автордың кітабын онлайн тегін оқу  A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder

James De Mille

I The Finding of the Copper Cylinder

It oc­curred as far back as Fe­bru­ary 15, 1850. It hap­pened on that day that the yacht Fal­con lay be­calmed upon the ocean be­tween the Ca­naries and the Madeira Is­lands. This yacht Fal­con was the prop­erty of Lord Feather­stone, who, be­ing weary of life in Eng­land, had taken a few con­ge­nial friends for a win­ter’s cruise in these south­ern lat­i­tudes. They had vis­ited the Azores, the Ca­naries, and the Madeira Is­lands, and were now on their way to the Mediter­ranean.

The wind had failed, a deep calm had suc­ceeded, and ev­ery­where, as far as the eye could reach, the wa­ter was smooth and glassy. The yacht rose and fell at the im­pulse of the long ocean un­du­la­tions, and the creak­ing of the spars sounded out a lazy ac­com­pa­ni­ment to the mo­tion of the ves­sel. All around was a wa­tery hori­zon, ex­cept in the one place only, to­ward the south, where far in the dis­tance the Peak of Tener­iffe rose into the air.

The pro­found calm, the warm at­mos­phere, the slow pitch­ing of the yacht, and the dull creak­ing of the spars all com­bined to lull into a state of in­do­lent re­pose the peo­ple on board. For­ward were the crew; some asleep, oth­ers smok­ing, oth­ers play­ing cards. At the stern were Ox­en­den, the in­ti­mate friend of Feather­stone, and Dr. Con­greve, who had come in the dou­ble ca­pac­ity of friend and med­i­cal at­ten­dant. Th­ese two, like the crew, were in a state of dull and lan­guid re­pose. Sus­pended be­tween the two masts, in an In­dian ham­mock, lay Feather­stone, with a cigar in his mouth and a novel in his hand, which he was pre­tend­ing to read. The fourth mem­ber of the party, Melick, was seated near the main­mast, fold­ing some pa­pers in a pe­cu­liar way. His oc­cu­pa­tion at length at­tracted the rov­ing eyes of Feather­stone, who poked forth his head from his ham­mock, and said in a sleepy voice:

“I say, Melick, you’re the most en­er­getic fel­lah I ever saw. By Jove! you’re the only one aboard that’s busy. What are you do­ing?”

“Paper boats,” said Melick, in a busi­nesslike tone.

“Paper boats! By Jove!” said Feather­stone. “What for?”

“I’m go­ing to have a re­gatta,” said Melick. “Any­thing to kill time, you know.”

“By Jove!” ex­claimed Feather­stone again, rais­ing him­self higher in his ham­mock, “that’s not a bad idea. A we­gatta! By Jove! glowious! glowious! I say, Ox­en­den, did you hear that?”

“What do you mean by a re­gatta?” asked Ox­en­den, lazily.

“Oh, I mean a race with these pa­per boats. We can bet on them, you know.”

At this Feather­stone sat up­right, with his legs dan­gling out of the ham­mock.

“By Jove!” he ex­claimed again. “Bet­ting! So we can. Do you know, Melick, old chap, I think that’s a weg­u­lar piece of in­spi­ra­tion. A we­gatta! and we can bet on the best boat.”

“But there isn’t any wind,” said Ox­en­den.

“Well, you know, that’s the fun of it,” said Melick, who went solemnly on as he spoke, fold­ing his pa­per boats; “that’s the fun of it. For you see if there was a wind we should be go­ing on our­selves, and the re­gatta couldn’t come off; but, as it is, the wa­ter is just right. You pick out your boat, and lay your bet on her to race to some given point.”

“A given point? But how can we find any?”

“Oh, eas­ily enough; some­thing or any­thing—a bub­ble’ll do, or we can pitch out a bit of wood.”

Upon this Feather­stone de­scended from his perch, and came near to ex­am­ine the pro­ceed­ings, while the other two, ea­ger to take ad­van­tage of the new ex­cite­ment, soon joined him. By this time Melick had fin­ished his pa­per boats. There were four of them, and they were made of dif­fer­ent col­ors, namely, red, green, yel­low, and white.

“I’ll put these in the wa­ter,” said Melick, “and then we can lay our bets on them as we choose. But first let us see if there is any­thing that can be taken as a point of ar­rival. If there isn’t any­thing, I can pitch out a bit of wood, in any di­rec­tion which may seem best.”

Say­ing this, he went to the side, fol­lowed by the oth­ers, and all looked out care­fully over the wa­ter.

“There’s a black speck out there,” said Ox­en­den.

“So there is,” said Feather­stone. “That’ll do. I won­der what it is?”

“Oh, a bit of tim­ber,” said Melick. “Prob­a­bly the spar of some ship.”

“It don’t look like a spar,” said the doc­tor; “it’s only a round spot, like the float of some net.”

“Oh, it’s a spar,” said Melick. “It’s one end of it, the rest is un­der wa­ter.”

The spot thus cho­sen was a dark, cir­cu­lar ob­ject, about a hun­dred yards away, and cer­tainly did look very much like the ex­trem­ity of some spar, the rest of which was un­der wa­ter. What­ever it was, how­ever, it served well enough for their present pur­pose, and no one took any fur­ther in­ter­est in it, ex­cept as the point to­ward which the pa­per boats should run in their event­ful race.

