But even to this dogged and halting march there was a limit. Oogalah himself had enough rectitude of purpose to realize that, and perhaps too he felt vainglorious of his superiority. He indicated almost sternly a final towering hill, a continuation of the broken cordillera we had been following, which should be the terminus of our exploration. We—at least Hopkins and myself—would not have cared to overpass it. We were deadly faint and exhausted when we reached it, and but for the magnanimous help of the Eskimo, who carried our packs, I think we would have swooned and fallen by the way. The Professor seemed the least susceptible to the mysterious influence, and this amusingly vexed and confounded Hopkins. Brute willpower and his insatiable fever of desire to obtain the transmuting substance which raised before him the vision of boundless wealth, kept Goritz on his feet. With the Professor it was the energizing power of scientific curiosity. The paralyzing effect of suffocation was really noticeable.
Well, after a few minutes’ rest, with Goritz impatient and the Professor aflame with wonder, we started up a portentously narrow hill, and a high one too. Oogalah pointed out its pinnacle as our destination, and then turned westward into that dizzying and unearthly country wherein lay the trough of radium. Around us fell the radiance of its wonderful emission, but we found that the climbing path—it had been worn well into the rock by previous pilgrims—clung to the eastward scarp of the hill, and was therefore actually in shadow—a welcome relief. Perhaps five hours were consumed in this toilsome ascent, but when we reached the last winding trail, and had clambered to a small shelf immediately under the ragged apex, we looked over a scene of unparalleled terribleness.
The pen of Dante or the pencil of Dore alone could have done justice to its weird and frightful desolation, not entirely expressed in lifelessness, but in the awful grimace in it of tortured and disfigured matter. The blacks, purples and reds, smeared over it wrote in it a sort of agony of disgrace and unseemliness and pain. I wonder if the landscapes of the Moon resemble it.
For a long way in the foreground, where we saw with astonishment the running figure of Oogalah, stretched a broken platform of white quartzite, and through this sprang the strangest confusion of lines, skeins, dashes and drippings of black, purple, brown, and traceable here and there, as of the tracks of a bleeding animal or man, chained drops of red. It was not beautiful certainly, it had no ornamental or decorative features; it was, rather, scoriaceous and blasting.
Beyond this rugose platform rose two mounds, one ashen and white—the Professor said it was a bleached, corroded and kaolinized granite—the other a purplish, livid mass streaked with threads or blotches of yellow (sulphur, the Professor thought), and these hills ran north and south, becoming reduced to sprawling and unwholesome heaps of slaggy consistency which ever and anon encroached on the quartzite zone and even encumbered it, as if tossed upon it in drifts of scattered nodules.
Through the gateway, between the two first mounds, we saw even now the form of Oogalah passing, but he was no longer erect. He was crawling on hands and knees, and over his head hung a towel. Hopkins and myself shuddered for him. His venturesome undertaking seemed to us simply suicide. He intended to bring us each a mass of the mineral—a small piece. When he gathered this miracle-working substance for Radiumopolis, we were told, he first camped behind one of the peridotite hills, then issued upon his dangerous mission, collected what he could, returned to his camp, and for weeks kept at it until his supply was sufficient. The store made, he removed it in the same laborious way, stage by stage, until he came to the safer country, where he was met by numerous assistants who transported the radium homeward.
But we could see from our elevation beyond these dead heaps, beyond, into the vale of Acheron, as it were,
Quam super haud ullae poterant impune volantes
Tendere iter pennis;
a further dead valley declining into the deeper chasm from which sprang the auroral light. This chasm was evidently indefinitely prolonged northward; from it rose the coronation or rays which seemed converged upon a marvelous blazing precipice on the further boundary of this irregular, narrow, longitudinal canon. Into the canon itself it was impossible to look. It was enclosed in the upper valley which we could see, and which presented a spectacle of stony desolation. Its sides were evidently precipitous on the east, and pretty generally hidden from us, but on the west it presented to us a long, receding slope of rock palely illuminated beneath the light streaming in a broad and thick flood over it. These rock exposures were curiously discolored, and also curiously spotted with glow-spots, from included radium perhaps.