“We have absolutely reached a New Continent. Everything confirms that: Latitude, longitude, direction from Point Barrow, and the topography. It isn’t Wrangel or Herschel or Harold or Bennett, or any part of the Franz Josef Archipelago. That splendid fringe of peaks hides inner valleys that decline into a central area of warmth, light and Life!”
I really think that we believed him. The glorious extravagance of the prediction, its superb audacity, its anomalous improbability subjugated us totally, because our startled expectations would be satisfied with little else. That was the psychology of it. And Mr. Link, the Professor was right. LISTEN!
Our position was on a flat, shelving coast, slowly rising to foothills, beyond which gaunt bare precipices towered apparently to uplands, from which soared the sharp serrations of a continuous cordillera. It made a noble picture. Snow covered the higher elevations, it lay in drifts in the lower chasms, it formed a light covering on the tableland but failed to approach nearer to the shore, which was a series of sand or rubble flats, embedding low backs, pointed mounds, and dikes of diabase. Only at one point was a glacier visible. To the north, almost at the limit of vision we could see the glittering ribbon high up in the mountains. The days were shortening, and although the sun remained for most of the time above the horizon, nightfall was marked by its declination, when a peculiar tawny golden glow filled the air. The mountains were striped with light and shade, half roseate, half black as ink; the highlands were also in gloom, and between both the foothills made a beaded girdle of whiteness like a necklace of gigantic pearls on the dusky neck of an Ethiopian.
There was no question of turning back. An unappeasable hunger for discovery filled us. What lay beyond those pearly pinnacles? WHAT? Our plans were quickly laid. There was call for expedition, for the Arctic night was coming, and while sincerely, with three of us, some inexplicable provision seemed imminent for its replacement, Antoine Goritz resisted our madness at that point, and told us that if this was a dead world, nothing but the dogs would save us from death; our retreat would have to be over the frozen polar sea.
The first step was to find game: Seal, walrus, bear, ox, hare, anything. We divided into two skirmishing parties, Hopkins and I going to the right, Goritz and the Professor to the left. The dogs were tethered, and fastened to the launch. The Professor and myself had already collected some of the plants. How radiant and beautiful they seemed in that still untrodden asylum, the little green-leaved willows, a saxifrage, the yellow mountain poppy of Siberia (Papaver nudicaule), forget-me-nots, cloud berry, and in the boggy hollows cottongrass, spreading its wavy down carpet, while here and there tiny forests of bluebells swung their campanulate corollas! The cold pure waters of the snows fed these alpine gardens, and we even detected the hum of insects amid the variegated patches of delicious bloom. Game? “Well I should smile,” shouted Hopkins.
Hopkins and I, in splendid spirits, made our way to the upland, a distance of some five miles, and then through the snow, watching the slopes of the foothills that made ideal pasturages for the musk ox, if these “artiodactyls,” as the Professor rather pompously spoke of them, were here at all. We had not gone far when up a ravine, where narrow meadows and boulder strewn intervals conducted, between two steep hills, a cascading stream, breaking from the craggy cliffs beyond, Hopkins espied a little herd of four cows, two calves, and a bull. Were they musk oxen? The horns looked different.
Hopkins skipped in glee, and, with his usual recourse to verse (preferably Lewis Carroll’s), he hoarsely whispered:
“‘What’s this? I pondered. Have I slept
Or can I have been drinking?
But soon a gentler feeling crept