Melick now let him­self down over the side, and placed the pa­per boats on the wa­ter as care­fully as pos­si­ble. After this the four stood watch­ing the lit­tle fleet in si­lence. The wa­ter was per­fectly still, and there was no per­cep­ti­ble wind, but there were draughts of air caused by the rise and fall of the yacht, and these af­fected the tiny boats. Grad­u­ally they drew apart, the green one drift­ing astern, the yel­low one re­main­ing un­der the ves­sel, while the red and the white were car­ried out in the di­rec­tion where they were ex­pected to go, with about a foot of space be­tween them.

“Two to one on the red!” cried Feather­stone, bet­ting on the one which had gained the lead.

“Done,” said Melick, promptly tak­ing his of­fer.

Ox­en­den made the same bet, which was taken by Melick and the doc­tor.

Other bets were now made as to the di­rec­tion which they would take, as to the dis­tance by which the red would beat the white, as to the time which would be oc­cu­pied by the race, and as to fifty other things which need not be men­tioned. All took part in this; the ex­cite­ment rose high and the bet­ting went on mer­rily. At length it was no­ticed that the white was over­haul­ing the red. The ex­cite­ment grew in­tense; the bet­ting changed its form, but was still kept up, un­til at last the two pa­per boats seemed blended to­gether in one dim spot which grad­u­ally faded out of sight.

It was now nec­es­sary to de­ter­mine the state of the race, so Feather­stone or­dered out the boat. The four were soon em­barked, and the men rowed out to­ward the point which had been cho­sen as the end of the race. On com­ing near they found the pa­per boats stuck to­gether, sat­u­rated with wa­ter, and float­ing limp on the sur­face. An an­i­mated dis­cus­sion arose about this. Some of the bets were off, but oth­ers re­mained an open ques­tion, and each side in­sisted upon a dif­fer­ent view of the case. In the midst of this, Feather­stone’s at­ten­tion was drawn to the dark spot al­ready men­tioned as the goal of the race.

“That’s a queer-look­ing thing,” said he, sud­denly. “Pull up, lads, a lit­tle; let’s see what it is. It doesn’t look to me like a spar.”

The oth­ers, al­ways on the look­out for some new ob­ject of in­ter­est, were at­tracted by these words, and looked closely at the thing in ques­tion. The men pulled. The boat drew nearer.

“It’s some sort of float­ing ves­sel,” said Ox­en­den.

“It’s not a spar,” said Melick, who was at the bow.

And as he said this he reached out and grasped at it. He failed to get it, and did no more than touch it. It moved eas­ily and sank, but soon came up again. A sec­ond time he grasped at it, and with both hands. This time he caught it, and then lifted it out of the wa­ter into the boat. Th­ese pro­ceed­ings had been watched with the deep­est in­ter­est; and now, as this cu­ri­ous float­ing thing made its ap­pear­ance among them, they all crowded around it in ea­ger ex­cite­ment.

“It looks like a can of pre­served meat,” said the doc­tor.

“It cer­tainly is a can,” said Melick, “for it’s made of metal; but as to pre­served meat, I have my doubts.”

The ar­ti­cle in ques­tion was made of metal and was cylin­dri­cal in shape. It was sol­dered tight and ev­i­dently con­tained some­thing. It was about eigh­teen inches long and eight wide. The na­ture of the metal was not eas­ily per­cep­ti­ble, for it was coated with slime, and cov­ered over about half its sur­face with bar­na­cles and sea­weed. It was not heavy, and would have floated higher out of the wa­ter had it not been for these en­cum­brances.

“It’s some kind of pre­served meat,” said the doc­tor. “Per­haps some­thing good—game, I dare say—yes, York­shire game-pie. They pot all sorts of things now.”

“If it’s game,” said Ox­en­den, “it’ll be rather high by this time. Man alive! look at those weeds and shells. It must have been float­ing for ages.”

“It’s my be­lief,” said Feather­stone, “that it’s part of the pro­vi­sions laid in by Noah for his long voy­age in the ark. So come, let’s open it, and see what sort of diet the an­te­dilu­vians had.”

“It may be liquor,” said Ox­en­den.

Melick shook his head.

“No,” said he; “there’s some­thing in­side, but what­ever it is, it isn’t liquor. It’s odd, too. The thing is of for­eign make, ev­i­dently. I never saw any­thing like it be­fore. It may be Chi­nese.”

“By Jove!” cried Feather­stone, “this is get­ting ex­cit­ing. Let’s go back to the yacht and open it.”

The men rowed back to the yacht.

“It’s meat of some sort,” con­tin­ued the doc­tor. “I’m cer­tain of that. It has come in good time. We can have it for din­ner.”

“You may have my share, then,” said Ox­en­den. “I hereby give and be­queath to you all my right, ti­tle, and in­ter­est in and to any­thing in the shape of meat that may be in­side.”

“Meat cans,” said Melick, “are never so large as that.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” said the doc­tor, “they make up pretty large pack­ages of pem­mi­can for the arc­tic ex­pe­di­tions.”

“But they never pack up pem­mi­can in cop­per cylin­ders,” said Melick, who had been us­ing his knife to scrape off the crust from the ves­sel.

“Cop­per!” ex­claimed Ox­en­den. “Is it cop­per?”

“Look for your­selves,” said Melick, qui­etly.

They all looked, and could see, where the knife had cut into the ves­sel, that it was as he said. It was cop­per.

