“But as a contribution to the ophitic lore I believe we have found in this new polar continent the central arcana of the mystery referable, for aught we know, to the Adam legend. Gentlemen, we are stepping on the skirts of a great mystery.”
The solemnity of this conclusion which was becomingly indicated by the Professor’s outstretched hands and by the smile of benignant invitation for us to assume his own gravity, was somewhat abridged or spoiled by Hopkins’ interjection.
“I’m afraid, Professor, that we’ll be stepping into trouble if we pinch too many of these joints. I say leave the contraptions alone.” This was meant as a rebuke to Goritz who was for rifling everything. I half believe he would now have been willing to abandon our further march, hunt for the wood temples, despoil them, and retreat, recover our yacht and hike it over the ice for Point Barrow. The gold had strangely turned his head.
“Yes,” I interrupted, for I was really anxious too, though I was willing to join the laugh that followed Hopkins’ remonstrance, “we must be careful. There’s mystery enough here and there may be power behind the mystery, enough also to send us each about our business to Eternity.”
However, from this time we watched for the trees that accentuated the great rings of woods, marked off by the circular and intersecting roads. We detected numbers of them, though for days none would be found. Cleared spaces surrounded them, but not always, nor indeed generally, were there votive offerings of gold images, but bits of apparel, pottery, glass beads (we wondered much over these last), leaden, rudely shaped figures, stone implements and carved wooden masks. We wasted time in this pursuit, urged to it by Goritz’s insatiable delight over the gold finds (we resisted his intentions of taking everything away, though he despoiled many of the trees), and I think the Professor was responsible for much of our wandering, for in his note taking he was indefatigable.
The ground continued to descend, and though the decline was interrupted by hillocks, protuberant mounds and long, rising slopes, these exceptions were accidental, and we realized that since entering the forest we had descended nearly three thousand feet. We were actually over five thousand feet below the mean level of the earth. From some of the elevations our view still measured the endless stretch of sombre green (really a blue-green), though we felt certain that a still lower valley bounded its marge and that beyond the latter limit there were hot springs or geysers, the gushing upward of steam clouds was so incessant. And then more wondrously, we were made aware of a shaft of light, a luminous prism shooting upward from the earth, which we began to suspect was related to the stationary sun from which this puzzling and utterly unrelated nook of the earth received light and heat, when outside of its charmed and storm-beleaguered rim the polar seas and lands lay bound in the iron grip of winter and were dark beneath a sunless sky. Bewildering, maddening paradox! We were often thunderstruck and speechless, dimly doubting whether we had not indeed “shuffled off the coil” of life, and had become reincarnate in another sphere.
I guess that I alone had that feeling often, for Hopkins’ imperturbable realism, Goritz’s avarice and the Professor’s splendid vaulting ambition to convulse the scientific world kept them mortally conscious and human.
And now an amazing thing happened. It began the rush of events that for three or four months tossed us along a course of excitement that made our heads spin and terminated in episodes for all of us too fabulous to be believed and yet—Mr. Link they are the sober, unvarnished truth. You may doubt your ears, you may be tempted—you will be—to put me in a class outside even of the biggest assassins of truth—and as a journalist you have known a good many, but in the end perhaps I can re-establish my reputation by an appeal to your eyes! That sort of evidence cannot be gainsaid.
Well, it turned out that we had nearly crossed the interminable forest, and were tramping silently along one of the radial roads, just after it had cut (“bisected” the Professor insisted) the arc of one of the great circles, when Goritz quickly raised his hand:
“Listen! Music—drums!”