“So,” I said to myself, “these are the reminiscent Tree and the Serpent.”
“Look to me like bean poles,” remarked Hopkins, who was looking over my shoulder.
On we went west. It seemed as if the abominable rocks and sand would never come to an end, the former sharp and knife-like, cutting our shoes, the latter whirling in blinding sheets against our faces, in spite of the almost constant fog, and even the occasional rain. The sledge was lightened and moved as carefully as possible, but the obstacles could not be avoided in the mist, and before the day was half over it was a wreck, so that its load had to be distributed among us. There was made at once a concentration of everything indispensable, and the rest was abandoned. Our heavy packs did not help our progress. The wind kept westerly. It was strong. We were astonished at the absence of snow and at the moderate temperature. The thermometer denoted 0° and 2°, Centigrade. These conditions seemed to bear out the Professor’s claims, and the altitude was decreasing too. Then came a desperately stony hollow, and the land rose steadily until we were even higher than we had been at the start. But there were no mountains about us, just a broad back of sloping rock, “a gigantic, intrusive, basaltic dike,” said the Professor, between gasps, as fog smote us with almost the solidity of water.
We had made thirty miles, and nature and the day were united in protest against a longer drive. A yelp ahead, a shout from Goritz to “fall back,” showed some danger line in our vicinity. We had not stopped one instant too soon. One of the dogs had plunged over a precipice, and we were then standing on its crumbling edge. By one of those sudden changes in nature which call to mind a divertissement in a scenic theatrical display, the fogbanks now drifted off and in the light of the low western sun we looked out over a strange land.
The barren and roughened ridge at last ended in this inner line of the Krocker Land Rim. It abruptly, like a palisade escarpment, fell off into declivities or occasional slopes made up of the talus of its decomposition or dilapidation. We gazed now on a singular barrenness of steeply slanting land, ribbed with asperities like hogs’ backs, of parallel hills. Over this land, in the channels that they had made for themselves, some entrenched in precipitous valleys, rushed streams fed by that continual precipitation which toward the sea became snow, and inland away from a colder atmosphere fell in torrents of rain.
The scene was indescribable, not by reason of variety but of monotony of detail, and because beyond it, far along a horizon that may have been fifty or more miles distant the most perplexing vaporous effects prevailed. What it might be it was impossible to determine. There were constant motions there, motions explosive and gradual, for we could almost be sure that the cloudy masses were processioning now measuredly in huge volume and then disordered by internal rupture. We thought we caught the flashes of electric storms.
The scene below us was most repellent. The vicissitudes of cold and storm had ejected all semblance of charm from those black, denuded rocks. Their asperities, which were pinnacles hundreds of feet high, were united by valleys bare to the eye, from our point of view, of all vegetation, the whole combination slanting inward, and composing a broad, melanic sterility perhaps only paralleled on the lifeless and crater-pitted plains of the moon. The violent tossing streams, many of them hidden in defiles of erosion, alone imparted the sense of animation, and even this animation seemed ruthless and destructive. It was utterly sullen, and when it was not sullen, it was savage and threatening. It was all so overwhelming that we simply stared at it, voiceless and despairing.
Hopkins broke the spell of our dismay: “Well, Professor, this certainly is not Paradise, but I’m willing to believe that it’s the shell, the outside of it, and a pretty hard kind of a nut it makes. Can we crack it?”
That indeed was the question we all silently asked. Where would this wilderness of rocks and waters lead us? Could we expect to find game or any sort of food in this tableland of sheer, stark, desolation? Our supplies were daily shrinking, and we had been a little wasteful too, deluded by the false hope of soon securing succor. It was a long way back to the cache on the tableland, and a longer one to the anchored launch on the sands of the coast, but how far was it ahead of us to life? At least behind there were bears and musk oxen, and seal and duck; did anything replace them before us? It made us pause; the risk of going on was considerable.
Our council convened under rather straightened circumstances of confidence and hope. The dogs would be of no use in the marches before us, unless indeed we threw them into the larder, and their upkeep was an equivocal handicap, which might more than offset their value as an aid to the commissariat. Goritz said we had forty pounds of provisions, about a pound a day for each man for ten days; and there were the guns and ammunition to be carried too, the instruments and the stoves and oil. The tent outfit could be left behind; at a pinch we might battle through without it. Battle, though, to WHAT? Ah! That was the question. Were we in a dead land? Was the gold belt a prehistoric relic, having no relation to any living race, a token of past occupancy by a people who had fled from the fast contracting opportunities of life in this Arctic inferno? It was a good illustration of the caprice of human feelings, our total rejection of the considerations that a few days before had made us jubilant, boastful, careless; so quickly does the average man reflect the color of his surroundings.