In all instances the crop of gold is small, and its accumulation slow, so that the rich displays at Radiumopolis must have represented the result of many years of this peculiar labor. Javan told me that the yield of gold was steadily diminishing because of the difficulty of obtaining radium, and the almost exhausted condition of the lead and zinc sulphide mines. Then he told me of a possible new replenishment of the latter from deposits far beyond the pine tree forest to the east. The Professor, Hopkins, and myself exchanged an astute smile of understanding as did also Goritz, though less intelligibly. We recalled the flying trip of the doctors, and the radium-lighted cave in the Deer Fels. The mines of sulphide in the limestone hills of the Gold Makers’ country are of the types familiar to the miners of the same mineral in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa.
With what wonder stricken faces the Professor, Hopkins, Goritz and I gazed upon the flattened piles of sulphide ore and radium, after the long-buried mixture was taken out of the ground in whose seclusion the miraculous effect had indisputably been produced. The lead-gray glint of the ore made more conspicuous the scattered dust of gold amongst it, with particles cohering to half converted lumps of galena. And our wonder transcended words when we were led into an adjoining room where the gold detritus was hammered into sizeable bits, and these again compacted into sticks or nodules, while on the shelves surrounding this apartment, the collected masses lay in bewildering confusion. Aladdin’s Lamp seemed almost less insupportably incredible.
It was on the occasion of the enforced second—but much desired—visit, when we besought the services of the Samoyedes to recover the body of our lost friend, that I again studied, more closely, the chances of the river liberating me from the increasingly unendurable imprisonment. A few of the hardened Samoyedes were brought back with us, after this errand of mercy, to Radiumopolis, and with Oogalah they recovered the body of Goritz. I think the Council would have been pleased to have instituted a special Crocodilo-Python festival, and delivered the poor fellow’s body to the horrible denizens of the neighboring swamps, but King Bjornsen forbade that sternly, and it caused some unpleasantness. It was another indication to me of the inevitable “blow-up,” as Hopkins called it, of our amicable relations with these Radiumopolites, and the increasing urgency of my effecting my escape, to bring to my friends the means of their possible extrication. Under the pretence of returning Goritz to the sky, from which (with us) he had come, we secretly buried him in the valley, and there he lies today.
It was something of a contre-temp to have Goritz die at all. It gave a rather second-hand and made-up look to our claims to have come from the heavens, and to the inquiring minds of our enemies supplied undesirable data for starting grave doubts as to our authenticity—still another danger lurking in our path, or, as Hopkins gloomily put it, “another nail in our coffins.”
Our friend was King indeed, but the enthusiasm that had carried him to that eminence lacked permanence. It could not be rooted in racial consanguinity, it was probably constantly decried by the little doctors, and the Professor, to quote the epigrammatic Hopkins, was a “poor mixer.” That last word unveiled a multitude of perils.
CHAPTER XV
My Escape
You must have observed, sir, that in my narrative I have from time to time exhibited our variant and varying frames or states of mind toward the strange conditions we were approaching, and the still stranger ones we actually entered. You have been told that some of us dreaded to go on—myself for instance—that later, diverted or enthralled by the strangeness of it all, we wanted to go faster, that from shrinkingly divining some disaster we were lulled into the anticipation of great pleasure, and that when our actual danger was reached and surmounted it might seem we should almost have resigned ourselves to stay; resigned ourselves to that serenity of mind depicted by Doctor Johnson, from whose work the Professor derived the name he had given to the central vale of Krocker Land, where, “such was the appearance of security and delight which their retirement afforded, that they to whom it was new always desired that it might be perpetual.”
But it surely does not require much penetration of feeling, to say the least, or sympathy of mind, to see that our position would very soon become unendurable, from the same general repugnance in all of us and from particular motives in each. To begin with, we soon felt stifled in this recondite and obsolete and trivial civilization; the very circular enclosure which shut it in became a prison, and after all, if we were of the same zoological stirps, as these people, we had differentiated too much for pleasurable association. At no time have I felt so keenly that the breath of the modern man’s life must be the breath of the world where it moves the fastest and its breath is quickest.