THE PINE TREE GREDIN
Some of my first trepidation over the adventure had vanished, but much remained. I felt no confidence in those uncanny air travelers. Goritz became impatient and almost retaliatory; he was maddened by the vision of wealth, for he dreamed we were coming close to some dazzling, incalculable phenomenon of riches. Hopkins was good-naturedly suspicious and apprehensive, but confessed to an overpowering desire to see the thing out, and “have it over.” The Professor lived in the seventh heaven of delectation over the prospect of preparing a batch of papers, to be read before the Royal Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, that would place his name high on the walls of the Temple of Knowledge. All of us were thus anxious to get on, and we made rapid progress. Need there was, for our provisions were again nearing exhaustion.
It was almost a hundred and twenty hours, or five days, since we had left the Deer Fels before we dragged ourselves into the first grateful shadows of the great Pine Tree Gredin. So Professor Bjornsen termed it. Such it was. A vast, plunging hillside or scarp, covering miles and miles, and appareled from top to bottom with this wonderful vesture of tall pines. And it sang with the refreshing music of innumerable brooks. The exhaustless reservoirs of water emptied upon the vast desert zone which, almost without leaving a trace of greenness behind them, entered that profoundly weathered and comminuted soil, engulfed completely, as are the rivers of California or Colorado or Persia, and reissued unsullied, purified and cold, over this pine tree steppe.
The exhausted pilgrim through Purgatory who sees the gates of Paradise open to him, would, for Christians, furnish a description of our feelings as, ragged, choked with dust, almost crazed with thirst and speechless from fatigue, we threw ourselves at the foot of the first towering grove, and sank our heads into its moss lined bowls of living water. As a Jew I myself recalled the pretty fable of “The Slave Who Became a King” and all that the shipwrecked wretch had felt when the new people he had reached made him their king and fed and clothed him; for indeed to us, as Nefesh was to Adam, this new stage was the Island of Life. I had reason to remember the story more literally afterwards.
And the marvelous stateliness of this blue-green ocean of straight trees, the entrancing vistas between the majestic columns, with a life of pheasant and hare and squirrel, the bubbling cadences of springs, and the rambling mirthfulness and riot of the brooks, the deep-browed silence in places, and the needle-thatched ground, inviting us to sleep and dreams, had a fabulous expression, as if the prelude to some unearthly—See how the whole unreality of it haunts me—experience. But, besides its picturesqueness, we rejoiced in the dusk-like protection from the light; in the effect and feeling of a dark submarine immersion, the light became so beryl-like, that we again, and now as it were en masse, encountered fresh reminders of the still invisible people we must soon see face to face.
There were clearings which had been made in the forest. They were dotted with stumps and crossed by fallen trunks, and made outlooks from which we saw the interminable distances of serried ranks of trees. Far to the right, far to the left, far before us with as yet no determinable limit in any direction, the gigantic flood of pines flowed ceaselessly down the sides of a continental amphitheater.
These cleared rings were suggestive enough. There was no evidence that less toilsome methods had been used than those adopted by prehistoric man. The trees had been hacked and cut by stone axes, they had been trimmed by stone axes, and we found traces of fire around them, which had been made to hasten their fall. But it was not long before we came upon well-made roads threading the forest, to which the clearings themselves were tributary, and over which the great logs had been transported.
Besides we found dishes and cups, vessels of various sizes, which were well advanced in fictile skill, being watertight, with glazed bodies of white and yellow or terracotta tints. And over them, as on the buckles, were rudely painted and reburned that now familiar symbol of the tree and serpent. These interested us greatly, but our sharpest hunt for some gold relics was unrewarded.
“No lost property worth advertising for ’round here,” said Hopkins.
“Well it’s still westward,” said Goritz. “We must run them down soon. But see how endless the prospect,” and he pointed to that unique multitude of motionless trees, falling away and ever downwards into some gigantic central subsidence.