And the Nimbus—a paltry reproduction of the incalculable vaporous discharges that encircle at every other point this hidden paradise. The chasm here was indeed deep, but imperfectly continuous, and huge horsebacks of stone piled within it formed practicable though most broken and uneven bridges across it. The steam rising from the heated rocks below was not visibly referable to any water supply, as on the east, where the plunging rivers so abundantly furnished the means of raising this colossal stage curtain, and there was absent from here that tumultuous rolling ocean of clouds in the sky. Probably underground courses supplied the water, for, after we had surmounted one of the least precipitous and angular of the bridges and had gotten into the rising territory beyond, we encountered a puzzling intricacy of profound cracks or fissures, and we could not only hear but could see the patchy lustres of running water in them.
From this point our guide turned abruptly northward, taking us through a terrible desolation of rocks, with the high snow-clad peaks of the Krocker Land Rim gloriously looming skyward on the left. I shall not forget that strange transit. It was hard work. We carried our own supplies, the water and a few instruments, and their weight was almost insupportably increased by the discomforts of the harsh, inhospitable land we traveled through, and, by some dizzying influence which began to strain our heads with headaches, to parch our throats, and to produce a most uncomfortable and absurd illusion of treading on air cushions. This last hallucination made us unsteady, and after a while it pestered us so much that we were compelled to stop at short intervals to rest.
Oogalah kept on well ahead, looking back at us every few minutes and distrustfully shaking his head, with incessant gestures for increased speed. We were not over anxious to hurry. The region was extraordinary and its geologic features, as connected with this unparalleled deposit, or vein, or lode, or whatever it was, of radium, were certainly worth noting. And then our heads! Hopkins diverted us by his misery.
“I’d like to look inside of my cranium just now. I couldn’t begin to tell how it feels; something, I should say, like what gunpowder men call deflagration is taking place there, popguns going off every few minutes, with a hurdy-gurdy accompaniment in my ears and a bad taste in my mouth.
“The Professor really ought to be very careful and avoid any extra exertion. In a bean as full as his, there probably isn’t much room for expansion, and I guess the right word for describing our condition is expansion—almost unlimited. My head may seem no bigger than usual, but I should say it had already grown large enough for distribution to a dozen headless gentlemen, enough to give each of them a head piece of ordinary dimensions. Whew—but this is fierce.”
The poor fellow had clapped both hands to his head as if to actually hold it together. And with all of us the inscrutable sensations were becoming insufferable. Goritz insisted on keeping on but we overruled that. It was just possible that our resting a while might accustom us to the strange influence of atmosphere, and enable us to proceed without this torturing plague of heat and noise and dilation in our poor heads. We sat down. Oogalah quickly discovered our reluctance, and was back with us in a trice, gesticulating and vociferating as well, absolutely unaffected, which brought to the suffering Yankee’s face the most comical expression of disgust and surprise.
“I say, Erickson, this has me guessing. What do you suppose that fellow’s made of? Rubber? Cork? Do you know I believe he’d put electrocution on the fritz. You’d be compelled to pulverize him if you ever expected to drive the life out of his body. One hundred yards more of this and I’ll either join the choir invisible ipse motu, as they say in the books, or just get one of you to pass me over with a wallop on the cocoa, or a fine slit along the carotid. I believe I could go so far as to commit hari-kari, and not know it. It can’t be possible that you fellows don’t notice it.”
“Notice it!” I answered. “My head feels like a balloon. I almost wonder I don’t float off with it. We can’t last this way. It would be a sorry ending to this famous exploit, if we were all to burst like soap bubbles.”
Oogalah by means of elaborate pantomime to the Professor, and a few intelligible words to Goritz acquainted us with his assurance that a hill about one hundred yards away would bring us relief. We struggled to it, sick and staggering. To our amazement upon ascending it a little way relief came, and our tormented heads sensibly shrank—so it felt—to something like their usual volume. Then we noticed, guided by the Professor’s acumen in such matters, that while the region was unmistakably an igneous complex, the rocks we had passed over were entirely granitic, and the elevation on which we now stood was a basic olivine-peridotite, dense and black, and in some way exempt from the radiumistic occlusions which perhaps saturated the granitic batholith around it. I will not stop to discuss this, sir, but later we indeed established the fact that the enormous outflow of granite lava had brought to the surface innumerable radium bodies, distributed through it in molecular aggregates of considerable size, and that the unseen but voluminous discharge of the emanation so affected us, while the gabbro dikes, containing none, afforded an impermeable flooring for our passage.
Then, too, we were now approaching the splendid prism of light that shot upward, yet obliquely, in a vast pulsating diffusion of a delicate radiance that grew, as we advanced, more and more intolerable. Our progress consisted now in crossing, as quickly as our stumbling movements would allow, the granitic intervals that separated the ranges of low basic hills. On these latter we regained our strength and composure, and prepared for the succeeding dashes that carried us over the perilous interludes. It was amazing to watch the insouciance and activity of our guide. He did not even protect his eyes. It seemed as if some physiological peculiarity rendered him immune to the terrifying disorders that signalized to us, instantly, the presence of these puissant particles of radium, or else he had become so from his long continued exposures, a theory quite incomprehensible to us.