Attended there as they were bid;
It was their duty and they did.”
Of course in exchange for all these confidences, if they could be called that, Ziliah exacted some confidences in return, and I confess I had to resort somewhat to invention, where I did not have Hopkins’ precise directions in the matter, in meeting her exorbitant curiosity over everything concerning America. This disquisitional curiosity was singular in an unsophisticated maiden of a semi-civilized people who, it might have been supposed, would have contented herself with the indulgence of her affections and felt no interest in her hero’s history.
But so it was. Spruce Hopkins understood her admiration, but was extremely puzzled, certainly at first, as to his own legitimate behavior in the affair.
CHAPTER XI
The Crater of Everlasting Light
The return of the Ophidian Pilgrims, as the Professor termed them, seemed unreasonably slow. The wardens, Ziliah, and the servants of the Capitol were all equally mystified over this unusual slowness. Cold, dry weather supervened, for indeed the stationary sun seemed sensibly to respond to the secular influences of the seasons, as we know them. We had all been too sufficingly engaged in studying our new surroundings, to regret or miss the absent Government, for a larger liberty had been vouchsafed us, though one thing was forbidden. We could not enter the precincts of the forest to the west of the Capitol.
We walked through the city, we explored the Capitol, we increased our acquaintance with the domestic habits of the populace, and the Professor and myself had accumulated notes on all of these things, to be incorporated in the work on Krocker Land which we fervently hoped to write, and which now—Alas!—may never see the light, for—the Professor is today a fixed official fact in that almost mythical land in the Arctic Sea. But I hasten.
Goritz had restrained with difficulty his almost uncontrollable impulse to perpetrate some outrage on the Capitol itself in his determination to accumulate a fortune of gold. We had averted this danger by very emphatic protests. We pointed out to him its danger and the folly of jeopardizing our safety when the means of getting back—I had almost said to the Earth, as if we had actually left it—were now almost null, or were at least desperate. We told him that the plunder in his room, if found—and I began to fear that the depredations on the tree shrines had already been detected and were, in some way, a cause for the delayed return of the pilgrims—would involve us all in grave difficulties. To our entreaties or threats he became deaf or obstinate, and I had followed him, in the sleeping hours, when he expected to achieve his robberies without molestation, only to intercept him chiseling at the gold plates that encrusted the Capitol.
In the meanwhile the Professor, whose popularity increased with everyone, had become attracted to a young Eskimo whose first astonishment over the Professor’s poll of red hair had been succeeded by a sort of personal adoration. He followed the Professor with an attachment and fascination that might have proved irksome. I made some inquiries of my informant, the acquiescent Ziliah, about him, and learned from her that he was a guide and the gatherer of radium. He alone apparently was able to penetrate the strange and ghastly country where the radium masses were collected, in that zone of the Unreal where lay the CRATER OF EVERLASTING LIGHT. His peculiar ability arose from his immunity to the influence of the radium itself, which invariably prostrated those who touched it, while the region itself forbade approach, by reason of those indeterminable emanations which destroyed the adventurers who entered it. For some reason, or, in some way, Oogalah Ikimya, the young Eskimo, enjoyed a unique invulnerability, and on his efforts Radiumopolis depended for its supply of radium. This distinction had given him a particular arrogance. He alone now dared the inexplicable dangers, or even knew the devious route that threaded the labyrinths leading to this unutterable place.