I hastened up the beautiful Arctic glen, and the still unsuspecting animals moved towards me. Now they saw me, and the bulls ranged themselves in defence, behind them the still grazing cows, startled only for a moment into attention. There was no inclination to escape. Only as I fired and the foremost bull staggered sideways and then dropped headlong at my second shot, did the herd shuffle to one side and then scamper away. Before I had reached the fallen leader their shaggy heads had disappeared over a fold of ground that shut in an adjoining valley.
I cut some steaks and loaded myself with the juicy red masses of flesh. Although Greely and Peary had failed to smoke-dry meat, perhaps I might succeed. I returned to the raft. It had become a base of operations. Here I cooked my steak and with the tasteless tortillas they made a feast. But the momentary thought of jerking the meat was hopeless. It would take too long and then it might prove futile. If Coogan was looking for me, I must be looking for him. One more long sleep and then I must “be going.” I felt sad, and the glorious dying day bathing the horizon in carmine and gold, to be shifted a little further on, with scarcely a change of color, into sunrise, from its very exorbitant splendor oppressed me. I slept, but I tossed with forbidding dreams. I WAS NOT WELL.
The next day I started down the coast, but I revisited the ovibos, tore more meat from the carcass, and with my pack, a sleeping bag, the rug, my gun, and a bundle of splinters of wood I began my journey. The heaped up bundles on my back bent me, and I did not expect to make a record in walking. I was carrying my household on my back. But the favoring character of the shore cheered me, and it almost seemed that the peaks, barricades and buttresses of the mountains receded. I was on an extensive morainal or alluvial plain, furrowed by small valleys and inconspicuous ridges, where it rose to the amphitheatrical wall of the Krocker Land Rim. If it would last!
The diary of my daily progress for the next few days need not be rehearsed here. It was satisfactory on the whole, but the sure signs of scurvy had begun to show themselves, and some rheumatic ailment began to make every step I took painful. I seemed to see the end of it all, and, anticipation fed disease. My march each day lessened; the meat had been consumed in a few days, and was supplemented by ducks, a seal, and another ovibos, so that for almost ten days I suffered no deprivation of actual nourishment, but my swelling limbs, the pasty and aching jaws, the occasional vanishing of all strength, and temporary collapses gave insistent warnings that I could not continue. A dull sense of helplessness supervened, my memory wavered, delusions visited my brain, and ever and again the white ice-packed sea seemed a snow covered tableland on which I might walk safely. Only some frantic remnant of sanity prevented this suicidal impulse. I was delirious at times with pain.
And the end of the propitious coast was in sight. I must have made, Mr. Link, in those ten days, by superhuman exertions, some one hundred and fifty miles, furiously driving on, almost unconscious of my motion. And now a black rampart of bold hills, stretched out like an arresting arm, crossed the horizon. Higher and higher rose the forbidding cliffs, and I saw with despair that they entered the sea in escarpments, whose vertical and gloomy walls were beaten by waves, or against which the churned ice was flung in broken cakes. Beyond the stern barrier my flagging strength could never take me. And yet, in my feebleness I hastened to reach it as an ultimate goal over which, I almost thankfully noted, so worn was I in spirit, I could not pass. Temperamental decay was at work in me, and I became inert. I did not care.
At last—oh how heavily dragged my feet, how wearingly surged the pains! I had come to the dark shadow of the cliffs. It was a sheer precipice. My wandering and scarcely seeing eyes dimly noted its immensity. It crushed the last vestiges of effort. Its undeniable prohibition smote me as a physical violence. I fell headlong. Nothing was with me but my gun. Pack, rug, sleeping bag, all had been dropped, the first last, for to its unequivocal testimony (in the gold and in the radium) of all I had seen, all I had been through, I clung with an almost demented obstinacy. And now that was left behind. Some recurrent spasm of vitality returned; I struggled to my feet, shaking in an ague, and just able to support myself against a detached splinter of rock, almost at the foot of the overhanging bluff, that seemed to my seared sight to touch the sky.
What was it then that made me seize my gun, and, steadying myself by some superhuman help—Yes, Mr. Link, by some help not of this earth—empty the magazine of cartridges in a crashing volley against that impenetrable rock? Was it madness, the last rage of defeated purpose, or was it inspiration? I do not know, but as the sharp reports multiplied, and to my racked nerves sounded in terrific crescendos I fell forward. The sense of hearing was the last to desert me, and though my eyes had closed, even while the shattering reverberations from the cliff rang in them, I HEARD AN ANSWERING SHOT. It was all I heard. I had swooned.
But, Mr. Link, the ebbing tide of life returned, slowly indeed at first, so slowly that the friendly faces around me seemed only indefinite, leering masks, before which I shuddered. Warmth reasserted its sway, the warmth of life. I felt fresh, cleanly nourishment, the elixir of whisky slipping down my throat, and then a delicious thrill of comfort, and I became conscious, to find myself eating and drinking and around me the anxious, staring faces of Coogan, Isaac Stanwix, Bell Phillips, and Jack Spent.
It was for an instant only, the violence of my return to consciousness weakened me, and I sank back in their arms, but as I did, the overmastering care that lay deepest in my heart struggled into utterance, through all my clouded mind, and I gasped, pointing to the path over which I had come, “The pack—the pack.”
It was not many hours later that I again awoke, in the luxurious cabin of the “Astrum,” pillowed in an easy chair, and watching with grateful eyes the ministering mercies of my friends. Very gradually my sapped strength and health were renewed, but indeed it sometimes occurs to me that I shall never be quite all I once was. The multiplied strains, repeated, contrasted, with the unapparent but real nervous shocks of excitement suffered in the ordeals of entering Krocker Land, and those less obviously but most certainly disordering experiences in Radiumopolis, with the whole effect of the monstrous unreality of it all, have unhinged my system. And then—the agony of my last humiliation in this city.