Unluckily there was the most helpless ignorance of boat making to contend with, and the additional provocation to despair that there were no tools to make them with. This historic fisherman had tried to do the trick with a raft. I would take a raft too. What else? The Samoyedes built them well and strongly, and under my uncontrolled supervision a narrow raft made of two tiers of logs, crossed in position and bound together with the strongest ropes, was prepared. On this a woven hamper was firmly fastened, and in that were placed my provisions (tortillas, and dried meat) and extra clothing, and rugs, and a sleeping bag of sheepskin. A pack strapped to my back carried Goritz’s gold souvenirs, some radium masses, a compass, chronometer, matches and a selection of fishing hooks and lines. A gun was almost riveted to my side, so immobile did it seem. But the tour de force of foresight was involved in the insertion of two short posts (five feet high) at the stern, though distant from the raft’s edge by about three feet, and distant from each other by three feet. To each of these posts, at the level of my shoulders, was reamed a hole for two looped leathern thongs, so adjusted that standing between the posts I could insert my arms in the loops, clasp my hands across my breast, and secure a chancery that nothing short of dislocation of the raft itself could break, or the avulsion of my own arms from their sockets, while in an instant I could free myself.
The Samoyedes rigged up a rude steering tiller which of course was indispensable. It consisted of a girdle suspended from a cross piece, binding the two abovementioned posts, through which a stick paddle was swung. It was decidedly awkward, as it displaced me from my position of safety between the posts, and therefore at critical moments might prove quite worthless, if not a positive danger. Here I must count on my own agility and strength. Besides this tiller half a dozen poles and as many oars were tied to the posts projecting above them like short masts. These might prove very serviceable. But there was also a last Atlantean touch. Two of the three foot balloons were firmly tied to the crosspiece of the upright posts. It was the Professor’s suggestion, and I am positive that at a critical twist it saved matters.
That was about all, except that some further records were given me by Bjornsen and they were consigned to the great woven hamper. Well, some learned societies will be saved head splitting disputes, and no less head dizzying theories, the former perhaps not altogether harmless. That hamper never came through.
By the beginning of July I was ready for the plunge. The day was auspicious, clear but torrid, with the stationary sun wrapped in luminous clouds, and its overwhelming rival coursing a higher altitude in unchecked splendor. The great river assumed an enticing placidity; its tranquil current had even lost the chained bubbles floating from the shattering cascades that freed it from the Canon of Promise. And Radiumopolis had bodily transferred itself to the scene; the banks, the hills, the roofs of a few abandoned sheds were closely crowded, by a wonderfully variegated multitude, intensely interested, subdued into a faintly murmurous throng by the excitement of admiration. I was something more than a hero that day. Obeying the summons of the spirit of my former companion, I was to rejoin him along that trackless pathway of the great river, whose banks touched heaven, in whose inaccessible depths dwelt all the demons of death and terror.
There was a reservation of space, at the point where my raft swung uneasily, for the King, the Council, Hopkins and Ziliah, and the magistrates of the city, and only a Hogarth could have done justice to that commixture of physiognomies, the odd and contrasted figures, interspersed with the taller men and women, all wearing their regalia, and the massed battalions beyond them in holiday array. Some daring aeronauts circled in the air above me. Flowers did not figure in the festivals nor in the predilections of the Radiumopolites, though blue and yellow blossoms lit their landscapes with a smile of floral prettiness that was very bewitching, and their own blue and yellow tunics, or coats, indicated some sympathy with these colors. On this occasion I was presented with some flat pincushion-like mats made up of these flowers by some blushing girls, and from the laughter—gentle and decorous—that this evoked, I believed they evinced a warmer sentiment than regret. Of course my mission, as publicly declared, precluded my probable return, or, at least, it meant my long absence. By the Council doubtless, certainly by a few undisguised enemies in it, it was hoped that it meant my wholesale and irremediable destruction.
