However, this in passing, Mr. Link. I will recur to it. Let me resume my story, omitting under the foregoing stipulations any description of the Professor’s enthronement. I am indeed approaching the moment of my own hazardous dash from Krocker Land for the outer world.
Goritz, I said, had disappeared. It seems he had not been seen for many settas—setta is equivalent to about twelve hours. Hopkins and I had been away scouring the countryside, and knew nothing of Goritz’s whereabouts. I have already hinted at his restlessness, moodiness, and his unceasing hunt for gold. Latterly this had become changed into an intense eagerness to revisit the radium country with Oolagah to collect radium.
We had not yet seen the process of transmutation, certain as we were as to its accomplishment and knowledge of the same among the Radiumopolites, a knowledge probably limited to the doctors. Goritz had a theory as to the illimitable power of radium to effect this conversion. He was mistaken. He was dissatisfied with the pieces we had been given—oxidized lumps holding the unchanged metal in their centers—and was always teasing Oogalah to take him again to the radium valley or chasm. Oogalah refused. I think he did not relish Goritz’s company. Now Hopkins and I believed Goritz harbored the intention to gather his belongings at a favorable moment, mostly the gold objects and the radium, and, trusting blindly in his great strength, experience, and resources, to force his way back to the Krocker Land Rim, regain the coast, hunt up the naphtha launch and possibly make some attempt to sail back to Point Barrow. It was sheer madness. We had had few occasions to argue it with him, as he rather avoided us, and his secretiveness and stealthy activity strengthened our suspicions. Hopkins half feared the unfortunate man was losing his mind.
GORITZ’S DEATH
But when we learned of his absence—we were all rather marked men now in Radiumopolis and our goings and comings were minutely noticed—I suspected at once he had tried to get to the radium fields alone and had been lost or destroyed there. Taking Oogalah, now acting under orders, Hopkins and I started out. We reached the peridotite hills which afforded us such welcome relief against the inordinate misery of our heads, that arose from the powerful emanations of the region of the granite ledges. No traces of our missing friend appeared. Oogalah left us, passing through the gateway between the sulphur patches, and made straight for the edge of the cliffside that broke down into the unapproachable and impossible crevice. Beyond the farthest point he dared to penetrate lay the prostrate body of Antoine Goritz, our former leader, dead. Oogalah could see him plainly, but he hesitated to try to reach him, and it would have been impossible for him alone to have carried this youthful giant back. Goritz’s head was towards Oogalah coming from the east. He had fallen headlong, a little crumpled up, as if in convulsions when he fell, and in his hands, still clutched in an irretractable deathgrip, were two lumps of radium.
Sorrowfully Hopkins and I turned back, followed by the mute but wondering Eskimo. We could not possibly have recovered the body then, but we hoped to later. We had already heard that the workers in radium, the Gold Makers, were like Oogalah immunized or less sensitive to its paralyzing influence, and with some of these men we hoped the recovery could be made. We noticed on this sad errand that our own susceptibility had changed, that it deterred us less, just as for months past the irritation of the eyes from the peculiar light of the land had passed away, which before, in the Deer Fels, even in the Pine Tree Gredin, had afflicted us. So, reluctantly we returned, fully assured by Oogalah that with assistance from some of the gold makers the body could be withdrawn. And that, sir, partially led to our second visit to the village of the Gold Makers.
That gold was made by some miraculous power, aided by some peculiar skill in the Radiumopolites, we had convinced ourselves, before we reached that city. Since then the spectacle of the Capitol, the apparent extravagance of the use of gold in decoration and in apparel, and even in the appurtenances of the rooms and homes of the officers of the city, the shockingly hideous Crocodilo-Python effigies on the palace, and that impossible, realistic creation of the Serpent-Throne in which the Professor sat at the time of his triumphant coronation, and Ziliah’s story and the equally credible narrations of Oogalah confirmed specifically our suspicions. But we had never seen it made, nor even found in the industries of the city any trace of its manufacture. That the odd encounter of ours with the sphalerite in the limestone cave of the Deer Fels, when the convocation of little men drifted down from the sky, borne by those incommensurable balloons (and, by the way, we had never since seen a balloon in use or idle) had something to do with gold making, we were positive.
Since our arrival and establishment in the city we had heard of the Gold Makers. It was for them that Oogalah explored the radium fields near the Crater of Everlasting Light. Oogalah told us most of what we learned about them. They were a different people again from either the Eskimo or the Hebrew type in the city of Radiumopolis, and the Valley of Rasselas. They lived in a secluded community many miles away from Radiumopolis, and seldom visited the city, though they occasionally intermarried with the comely Eskimo girls or the larger women of the small race. When we inquired the cause of their isolation Oogalah said the mines were where they were to be found, and the burial grounds.
The last named excited our wonder, but Oogalah was vague on the subject and seemingly uninterested. He did exhibit some enthusiasm over his recollections of the wildness and beauty of the country where the Gold Makers lived and worked, and mentioned a mighty river there. This was the river that issued from the Canon of Promise, the effluent from the Saurian Sea, which, as I have said, again turned westward and through another savage defile entered the Kara Sea. That river I named “Homeward Bound,” for by it I came out.