“It’s for­eign work,” said Melick. “In Eng­land we make tin cans for ev­ery­thing. It may be some­thing that’s drifted out from Mo­gadore or some port in Morocco.”

“In that case,” said Ox­en­den, “it may con­tain the man­gled re­mains of one of the wives of some Moor­ish pasha.”

By this time they had reached the yacht and hur­ried aboard. All were ea­ger to sat­isfy their cu­rios­ity. Search was made for a cold-chisel, but to no pur­pose. Then Feather­stone pro­duced a knife which was used to open sar­dine boxes, but af­ter a faith­ful trial this proved use­less. At length Melick, who had gone off in search of some­thing more ef­fec­tive, made his ap­pear­ance armed with an axe. With this he at­tacked the cop­per cylin­der, and by means of a few dex­ter­ous blows suc­ceeded in cut­ting it open. Then he looked in.

“What do you see?” asked Feather­stone.

“Some­thing,” said Melick, “but I can’t quite make it out.”

“If you can’t make it out, then shake it out,” said Ox­en­den.

Upon this Melick took the cylin­der, turned it up­side down, shook it smartly, and then lifted it and pounded it against the deck. This served to loosen the con­tents, which seemed tightly packed, but came grad­u­ally down un­til at length they could be seen and drawn forth. Melick drew them forth, and the con­tents of the mys­te­ri­ous cop­per cylin­der re­solved them­selves into two pack­ages.

The sight of these pack­ages only served to in­ten­sify their cu­rios­ity. If it had been some species of food it would at once have re­vealed it­self, but these pack­ages sug­gested some­thing more im­por­tant. What could they be? Were there trea­sures in­side—jew­els, or golden or­na­ments from some Moor­ish seraglio, or strange coin from far Cathay?

One of the pack­ages was very much larger than the other. It was en­closed in wrap­pers made of some coarse kind of felt, bound tight with strong cords. The other was much smaller, and, was folded in the same ma­te­rial with­out be­ing bound. This Melick seized and be­gan to open.

“Wait a minute,” said Feather­stone. “Let’s make a bet on it. Five guineas that it’s some sort of jew­els!”

“Done,” said Ox­en­den.

Melick opened the pack­age, and it was seen that Feather­stone had lost. There were no jew­els, but one or two sheets of some­thing that looked like pa­per. It was not pa­per, how­ever, but some veg­etable prod­uct which was used for the same pur­pose. The sur­face was smooth, but the color was dingy, and the lines of the veg­etable fi­bres were plainly dis­cernible. Th­ese sheets were cov­ered with writ­ing.

“Hal­loa!” cried Melick. “Why, this is English!”

At this the oth­ers crowded around to look on, and Feather­stone in his ex­cite­ment for­got that he had lost his bet. There were three sheets, all cov­ered with writ­ing—one in English, an­other in French, and a third in Ger­man. It was the same mes­sage, writ­ten in these three dif­fer­ent lan­guages. But at that mo­ment they scarcely no­ticed this. All that they saw was the mes­sage it­self, with its mys­te­ri­ous mean­ing.

It was as fol­lows:

“To the finder of this:

“Sir—I am an English­man, and have been car­ried by a se­ries of in­cred­i­ble events to a land from which es­cape is as im­pos­si­ble as from the grave. I have writ­ten this and com­mit­ted it to the sea, in the hope that the ocean cur­rents may bear it within the reach of civ­i­lized man. Oh, un­known friend! who­ever you are. I en­treat you to let this mes­sage be made known in some way to my fa­ther, Henry More, Keswick, Cum­ber­land, Eng­land, so that he may learn the fate of his son. The MS ac­com­pa­ny­ing this con­tains an ac­count of my ad­ven­tures, which I should like to have for­warded to him. Do this for the sake of that mercy which you may one day wish to have shown to your­self.

“Adam More.”

“By Jove!” cried Feather­stone, as he read the above, “this is re­ally get­ting to be some­thing tremen­dous.”

“This other pack­age must be the man­u­script,” said Ox­en­den, “and it’ll tell all about it.”

“Such a man­u­script’ll be bet­ter than meat,” said the doc­tor, sen­ten­tiously.

Melick said noth­ing, but, open­ing his knife, he cut the cords and un­folded the wrap­per. He saw a great col­lec­tion of leaves, just like those of the let­ter, of some veg­etable sub­stance, smooth as pa­per, and cov­ered with writ­ing.

“It looks like Egyp­tian pa­pyrus,” said the doc­tor. “That was the com­mon pa­per of an­tiq­uity.”

“Never mind the Egyp­tian pa­pyrus,” said Feather­stone, in fever­ish cu­rios­ity. “Let’s have the con­tents of the man­u­script. You, Melick, read; you’re the most en­er­getic of the lot, and when you’re tired the rest of us will take turns.”

“Read? Why, it’ll take a month to read all this,” said Melick.

“All the bet­ter,” said Feather­stone; “this calm will prob­a­bly last a month, and we shall have noth­ing to in­ter­est us.”

Melick made no fur­ther ob­jec­tion. He was as ex­cited as the rest, and so he be­gan the read­ing of the man­u­script.