As I shook hands with all I came at last to the Professor (King Bjornsen) and Hopkins. Our hands closed tightly and we dared not look each other in the face. I heard Hopkins whisper, “Heaven help you,” and if prayer reaches the throne of Grace when it is consecrated by the heart’s holiest hope, that prayer, I know, ascended to its place. As the Professor embraced me, he loosened the belt of lead I had worn and replaced it with a heavy gold girdle whose big buckle bore the carven Serpent. That, Mr. Link, I have never shown to anyone. Diaz, Huerta nor Angelica have ever seen it. It will amaze you. The Professor removed it from his own waist. There was a half hushed remonstrance. But the King’s gift was interpreted favorably, and as I received it a shout went up, and even the Council, for prudent reasons possibly, indulged in a titter of endorsement. My raft was pushed by willing hands into the stream. Its prow or front yielded to the gentle urgency of the current, and turned. I stood upon the hamper, and waved my hat—not the beehive contraption but a sheepskin fez—and again the Radiumopolites, now strangely stirred by this solemn gliding departure of a single man into the unknown, broke spontaneously into one of their sing-song, not quite unmusical, and not exactly musical, chants, which rising in pitch until it swelled to me over the water, almost seemed, I drearily thought, like a dirge. Its crooning wail still filled my ears when all details of the multitude were lost, and the shadow of the great gateway of rock, into which the river was relentlessly carrying me fell across the glassy wave that had now become my path to liberty.
There was now nothing to be thought of but self-preservation amid unknown and unsuspected dangers. I seized some bread—tortilla—a hunk of the dried, not unpalatable meat, and drank some wine. This interjected meal raised my spirits. A momentary sang-froid replaced my nervousness, and indeed, so great was my exultation at the thought of regaining the vanished world, of liberation from an unendurable stagnation and the bald, horrible misery of a silly paganism, that I became almost cheerful. That mood did not last long. Already I had passed the portal of the deep canon. The red sandstone walls rose in sheer precipices above me, and were rising visibly higher beyond. A few shrunken pine trees clung here and there to shelves of rock, while through some upward openings, and leading into transverse valleys, I caught glimpses of the dark green motionless tops of the serried trees that here marked the amphitheater of the Pine Tree Gredin.
The grimness of the swiftly developing descent almost appalled me now. I was on the back of a resistless flood not yet maddened into a fury of impetuous violence by opposition, nor quickened into the onset of a galloping torrent by sharper changes in its gradient, but doubtless bringing me and my smoothly drifting raft into just such wild vicissitudes. Could either one or the other survive them? The clumsy boat beneath my feet was a willing servant. It responded to the strokes of the tiller, and my dismal forebodings were momentarily forgotten in the amusement it gave me to swing the raft from side to side of the still broad waterway. As the light became dimmer, and a half crepuscular dusk crept into the deepening fissure over whose topmost edges the sky hung like an illuminated ribbon, I felt the grip of a solemn dread, the precurrent rigor of that deadly rigor animae which palsies the heart.
Still on and on, in a course that scarcely deviated from a straight line, and thus safely conducted us (to me my little barge shared, as a sentient thing, our common danger, and it alleviated my solitude to fancifully, as children do, personify it, talk to it, praise it) toward that distant goal, the ice-packed shore of Krocker Land. The bed of the stream lay in a rectilinear joint and the weathering on either side had not greatly widened the aperture above. The picture changed only in detail. The frowning sides, walls scarcely relieved by any vegetation or, which, if there, was too far above me for my eyes to detect, offered no distinction in color. Nature had not here spread her palette of blending hues, those that over the silent expanses of the Grand Canon of the Colorado transfer the colors of sunset to the immutable stone. It was the utter sternness, the harsh, immense uniformity of the still increasing precipices that crushed the soul. I seemed like an atom in the void, a plaything of nature; for a moment, and for a moment only, seen in this outraged solitude, to become then a part too of the lifeless panorama.
The cliffs rose now a thousand feet or more, and sensibly receded, the dislodged blocks from their summits building an awful fringe of titanic boulders, angular monoliths, at the water’s edge. Beyond me stretched the unvarying avenue, the shooting river seeming far away, motionless and fixed like a congealed mass, though every particle of it was flying onward with fresh acceleration. There could be no doubt of that. Points observed on the shores were more and more rapidly passed. This hastening pace became to me a portent of disaster. The angry river, placable at first, luring its audacious victim onward, now in sullen mastery, with a rising temper, as if impatient over its own leniency threatened to hurl the petty intruder, the graceless little egotist, into eternity. It would have done with him, washing his lifeless corse on its sullied waters to the depthless ocean, a memento and a warning, if so paltry an object could be either. Thus I seemed to divine the storm of its gathering wrath.