“Husky’s” name eluded determination for a while, but was revived through his own inadvertence in talking in his sleep, wherein the confession transpired of his having “done up” Blue Brigsy at a time when he himself carried the soubriquet of “Monitor Dick.” The clue was slight; it proved sufficient, and landed him in Sing Sing for a quarter of a century.
Jack Riddles was “lifted.” He was taken out of the proletariat, the pages, office boys and messengers, and placed among the police reporters, where he was duly taken in hand under instruction to acquire the current cursorial gait and speed of the slam-bang reportorial style. He will get it. This relieves the situation created by Riddles’ opportune circumspection from the top of the Fifth Avenue ’bus.
The reader, albeit he may demur at the jejune skipping around the explanation of the mystery at No. — east Fifty-eighth Street, has hereby had the situation sufficiently cleared to feel himself ready to enjoy Erickson’s story, and I assure him, he may look forward with expectancy to find the residue, or the heart, of that mystery resolved at, let me say, page 400 or thereabouts, assuming that by that time he cares any more about it. So that, pleasantly impelled by the spur of curiosity, as regards a secret yet undivulged, let him accept our editorial invitation— Does he not see our obeisance, and the sweep of our hand pointing to a door opening upon unimaginable wonders?—to peruse the history of a voyage more marvelous than that of Marco Polo, of Father Huc, of Mandeville, of Munchausen, of Sinbad, the Aethiopics of Heliodorus, of Ariosto, of Gulliver, of Ulysses, of Peter Wilkins, of Camoens, of Pomponius Mela.
Sive per Syrtes iter aestuosas,
Sive facturus per inhospitalem
Caucasum, vel quae loca fabulosa
Lambit Hydaspes
His unappeased wonder over a bit of unraveled criminality will vanish in the excitement of discovery, of adventure, of revelation, but at the other end, as the book drops from his hand, finished and admired, he will approve our reticence at this end, for then he will know HOW Erickson got into his difficulty, and WHY.
Erickson’s story was published in the New York Truth Getter—of course the reader never saw it there—prepared from his verbal narrative, his notes, and memoranda, and so expressed in English as to retain the glow, enthusiasm, amazement, and graphic delineation of the original. It was told to me in my library overlooking the sunlit tides around Throg’s Neck; in the short winter afternoons at times, at times through the long winter evenings, with Erickson hanging over the hearth where, as Max Beerbohm puts it, “gradually the red-gold caverns are revealed, gorgeous, mysterious, with inmost recesses of white heat.” Past all dreams of wizardry, more remote from thought than any visions of magic, stranger than the hallucinations of invention, was this picture of the unreal and terraced world descending in titanic steps to the heated regions of the earth’s mass, peopled with an impossible people, alive with animal abundance and clothed in the vestal glory of innumerable plants. In it were enacted those transmutations which Science predicts as the last triumph of human knowledge, and in it a wealth transcending the maddest hopes of Avarice had accumulated in an Acropolis of SOLID GOLD!
There in the frozen north, walled in by ice, hidden in fogs, almost impenetrably concealed or protected by storm, lay this incredible continent of wonders, unsuspected by the world of one thousand million people around it, the goal of whose ambition it had already reached, the course of whose evolution it illustrates, and who had, in these latest years, begun to grope blindly for its guessed at shores.