II Adrift in the Antarctic Ocean

My name is Adam More. I am the son of Henry More, apothe­cary, Keswick, Cum­ber­land. I was mate of the ship Trevelyan (Ben­net, mas­ter), which was char­tered by the Bri­tish Govern­ment to con­vey con­victs to Van Die­man’s Land. This was in 1843. We made our voy­age with­out any ca­su­alty, landed our con­victs in Ho­bart Town, and then set forth on our re­turn home. It was the 17th of De­cem­ber when we left. From the first ad­verse winds pre­vailed, and in or­der to make any progress we were obliged to keep well to the south. At length, on the 6th of Jan­uary, we sighted Deso­la­tion Is­land. We found it, in­deed, a des­o­late spot. In its vicin­ity we saw a mul­ti­tude of smaller is­lands, per­haps a thou­sand in num­ber, which made nav­i­ga­tion dif­fi­cult, and forced us to hurry away as fast as pos­si­ble. But the as­pect of this dreary spot was of it­self enough to re­pel us. There were no trees, and the mul­ti­tude of is­lands seemed like moss-cov­ered rocks; while the tem­per­a­ture, though in the mid­dle of the Antarc­tic sum­mer, was from 38° to 58° Fahren­heit.

In or­der to get rid of these dan­ger­ous is­lands we stood south and west, and at length found our­selves in south lat­i­tude 65°, lon­gi­tude 60° east. We were for­tu­nate enough not to find any ice, al­though we were within fif­teen hun­dred miles of the South Pole, and far within that im­pen­e­tra­ble icy bar­rier which, in 1773, had ar­rested the progress of Cap­tain Cook. Here the wind failed us, and we lay be­calmed and drift­ing. The sea was open all around us, ex­cept to the south­east, where there was a low line along the hori­zon ter­mi­nat­ing in a lofty promon­tory; but though it looked like land we took it for ice. All around us whales and gram­puses were gam­bolling and spout­ing in vast num­bers. The weather was re­mark­ably fine and clear.

For two or three days the calm con­tin­ued, and we drifted along help­lessly, un­til at length we found our­selves within a few miles of the promon­tory above men­tioned. It looked like land, and seemed to be a rocky is­land ris­ing from the depths of the sea. It was, how­ever, all cov­ered with ice and snow, and from this there ex­tended east­ward as far as the eye could reach an in­ter­minable line of ice, but to­ward the south­west the sea seemed open to nav­i­ga­tion. The promon­tory was very sin­gu­lar in shape, ris­ing up to a peak which was at least a thou­sand feet in height, and form­ing a strik­ing ob­ject, eas­ily dis­cov­ered and read­ily iden­ti­fied by any fu­ture ex­plorer. We named it, af­ter our ship, Trevelyan Peak, and then felt anx­ious to lose sight of it for­ever. But the calm con­tin­ued, and at length we drifted in close enough to see im­mense flocks of seals dot­ting the ice at the foot of the peak.

Upon this I pro­posed to Agnew, the sec­ond mate, that we should go ashore, shoot some seals, and bring them back. This was partly for the ex­cite­ment of the hunt, and partly for the honor of land­ing in a place never be­fore trod­den by the foot of man. Cap­tain Ben­net made some ob­jec­tions, but he was old and cau­tious, and we were young and ven­ture­some, so we laughed away his scru­ples and set forth. We did not take any of the crew, ow­ing to the cap­tain’s ob­jec­tions. He said that if we chose to throw away our own lives he could not help it, but that he would pos­i­tively refuse to al­low a sin­gle man to go with us. We thought this re­fusal an ex­cess of cau­tion amount­ing to pos­i­tive cow­ardice, but were un­able to change his mind. The dis­tance was not great, the ad­ven­ture was at­trac­tive, and so the cap­tain’s gig was low­ered, and in this Agnew and I rowed ashore. We took with us a dou­ble-bar­relled ri­fle apiece, and also a pis­tol. Agnew took a glass.

We rowed for about three miles, and reached the edge of the ice, which ex­tended far out from the promon­tory. Here we landed, and se­cured the boat by means of a small grap­pling-iron, which we thrust into the ice. We then walked to­ward the promon­tory for about a mile, and here we found a mul­ti­tude of seals. Th­ese an­i­mals were so fear­less that they made not the slight­est move­ment as we came up, but stared at us in an in­dif­fer­ent way. We killed two or three, and then de­bated whether to go to the promon­tory or not. Agnew was ea­ger to go, so as to touch the ac­tual rock; but I was sat­is­fied with what we had done, and was now de­sirous of re­turn­ing. In the midst of this I felt a flake of snow on my cheek. I started and looked up. To my great sur­prise I saw that the sky had changed since I had last no­ticed it. When we left the ship it was clear and blue, but now it was over­spread with dark, leaden-col­ored clouds, and the snowflakes that had fallen were omi­nous of evil. A snow­storm here, in the vicin­ity of the ice, was too se­ri­ous a thing to be dis­re­garded. But one course now re­mained, and that was an im­me­di­ate re­turn to the ship.

Each of us seized a seal and dragged it af­ter us to the boat. We reached it and flung them in. Just at that mo­ment a gun sounded over the wa­ter. It was from the ship—the sig­nal of alarm—the sum­mons from the cap­tain for our re­turn. We saw now that she had been drift­ing since we left her, and had moved south­west sev­eral miles. The row back promised to be far harder than the pull ashore, and, what was worse, the wind was com­ing up, the sea was ris­ing, and the snow was thick­en­ing. Nei­ther of us said a word. We saw that our sit­u­a­tion was very se­ri­ous, and that we had been very fool­hardy; but the words were use­less now. The only thing to be done was to pull for the ship with all our strength, and that was what we did.

