It seemed an eternity before the tall figure of the Yankee brushed through the grass, and flung the dead bodies of three wild geese among us.
Few or none who have not known the extremity of hunger can understand how, as Mikkelsen expresses it, “one’s whole consciousness becomes concentrated into one importunate demand for food—food—food.” And do you remember, if you read it, how Mikkelsen and Iversen set up the tins of the cache at Schnauder’s Island in a row, to feast their eyes on them, and then, after all, came that “feverish race with death—the grim death of hunger”?
Our state was not as desperate, but perhaps we were not such hardened and strong men. It was not long before a fire made of branches and twigs and grass was burning merrily, and though there was nothing but water to drink, and there were no condiments—no salt or pepper, no bread or biscuits, we devoured the fried duck with a rapture no words can properly do justice to. It was not enough. Hopkins must go again and again. But the larder furnished us in these new, hospitable surroundings was inexhaustible. We wondered whether the sound of a gunshot had ever been heard here; the birds were simply curious, not frightened, and only interrupted their play or avocation with a momentary and short flight.
We moved forward from our first resting place and encamped under the leafy covering of a beautiful, narrow, silver-leaved tree, that the Professor told us was a relative of that ornament of parks and pleasure grounds in Europe and America, the Anastatica syriachum. We called our camp Restoration. Hopkins suggested Emptiness as a name, for several reasons, because of our unappeasable appetites and because in it, besides ourselves, our guns, a few cooking vessels (to be exact, just a pot and a fryingpan) the rope we carried, and our few instruments, our ammunition and our matches, there were none of the appurtenances that are associated with the name of camp. But the name Restoration pleased us better, for here were we filled with a wonderful animation of expectancy, here our strength had been fully restored, here we had become joyful beyond estimation, the Professor had resumed his alacrity of mind, and once more we all embarked on the sea of fabulous imagining. It was altogether wonderful. Where were we? What was the meaning of this temperate charm of climate? Whence came this broad illumination when the sun had set?
The first moments of our mere animal restoration passed, then a delicious weariness overcame us as we surrendered to the mirthful spirit of surprise and admiration, and to the curative properties of fried or boiled duck. Around us stretched a magnificent country, which bore the aspect of the sylvan loneliness of the lakeland of Minnesota and Wisconsin and Canada, though more undulating or hilly. The wall of steam and cloud behind us, occasionally glowing dully with the flame of its intermittent explosions, extended north and south, or was lost in the pearly exhalations of the distance.
It formed an inexhaustible source of rain, for, as the east winds prevailed, the mists swept over this aquitanian land in showers, or, if the west wind, it was rolled away in thunderous glory to deluge that steep, barren zone we had descended, from Krocker Land Rim, and, beyond the Rim, it fell again in snow. The Professor, boastful now, and Goritz calmly exultant, arranged the fortunes we were about to meet in pleasing colors. To listen to them as Hopkins and I lay on our backs in the fragrant grass, starred with white and blue blossoms, was like the recital of a fairy story, a legend of miracles and marvels.
The Professor took up the strain in this wise:
“Here is the most wonderful illustration of Perpetual Motion. The precipitation of the Arctic Sea falls on this land in rain, outside of it in snow. The rain flows down the rivers of the arid slope under Krocker Land Rim, is emptied into the heated or inflamed bowels of the earth, uncovered by the huge meridional crevice, and returned as steam to be again thrown down, evaporated and reprecipitated in an endless chain of supreme magnitude.
“And, gentlemen, we have entered the polar depression of which you were so scornfully incredulous. We have already fallen two thousand feet below the mean level of the earth. This is a temperate region, with symptoms of subtropical or even perhaps tropical life I believe we shall discover a series of successive gigantic steps, each a recession within the crust of the earth, like continental amphitheatrical terraces, and at the Center—”
“What?” gurgled Hopkins.