half light, and then that feeble illumination vanished, and we were literally plunged in darkness. Waning of the light, amounting sometimes almost to extinction, and lasting for some hours, had been constantly observed by us on our journey from the coast, but nothing so complete as this. We were pretty well astonished, and remained silent, expecting some novel demonstration, for now we had become so convinced of our immersion in a sea of Sinbad-like adventure, that we were not only prepared but almost impatient for still newer and newer and stranger happenings.
The Eskimos were as silent as ourselves, but when in perhaps half an hour the light revealed itself again in the sky, as spluttering radiations, somewhat like the splattering of sparks about a slowly reconstructed arc light, and then became continuous, and then gradually swelled to its original intensity, and the valley once more glowed under our eyes, they began singing. It seemed to be some hymn or religious chant and we connected it at once with superstitious feeling over the removal and renewal of the light.
It was a wearisome iterative sing-song drone, rising and falling in pitch, and sometimes deriving a rhythmical accent from the clapping of their hands. The voices were not unmusical, and there was enough vocality in the words to even elicit an approach to charm. When later we heard this same song sung by thousands, its reinforced effectiveness produced a positive spell.