The recovery had been so unexpected that I felt gay as a child, and as the French say, everything about me wore for a little while couleur de rose. The stream itself, ample and full, sprawled out in a wider bed; before me a break in the canon walls, on one side, indicated some tributary valley and affluent and—I was rummaging my pack—here was a bottle of undiluted, unwatered wine! I almost emptied it. A tortilla and some strips of dried meat completed my banquet. I was myself again. The poles and paddles lashed to the posts were still there, and one of the former was soon in my hands, for the guidance of the boat. The best I could do now would be to keep her off the shores, turn and wriggle as she might in the middle stream.
My composure now returned, and permitted me to consider my predicament more calmly. Where was I? A few minutes after I asked myself this question, the lateral valley opened to view. It was a rough, rocky streambed in which now a probably much shrunken tributary to the river—Homeward Bound—on which I was, made its way from a bare, rugged upland. But here I caught a glimpse of the sluggishly ascending vapors and clouds from the Perpetual Nimbus. I could not be mistaken. The wall of wavering whiteness seemed to stretch southward. The confirmation of the Professor’s hypothesis was complete. The Valley of Rasselas was an enclosed pit, on all sides of which the terraced zones we had traversed on the east, would certainly be found. Here on the west less developed, compressed and narrower, they still existed. Radiumopolis at least was excentrically placed in the valley, but the valley itself was excentric also. Then I would soon be crossing the Rim, and apprehensions of new difficulties swarmed in my mind. The canon I was in cut across the great circular fissure which surrounded Rasselas, and the position of the whirlpool perhaps marked the crossing. Could it be possible? It was an extraordinary geological situation I was sure, but its explanation could wait. What terrors of rapids, falls, or cataracts, or more whirlpools lay before me? I looked ahead. The light from the stationary sun had gone, but the friendly luminary that now more than replaced it, was burning in the sky, and it showed my future course.
To my delight, on either side the canon walls declined; indeed, it seemed that far off they became simply high banks and nowhere were there perceptible disturbances in the stream itself. The great volume poured its almost unruffled torrent over a very ancient bed, and the whole aspect of the river assumed a peculiar sedateness, as it were, compared with the rushing, headlong haste it had shown above the whirlpool. And there! On either side rose the snow crowned pinnacles of the Rim! The encircling mountain fence of Krocker Land was opened here by a valley, and in that valley, deeply entrenched, Homeward Bound was placed. And now a new and beautiful feature developed. Brooks or streams, fed perhaps by melting snows or ice, leaped into my river from the still high cliffs. I could count a dozen or so, the splash of the falling water breaking the surface of the river into waves, and the noise of their motion and impact filling the canon with a half musical roar. It was a fascinating picture.
The river turned, not abruptly, but swinging southward in a long arm or curve, and then a vista developed that, for an instant, filled me with fresh alarm. On the left side the cliffs fell away, and their place was taken by the face, it looked so, of a small glacier. I was at sea level perhaps. The wall rose somewhat on the right, and intermittent threads of water still seamed their sides with lines of light and whiteness, but to the left there appeared the wide mouth of a glacial coulisse, and from the ice mass in it, little bergs floated in the now much retarded and widened river. The bergs scared me. A white or yellowish turbidity spread from the glacier, the contribution of rock-meal brought by the river that issued from beneath it.
It was quite possible to guide my raft by the paddle I had, and, though the Homeward Bound maintained considerable current still, it had but little directional force. In half an hour I was opposite the glacier, and amongst its bergs. I gazed eagerly seaward, trusting I might catch some glimpse of the coast that must be near at hand. But the view closed again, there seemed to be a contraction of the river, the walls rose on both sides, and now the river’s flow was but little more than the propulsion caused by its residual momentum.
The ice serpent wound upward into the snow recesses of the mountains. Opposite to me its riven front glowed with beryl and sapphire veins; the white calves lazily caught the motion of the stream, and almost, it seemed to me, resented my intrusion, so suddenly did they gather about me, either in derision or in menace. I did indeed feel powerless among them. Ice cakes flecked the stream. I was in a treacherous company. Anxiously I steered my craft through them, but in the mist that sprang from their sides, I would sometimes fail to see them and an inauspicious bump would send me sprawling. I felt that the moment of release was approaching. Soon the pale, haunted, Arctic Ocean would hold me. I felt its immensity already, and now that the excitement of the scramble for liberty, this arrowy voyage down the strange and majestic chasm of a great new river of the earth, was behind me, my heart quailed before the UNKNOWN, that confronted me with what—Deliverance or Death?
The mountains sloped away on either hand, or were, in fact, already behind me, for I was now floating with a diminished current that aided my avoidance of the torpidly drifting bergs. I was in a canal, literally cut through an ancient gigantic moraine, the vast scourings of an ancient ice sheet. It was not long delayed—my emergence on the ice-bound shore of western Krocker Land. The banks declined and slowly disappeared, yielding now to the broad fringe of a coastal plain where the river, encountering a varying resistance, had succumbed to the vagaries of mere idleness, and swung in broad loops to the sea. Yes—there it was—to quote the graphic words of Nansen—“that strange Arctic hush, and misty light, over everything,—that grayish white light caused by the reflection from the ice being cast high into the air against masses of vapor, the dark land offering a wonderful contrast.”
ERICKSON’S ESCAPE
And now the river widened, its banks receded and dwindled. To the north the high Rim advanced upon the sea, and black promontories rose in august severity in the glare of day, desolate and grim, their skirts fringed with the white surf of inrolling waves. Beyond them open water and then ice floes, endless prospect! To the south the Rim declined abruptly into a wide detrital platform of sand and clay banks, and huge boulders, and, here and there, like white ships, the icebergs that had stranded. I was in the Kara Sea. Beyond that dread, compassionless horizon lay Siberia—but could I reach it? The awful chill of a realization of my abject helplessness for the first time overwhelmed me. I was alone in the Arctic Ocean, a mere atom before the uncontrollable forces that a whim of the weather might suddenly summon forth on their wild errands of destruction; or else a waif cast on a desert shore to be left with pitiless irony, in the calm scorn of merciless Nature, to perish.