So we pushed off, and rowed as we had never rowed be­fore. Our progress was dif­fi­cult. The sea grew steadily rougher; the wind in­creased; the snow thick­ened; and, worst of all, the day was draw­ing to a close. We had mis­cal­cu­lated both as to dis­tance and time. Even if it had con­tin­ued calm we should have had to row back in the dark; but now the sun was set­ting, and with the dark­ness we had to en­counter the gath­er­ing storm and the blind­ing snow. We rowed in si­lence. At ev­ery stroke our sit­u­a­tion grew more se­ri­ous. The wind was from the south, and there­fore fa­vored us to some ex­tent, and also made less of a sea than would have been pro­duced by a wind from any other quar­ter; but then this south wind brought dan­gers of its own, which we were soon to feel—new dan­gers and worse ones. For this south wind drove the ship far­ther from us, and at the same time broke up the vast fields of ice and im­pelled the frac­tured masses north­ward. But this was a dan­ger which we did not know just then. At that time we were row­ing for the ship, and amid the dark­ness and the blind­ing snow and the dash­ing waves we heard from time to time the re­port of sig­nal-guns fired from the ship to guide us back. Th­ese were our only guide, for the dark­ness and the snow had drawn the ship from our sight, and we had to be guided by our hear­ing only.

We were row­ing for our lives, and we knew it; but ev­ery mo­ment our sit­u­a­tion grew more des­per­ate. Each new re­port of the gun seemed to sound far­ther away. We seemed al­ways to be row­ing in the wrong di­rec­tion. At each re­port we had to shift the boat’s course some­what, and pull to­ward the last point from which the gun seemed to sound. With all this the wind was in­creas­ing rapidly to a gale, the sea was ris­ing and break­ing over the boat, the snow was blind­ing us with its ever-thick­en­ing sleet. The dark­ness deep­ened and at length had grown so in­tense that noth­ing what­ever could be seen—nei­ther sea nor sky, not even the boat it­self—yet we dared not stop; we had to row. Our lives de­pended on our ef­forts. We had to row, guided by the sound of the ship’s gun, which the ever-vary­ing wind in­ces­santly changed, till our minds grew all con­fused, and we rowed blindly and me­chan­i­cally.

So we la­bored for hours at the oars, and the storm con­tin­u­ally in­creased, and the sea con­tin­u­ally rose, while the snow fell thicker and the dark­ness grew in­tenser. The re­ports of the gun now grew fainter; what was worse, they were heard at longer in­ter­vals, and this showed us that Cap­tain Ben­net was los­ing heart; that he was giv­ing us up; that he de­spaired of find­ing us, and was now fir­ing only an oc­ca­sional gun out of a mourn­ful sense of duty. This thought re­duced us to de­spair. It seemed as if all our ef­forts had only served to take us far­ther away from the ship, and de­prived us of all mo­tive for row­ing any harder than was barely nec­es­sary to keep the boat steady. After a time Agnew dropped his oar and be­gan to bail out the boat—a work which was needed; for, in spite of our care, she had shipped many seas, and was one third full of wa­ter. He worked away at this while I man­aged the boat, and then we took turns at bail­ing. In this way we passed the dreary night.

Morn­ing came at last. The wind was not so vi­o­lent, but the snow was so thick that we could only see for a lit­tle dis­tance around us. The ship was nowhere vis­i­ble, nor were there any signs of her. The last gun had been fired dur­ing the night. All that we could see was the out­line of a gaunt ice­berg—an omi­nous spec­ta­cle. Not know­ing what else to do we rowed on as be­fore, keep­ing in what seemed our best course, though this was mere con­jec­ture, and we knew all the time that we might be go­ing wrong. There was no com­pass in the boat, nor could we tell the sun’s po­si­tion through the thick snow. We rowed with the wind, think­ing that it was blow­ing to­ward the north, and would carry us in that di­rec­tion. We still hoped to come within sound of the ship’s gun, and kept strain­ing our ears in­ces­santly to hear the wished-for re­port. But no such sound ever came again, and we heard noth­ing ex­cept the plash of the waves and the crash of break­ing ice. Thus all that day we rowed along, rest­ing at in­ter­vals when ex­hausted, and then re­sum­ing our labors, un­til at length night came; and again to the snow and ice and waves was added the hor­ror of great dark­ness. We passed that night in deep mis­ery. We had eaten noth­ing since we left the ship, but though ex­hausted by long fast­ing and se­vere la­bor, the de­spair of our hearts took away all de­sire for food. We were worn out with hard work, yet the cold was too great to al­low us to take rest, and we were com­pelled to row so as to keep our­selves from per­ish­ing. But fa­tigue and drowsi­ness over­came us, and we of­ten sank into sleep even while row­ing; and then af­ter a brief slum­ber we would awake with be­numbed limbs to wres­tle again with the oars. In this way we passed that night.

Another morn­ing came, and we found to our great joy that the snow had ceased. We looked ea­gerly around to see if there were any signs of the ship. Noth­ing could be seen of her. Far away on one side rose a peak, which looked like the place where we had landed. Judg­ing from the wind, which we still sup­posed to be southerly, the peak lay to­ward the north­east; in which case we had been car­ried steadily, in spite of all our ef­forts, to­ward the south. About a mile on one side of us the ice be­gan, and ex­tended far away; while on the other side, at the dis­tance of some ten miles, there was an­other line of ice. We seemed to have been car­ried in a south­west­erly di­rec­tion along a broad strait that ran into the vast ice-fields. This dis­cov­ery showed how ut­terly use­less our labors had been; for in spite of all, even with the wind in our fa­vor, we had been drawn steadily in an op­po­site di­rec­tion. It was ev­i­dent that there was some cur­rent here, stronger than all our strength, which had brought us to this place.

