We first stood at the beginning of a valley sloping from us with wide, graceful reaches. It lay between two series of hills, separated by minor valleys, whose contributions of water, in tree or bush-lined brooks, were added to the meandering river that subjugated all other impressions in its stately movement towards a far distant lake. This latter formed a great mirror of light on the horizon. The hills were much more deeply wooded than any we had passed, indeed the country assumed a new phase, and the languid inclines and faintly expostulating elevations here were replaced by more boulders and a piedmont-like picturesqueness.
And yet there dwelt in the picture a gentleness, an inviting softness of contour that was ingratiating, while the banked trees, the occasional escarpments of glistening rock, and that luminous, distant haze over the faraway lake tended to add strength and mystery. It was almost, by our chronometers, mid-day when we entered this delightful vale. Dark evergreens added a tonic charm to the coloring, and above us, scoring the blue, were ranged radiating white ribs of compacted cumulus.
We had clambered up on the ledges of a rock exposure, encumbered at its base by huge, confused fragments, and edged at its summit by the bushy fortress of a white flowered low tree like a wild cherry. The Anastatica(?), so abundant in the country we had passed over, had disappeared, and with it, we surmised, that mirific population of cranes, herons, geese, and ducks that made the enchained lakes vocal with pipings, screams, haloos, and bugle calls.
“Looks good to me,” exclaimed Hopkins. “Yes,” I said, “if we could take that picture with us back to New York on a canvas or a film, or a plate, we’d have ’em guessing. It’s a marvel. Pretty hard to believe we’re at north latitude 84°. That’s about it, Professor?”
“84°, 50’, 5”,” replied the Professor sententiously, as he applied his lens and his eyes to a scrap of stone.
“New York?” snorted Goritz. “You surely don’t ask for anything better than this. This is Eden.” It certainly seemed so, and while Hopkins contented himself with the comment that he hadn’t noticed any snakes about, we turned attentive ears to the Professor, who by this time had completed his enthralled study of the glittering schist in his hand.
“Azoic rocks,” he cried, his becoming smile mantling his face, his red, prominent ears and his flaring hair making a droll combination. “Very early rocks; the Grenville Series beyond doubt, as named by the Canadian geologists; the first solidifications of the earth’s crust, perhaps schists, granites and limestones, though here schists with pegmatite veins. An ancient circular axis surrounding a circular depression that has never been covered by the later oceans. Gentlemen, we are probably now situated on the one point of the earth wherein the processes of evolution have never played any role, because marine life has never existed within it, and the processes of derivation which have supplied the dry land with their mammalian fauna from the animals of the sea have been totally excluded, unless—unless—,” the judicial introspection and litigation which the Professor assumed at such critical points in his scientific homilies were always diverting, “unless the barrier had been broken at some point and the surrounding ocean admitted, just as Walcott has surmised may have been the case with the western protaxes of North America, when the pre-Cambrian seas introduced their life into the interior basin of the continent. We shall see, however; the sedimentary rocks of the inner circles (It was quite reassuring to observe the Professor’s stalwart certainty about everything) will reveal that. Even had no such invasion been permitted, life would have reached this isolated nucleus through the flight and migration of birds who might readily enough, as pointed out by Darwin, Wallace, Lancaster, Leidy and others, have carried the embryos of fish, the shells of molluscs and the larvae and bodies of insects hither, and the winds themselves may have assisted in this involuntary transit. The injection of seeds might have taken place in all sorts of ways. So far, you will observe that the faunal features, as might be expected, are very scanty, and true mammals are absent. The zoological peculiarities of this paleolithic bowl are absolutely unique. As a contribution to biological science our results promise to assume important proportions.”
Under the stimulus of this flattering encouragement we resumed our way, following the banks of the beautiful river to that remote splendor, the lake on the horizon, which seemed a fairy sea, where indeed might float argosies of an indigenous people which had been imprisoned in this inverted earth cone since human occupation of our earth began.
And it soon became apparent that we were again rapidly descending, a transition indicated by increasing warmth and the changed gradient of the river which was flowing rapidly, more rapidly, between thickset, outstretched arms of alder-like trees. Our interest was intense. The utter, incalculable strangeness of it all kept our nerves strung to an extreme tension. Sometimes we were simultaneously arrested by an overpowering mental revolt against it, as though we felt we had lost our senses, or as though some trauma had been inflicted on our brain, and then we stood staring, in absolute stupefaction. For all this was not simply new, it was superbly beautiful.
“Every way we’re to the good,” cried Hopkins. “We’re walking right into a Safe Deposit that would make Rockefeller or Rothschild coil up in a colic of undisguised despair. That, in the first place. Then, we’re mighty comfortable, well fed, careless and improving. That counts in the second place. And thirdly, if we get back to sanitary plumbing, carved food, and flats, we’ll be able to put up a story that will keep the people—I mean everybody—gasping, and there won’t be enough presses to print it, enough woodpulp to print it on, and I assume it’s more than likely that we’ll precipitate, as they say, the worst panic ever known, because nobody will be able to work until they’ve finished the story, and from appearances I think we could a tale unfold that might cover a thousand or more pages. Our copyright will be worth a king’s ransom.”