But we had reached the height, and the freshness of the air restored our equanimity, and made our strength whole again, and before us, with slow divulgements of unusual grandeur, spread the black skirts of a storm. But it was not over us, though patches of cloud were streaming from the west in hurrying phalanxes, dun, disordered, driven, as if under orders. And far off, beneath, it almost seemed, that strange stationary sun now half eclipsed, the hurlyburly of an inordinate atmospheric disturbance was visibly in operation.
The impression almost instantly made was that of a cyclonic movement—a suction of the air into the maelstrom center of a revolution that was gathering from the four quarters reinforcements of cloud and wind. A dull yellow light shone through occasional gaps in the aerial concourse of vapors, fish-gray chasms opened out at moments as if torn apart by uprushing or irrepressible volumes of wind, and, lit up by sharper flashes, they would suddenly evert, pouring out in boiling currents torrential black clouds. Then a cap of darkness seemed to descend, and yet in the remnants of light that stuck here and there to the flanks of this mountainous obscuration, we could see the multitudinous scurryings, windings and collisions of the smoking flails and banks and missiles of cloud.
Below this indivisible commotion, between it and what seemed the earth, stole or lay a stratum of light, and into this, slowly evolving like a gigantic corkscrew from the storm above, grew downwards, streaked with black, pillars of condensation, that were nothing else than water-spouts, terrible tornadoes in traveling helices, erect, inclined, and stalking towards and away from each other like watery titans.
We thought we even saw their conjunction and dispersal, but what was visibly secure in the picture was the ascent heavenward of an intolerably wild dust avalanche. The whiteness, for such it seemed, smote and penetrated the clouds; it swerved and was beaten into straight ribbons of livid light, or, mingling universally, adulterated the inky burden with a spurious ghastly filminess. Flashes of lightning (a rare phenomenon in the north) that must have been terrific in intensity and portentous in size bit through the darkness, and rumblings reached us from the remote conflict. Then agglomeration and colossal curdlings and it all was swallowed up in night!
We talked long that night upon the excitements of the last ten hours, and it was plain to each one of us that we were again approaching descents to parts still farther below the levels already passed; that the storm was over a distant depression; that in the last day or two the actinic power of that strange radiance that lurked somewhere in the skies over this depression was becoming stronger and more intolerable; that we might expect to find the incredible influences of Radium in all this; that perhaps in some way that Sun we saw, we felt, which was the photal center, provocation and cause of the plant life around us, and through which we had passed, was now limiting or suppressing it; the unmistakable dust or sand tornado showed a desert region before us. Then, too, we discussed the poverty of the faunal life, now growing thinner, smaller, more depressed as we advanced, the sallowness of the grass, the blueness of leafage, the anemic pinkiness of the heather, our own tortured feelings of alternate hope and apathy, of well being and of sickishness.
The bleaching, killing effect of this radium light (so we called It) was partially overcome by the rainfall which operated favorably for the plants. In hunting the small deer, and even they became more infrequent, we noticed that they occupied the shadowed sides of the hills and, in this stationary light, these shadowed sides remained almost unchanged. I say almost, because it became more and more apparent that the stationary Sun stirred. It rose or fell or approached or receded. There was some fluctuation too in its light. It was not a lamp hung in the sky but an aura that floated inconstantly over or around some central pivotal, causal spot, that varied also in its emanations.
Should we go on? I was silent. Overwhelming as might seem the inducements to break through the veil of the mystery before us I hesitated—No, I recoiled. But this was flagrant treachery to the spirit and ambition of exploration. So I was silent. Goritz dreaming of his Ophir and Golconda, was impatient to hurry on. Hopkins felt that there was nothing else to do; his doggerel helped him out:
“‘What matters it how far we go?’ his scaly friend replied,
There is another shore, you know, upon the other side.”
But the Professor was resolute. Here were all his predictions fulfilled—the vortical polar pit, the warmth, the aborigines, Eden reminiscences (he referred to the Crocodilo-Python) and now, what, so he modestly admitted, he had never dreamed of, the—