METROPOLIS OF RADIUM.
Go on? Of course.
CHAPTER VIII
The Pine Tree Gredin
After we had jerked some of the deer meat, fearing that the diminishing chances for game would leave us unsupplied, and as yet quite mystified as to where or when we would engage the pygmy people, we took up our loads and went on. The storm whose gyrating fury had absorbed our attention had raged itself away, though it was some thirty-six hours before it cleared, and, slowly liberated from the thickly wrapt curtains of gloom, the now more and more obvious sun shone again. The upland we were crossing caused us many perplexities. The numerous broad troughs and depressions, the tracts of tangled dead bushes and the hedges, resembling “pressure ridges” of ice, which had been somehow shaped by prevalent winds into long fences of scraggly, prostrate trees, were increasingly interspersed with sandy expanses, which we interpreted as the melancholy presages of a desert area beyond.
The average elevation was level, with a tendency to fall as we advanced. We expected daily to reach some abrupt drop which would announce our descent into the “last hole of the Golf Links,” to quote Hopkins. The scheme of Krocker Land grew daily more and more convincingly simple. Whatever limital lines embraced it, it was a sort of amphitheater, with the serial displacements up or down which we had already traversed succeeding each other concentrically; it was temperate in climate; it might become torrid because of its inclusion in the deeper parts of the earth’s crust, or because, even more probably, it was situated over some residual uncooled igneous magma. It was encircled, we assumed, by the profound crevice we had bridged below the Rim, and its extraordinary sun which gave light and heat was practically concealed from external detection by the gigantic vaporous wall of the “Perpetual Nimbus,” endlessly created by steaming and evaporation from the crevice itself, reinforced, too, by the turbulence of the general atmosphere, which for days and days had presented a turmoil, or else a dead waste, of cloud-filled skies.
We thought of that outer world now slowly—nay, rapidly—succumbing to the tightening grip of frost and snow and ice, now again dark or visible only in that strange sepulchral glow of aurora and stars; of that vast Arctic desolation, the shrouded corpse of a world, and of the gathering legions of snowflakes endlessly dropping or whirling from the blue-black empyrean; of the ice pack formed like a vise around the empty, tenantless shores, and groaning under the lash of the winds or the tyrannous push of the tides; of the distant eastern Arctic lands, pale with ghost lights over glacier and mountain, inland ice, trackless coasts, black rock-bound capes and the blue domed igloo of the Eskimo; a land hallowed to thought by heroism; on whose barren plains the monuments to the dead rise in the wastes feebly to tell of devotion, courage past knowledge to measure, faithfulness; where the polar bear and the walrus alone maintain nature’s plea against utter death.
How those thoughts contrasted with all this around us, an undulating oasis in the polar desert, where now indeed the antipodes drew near in some strange new development of sand and aridity. Somehow this latter notion clung persistently. It was partly due, no doubt, to a natural ascription of deadly power in the inexplicable Sun, whose strength each mile was revealed in a more deadly manner; in part also to the decrescence of life, now noticeable in many ways. There was a paling and bleaching of the herbage, and for miles and miles the movements of insects were almost absent, while the deer vanished, and only moles or shrews were occasionally detected in the crookedly ridged ground.
It was after five days’ continuous struggle over the back of this lumpy and semi-mountainous region, whose charm for us had long before disappeared, and when the sharpest scrutiny no longer disclosed the little deer whose succulent steaks and chops had kept us happy and well, eked out with water, and the still persistent berry I have mentioned, that we reached the edge of a new descent. Shielding ourselves in a low coppice of bushes from the peculiar light, which was sensibly increasing in strength and which seemed less softened by the interposition of veils of mist and cloud, we could just see, like a black ribbon painted along the horizon, a zone of tree tops.
“TREES,” we shouted joyously.