We now de­ter­mined to land on the ice, and try to cook a por­tion of our seals. On ap­proach­ing it we no­ticed that there was a cur­rent which tended to draw us past the ice in what I sup­posed to be a south­west­erly di­rec­tion. This con­firmed my worst fears. But now the la­bor of land­ing and build­ing a fire on the ice served to in­ter­est us for a time and di­vert our thoughts. We brushed away the snow, and then broke up a box which was in the boat, and also the stern seats. This we used very spar­ingly, re­serv­ing the rest for an­other oc­ca­sion. Then we cut por­tions from one of the seals, and laid them in thin strips on the flames. The cook­ing was but slight, for the meat was merely singed; but we were rav­en­ous, and the con­tact of the fire was enough to give it an at­trac­tive fla­vor. With this food we were greatly re­freshed; and as for drink, we had all around us an end­less ex­tent of ice and snow. Then, tak­ing our pre­cious frag­ments of cooked meat, we re­turned to the boat and put off. We could scarcely tell what to do next, and while de­bat­ing on this point we fell asleep. We slept far into the night, then awoke be­numbed with cold; then took to the oars till we were weary; then fell asleep again, to be again awak­ened by the cold and again to pull at the oars. So the night passed, and an­other day came.

The snow still held off, but the sky was over­cast with dark, leaden-col­ored clouds, and looked threat­en­ing. Ice was all around us as be­fore; and the open wa­ter had di­min­ished now from ten miles to five miles of width. The ice on one side was low, but on the op­po­site side it arose to the height of one hun­dred feet. We saw here, as we watched the shore, that the cur­rent which had al­ready borne us thus far was now stronger than ever, and was car­ry­ing us along at a rate which made all ef­forts of ours against it ut­terly use­less. And now a de­bate arose be­tween us as to the di­rec­tion of this cur­rent. Agnew sud­denly de­clared his be­lief that it was run­ning north, while I was firm in the con­vic­tion that it ran south.

“There’s no use row­ing any more,” said Agnew. “If it runs south we can’t re­sist it. It’s too strong. But I al­ways like to look on the bright side, and so I be­lieve it runs north. In that case there is no use row­ing, for it will carry us along fast enough.”

Then I pro­posed that we should go ashore on the ice. To this Agnew ob­jected, but af­ter­ward con­sented, at my earnest re­quest. So we tried to get ashore, but this time found it im­pos­si­ble; for the ice con­sisted of a vast sheet of float­ing lumps, which looked like the ruin of bergs that had been bro­ken up in some storm. After this I had noth­ing to say, nor was there any­thing left for us but to drift wher­ever the cur­rent might carry us.

So we drifted for some days, Agnew all the time main­tain­ing that we were go­ing north, while I was sure that we were go­ing south. The sky re­mained as cloudy as ever, the wind var­ied in­ces­santly, and there was noth­ing by which we could con­jec­ture the points of the com­pass. We lived on our seal, and for drink we chewed ice and snow. One thing was cer­tain—the cli­mate was no colder. Agnew laid great stress on this.

“You see,” said he, “we must be go­ing north. If we were go­ing south we should be frozen stiff by this time.”

“Yes; but if we were go­ing north,” said I, “we ought to find it grow­ing warmer.”

“No,” said he, “not with all this ice around us. It’s the ice that keeps the tem­per­a­ture in this cold state.”

Ar­gu­ment could do no good, and so we each re­mained true to our be­lief—his lead­ing him to hope, and mine drag­ging me down to de­spair. At length we fin­ished the last frag­ment of the seal that we had cooked, and, find­ing our­selves near some firm ice, we went ashore and cooked all that was left, us­ing the re­main­der of our wood for fuel, and all that we dared to re­move from the boat. Re-em­bark­ing with this, we drifted on as be­fore.

Sev­eral more days passed. At last one night I was roused by Agnew. He pointed far away to the dis­tant hori­zon, where I saw a deep red glow as of fire. We were both filled with won­der at the sight, and were ut­terly un­able to ac­count for it. We knew that it could not be caused by the sun or the moon, for it was mid­night, and the cause lay on the Earth and not in the skies. It was a deep, lurid glow, ex­tend­ing along the hori­zon, and seemed to be caused by some vast con­fla­gra­tion.

III A World of Fire and Desolation

At the sight of that deep-red glow var­i­ous feel­ings arose within us: in me there was new de­jec­tion; in Agnew there was stronger hope. I could not think but that it was our ship that was on fire, and was burn­ing be­fore our eyes. Agnew thought that it was some burn­ing for­est, and that it showed our ap­proach to some hab­it­able and in­hab­ited land. For hour af­ter hour we watched, and all the time the cur­rent drew us nearer, and the glow grew brighter and more in­tense. At last we were too weak to watch any longer, and we fell asleep.

