I heard the voice of Goritz shouting, “Tie up.” And then Hopkins replying, “All right! Alfred is a little out of sorts. He can’t help you much. When I say, pull together.”
Hopkins unloosed our connection, firmly fastened me to the rope and, indicating my upward course, telling me to “brace up,” and that it was the last lap, pushed me up a declivity bristling with sharp projections. For the first time I saw a dim light filtering from above. I did not attempt to look upward. The pull came, and I scrambled weakly forward. Again the dark, red-riven cloud overwhelmed me, my limbs seemed disjointed; a picture of home, I thought, filled my eyes; a blow on my head, then a vast detachment as if I were falling through space succeeded, and I lost consciousness.
And when I awoke! Ah! Mr. Link I have since often believed that our first glimpse of heaven may be like the vision of loveliness that surrounded me when slowly my eyes took on their functions, and my head cleared, and rational observation again began. My pains, too, had for the instant subsided. I felt almost disembodied, as if indeed in some spiritual trance I had reached the other side of death.
I was lying in deep grass on a hillside, bathed in light; my friends around me—No, Hopkins was not there. I noted that. Backward the steaming wall of vapor was lit with a soft radiance, and resembled an ever-changing cloud land. Above, the sky was clear and blue; the distance was a revelation of beauty, ponds and lakes separated by low hills, whose summits held coppices of trees and shrubs, sparkled and shone in far flung chains and groups, and below, in a softly radiant vale, the slim, long outline of a little lakelet, embosomed in tall, waving reeds or grasses, like some titanic jewel, gleamed, crystalline and keen.
Ducks were swimming on its surface, and skimming with beating wings its tiny waves. Herons or cranes were wading in the sedges on its shores, and a stirring and noisy aquatic bird life everywhere about it, made it vocal and animated. Far away a strange, soft light burned in the heaven, and for a moment it seemed as if another sun had replaced the diurnal traveler of the skies.
CHAPTER VI
The Crocodilo-Python
But nature reasserted its importunities, and hunger gnawed my vitals. In a chapter of Admiral Peary’s book, “Over the Great Ice,” is a thrilling episode which describes his own and Astrum’s, hunger before they slew the musk ox near Independence Bay, Greenland, and the ferocity, almost, with which they feasted on the raw meat. I once thought that the story had been given a half theatrical exaggeration. Now I know it was truthful enough. My companions were also weak and prostrated. I now saw clearly their thin, pinched features, the natureless stare of their eyes, the flaccid, hopeless flutter of their hands. I had not realized how near we had been to dropping dead in our tracks.
There was a shot—another, then—another. “God be thanked,” muttered Goritz, and the Professor mechanically rose to his unsteady feet, and shaded his eyes, looking down the hillside.
“He’s coming, and his hands are full,” at length he said, and sank to the ground.