On wak­ing our first thoughts were about the fire, and we looked ea­gerly around. It was day, but the sky was as gloomy as ever, and the fire was there be­fore our eyes, bright and ter­ri­ble. We could now see it plainly, and dis­cern the cause also. The fire came from two points, at some dis­tance apart—two peaks ris­ing above the hori­zon, from which there burst forth flames and smoke with in­ces­sant ex­plo­sions. All was now man­i­fest. It was no burn­ing ship, no blaz­ing for­est, no land in­hab­ited by man: those blaz­ing peaks were two vol­ca­noes in a state of ac­tive erup­tion, and at that sight I knew the worst.

“I know where we are now,” I said, de­spair­ingly.

“Where?” asked Agnew.

“That,” said I, “is the Antarc­tic con­ti­nent.”

“The Antarc­tic fid­dle­stick,” said he, con­temp­tu­ously. “It is far more likely to be some vol­canic is­land in the South Sea. There’s a tremen­dous vol­cano in the Sand­wich Is­lands, and these are some­thing like it.”

“I be­lieve,” said I, “that these are the very vol­ca­noes that Sir James Ross dis­cov­ered last year.”

“Do you hap­pen to know where he found them?” Agnew asked.

“I do not,” I an­swered.

“Well, I do,” said he, “and they’re thou­sands of miles away from this. They are south lat­i­tude 77°, east lon­gi­tude 167°; while we, as I guess, are about south lat­i­tude 40°, east lon­gi­tude 60°.”

“At any rate,” said I, “we’re drift­ing straight to­ward them.”

“So I see,” said Agnew, dryly. “At any rate, the cur­rent will take us some­where. We shall find our­selves car­ried past these vol­canic is­lands, or through them, and then west to the Cape of Good Hope. Be­sides, even here we may find land with an­i­mals and veg­e­ta­tion; who knows?”

“What! amid all this ice?” I cried. “Are you mad?”

“Mad?” said he; “I should cer­tainly go mad if I hadn’t hope.”

“Hope!” I re­peated; “I have long since given up hope.”

“Oh, well,” said he, “en­joy your de­spair, and don’t try to de­prive me of my con­so­la­tion. My hope sus­tains me, and helps me to cheer you up. It would never do, old fel­low, for both of us to knock un­der.”

I said noth­ing more, nor did Agnew. We drifted on, and all our thoughts were taken up with the two vol­ca­noes, to­ward which we were ev­ery mo­ment draw­ing nearer. As we ap­proached they grew larger and larger, tow­er­ing up to a tremen­dous height. I had seen Ve­su­vius and Strom­boli and Ætna and Co­topaxi; but these ap­peared far larger than any of them, not ex­cept­ing the last. They rose, like the Peak of Tener­iffe, abruptly from the sea, with no in­ter­ven­ing hills to dwarf or di­min­ish their pro­por­tions. They were ten or twelve miles apart, and the chan­nel of wa­ter in which we were drift­ing flowed be­tween them.

Here the ice and snow ended. We thus came at last to land; but it was a land that seemed more ter­ri­ble than even the bleak ex­panse of ice and snow that lay be­hind, for noth­ing could be seen ex­cept a vast and drear ac­cu­mu­la­tion of lava-blocks of ev­ery imag­in­able shape, with­out a trace of veg­e­ta­tion—un­in­hab­ited, un­in­hab­it­able, and un­pass­able to man. But just where the ice ended and the rocks be­gan there was a long, low reef, which pro­jected for more than a quar­ter of a mile into the wa­ter, af­ford­ing the only pos­si­ble land­ing-place within sight. Here we de­cided to land, so as to rest and con­sider what was best to be done.

Here we landed, and walked up to where rugged lava-blocks pre­vented any fur­ther progress. But at this spot our at­ten­tion was sud­denly ar­rested by a sight of hor­ror. It was a hu­man fig­ure ly­ing pros­trate, face down­ward.

At this sight there came over us a ter­ri­ble sen­sa­tion. Even Agnew’s buoy­ant soul shrank back, and we stared at each other with quiv­er­ing lips. It was some time be­fore we could re­cover our­selves; then we went to the fig­ure, and stooped down to ex­am­ine it.

The clothes were those of a Euro­pean and a sailor; the frame was ema­ci­ated and dried up, till it looked like a skele­ton; the face was black­ened and all with­ered, and the bony hands were clinched tight. It was ev­i­dently some sailor who had suf­fered ship­wreck in these fright­ful soli­tudes, and had drifted here to starve to death in this ap­palling wilder­ness. It was a sight which seemed omi­nous of our own fate, and Agnew’s boasted hope, which had so long up­held him, now sank down into a de­spair as deep as my own. What room was there now for hope, or how could we ex­pect any other fate than this?

At length I be­gan to search the pock­ets of the de­ceased.

“What are you do­ing?” asked Agnew, in a hoarse voice.

“I’m try­ing to find out who he is,” I said. “Per­haps there may be pa­pers.”

As I said this I felt some­thing in the breast-pocket of his jacket, and drew it forth. It was a leather pock­et­book, mouldy and rot­ten like the cloth­ing. On open­ing it, it fell to pieces. There was noth­ing in it but a piece of pa­per, also mouldy and rot­ten. This I un­folded with great care, and saw writ­ing there, which, though faded, was still leg­i­ble. It was a let­ter, and there were still signs of long and fre­quent pe­rusals, and marks, too, which looked as though made by tears—tears, per­haps of the writer, per­haps of the reader: who can tell? I have pre­served this let­ter ever since, and I now fas­ten it here upon this sheet of my man­u­script.

“Bris­tol April 20. 1820.

“my dar­ling tom

“i writ you these few lines in hast i don like youar gon a walen an in the south sea dont go dar­lin tom or mebbe ill never se you agin for ave bad drems of you dar­lin tom an im afraid so don go my dar­lin tom but come back an take an­oth ship for Amer­ica baby i as wel as ever but mises is pa an as got a new tooth an i think yo otnt go a walen o dar­lin tom * * * sea as the wages was i in New York an bet­ter go thar an id like to go ther for good for they gives good wages in Amer­ica. O come back my Dar­lin tom and take me to Amer­ica an the baby an weel all live an love an di to­gether

“Your lov­ing wife Pol­ley Reed.”

I be­gan to read this, but there came a lump in my throat, and I had to stop. Agnew leaned on my shoul­der, and we both read it in si­lence. He rubbed the back of his hand over his eyes and drew a long breath. Then he walked away for a lit­tle dis­tance, and I put the let­ter care­fully away in my own pock­et­book. After a lit­tle while Agnew came back.

“More,” said he, “do you re­mem­ber any of the burial-ser­vice?”

I un­der­stood his mean­ing at once.

“Yes,” I said, “some of it—a good deal of it, I think.”

“That’s good,” said he. “Let’s put the poor fel­low un­der ground.”

“It would be hard to do that,” I said; “we’ll have to bury him in the snow.”

At this Agnew went off for a lit­tle dis­tance and clam­bered over the rocks. He was not gone long. When he re­turned he said, “I’ve found some crum­bled pumice-stone; we can scoop a grave for him there.”

We then raised the body and car­ried it to the place which Agnew had found. So ema­ci­ated was the poor dead sailor that his re­mains were no heav­ier than a small boy. On reach­ing the spot, we found the crum­bled pumice-stone. We placed the body in a crevice among the lava rocks, and then I said what I could re­mem­ber of the burial-ser­vice. After this we car­ried in our hands the crum­bled pumice-stone un­til we had cov­ered the body, and thus gave the poor fel­low a Chris­tian burial.

We then re­turned to the shore.

“More, old fel­low,” said Agnew, “I feel the bet­ter for this; the ser­vice has done me good.”

“And me too,” said I. “It has re­minded me of what I had for­got­ten. This world is only a part of life. We may lose it and yet live on. There is an­other world; and if we can only keep that in our minds we sha’n’t be so ready to sink into de­spair—that is, I sha’n’t. De­s­pair is my weak­ness; you are more hope­ful.”

“Yes,” said Agnew, solemnly; “but my hope thus far has re­ferred only to the safety of my skin. After this I shall try to think of my soul, and cul­ti­vate, not the hope of es­cape, but the hope full of im­mor­tal­ity. Yes, More, af­ter all we shall live, if not in Eng­land, then, let us hope, in heaven.”

There was a long si­lence af­ter this—that kind of si­lence which one may pre­serve who is at the point of death.

“I won­der how he got here?” said Agnew, at last. “The let­ter men­tions a whaler. No doubt the ship has been driven too far south; it has foundered; he has es­caped in a boat, ei­ther alone or with oth­ers; he has been car­ried along this chan­nel, and has landed here, afraid to go any far­ther.”

“But his boat, what has be­come of that?”

“His boat! That must have gone long ago. The let­ter was writ­ten in 1820. At any rate, let’s look around.”

We did so. After some search we found frag­ments of a rot­ted rope at­tached to a piece of rock.

“That,” said Agnew, “must have been fas­tened to the boat; and as for the boat her­self, she has long ago been swept away from this.”

“What shall we do now?” I said, af­ter a long si­lence.

“There’s only one thing,” said Agnew. “We must go on.”

“Go on?” I asked, in won­der.

“Cer­tainly,” said he, con­fi­dently. “Will you stay here? No. Will you go back? You can’t. We must, there­fore, go on. That is our only hope.”

“Hope!” I cried. “Do you still talk of hope?”

“Hope?” said Agnew; “of course. Why not? There are no lim­its to hope, are there? One can hope any­thing any­where. It is bet­ter to die while strug­gling like a man, full of hope and en­ergy than to per­ish in in­ac­tion and de­spair. It is bet­ter to die in the storm and fu­ri­ous wa­ters than to waste away in this aw­ful place. So come along. Let’s drift as be­fore. Let’s see where this chan­nel will take us. It will cer­tainly take us some­where. Such a stream as this must have some out­let.”

“This stream,” said I, “will take us to death, and death only. The cur­rent grows swifter ev­ery hour. I’ve heard some old yarn of a vast open­ing at each of the poles, or one of them, into which the wa­ters of the ocean pour. They fall into one, and some say they go through and come out at the other.”

Agnew laughed.

“That,” said he, “is a mad­man’s dream. In the first place, I don’t be­lieve that we are ap­proach­ing the south, but the north. The warmth of the cli­mate here shows that. Yes, we are draw­ing north. We shall soon emerge into warm wa­ters and bright skies. So come along, and let us lose no more time.”

I made no fur­ther ob­jec­tion. There was noth­ing else to be done, and at the very worst we could not be in greater dan­ger while drift­ing on than in re­main­ing be­hind. Soon, there­fore, we were again in the boat, and the cur­rent swept us on as be­fore.

The chan­nel now was about four miles wide. On ei­ther side arose the lofty vol­ca­noes vom­it­ing forth flames and smoke with fu­ri­ous ex­plo­sions; vast stones were hurled up into the air from the craters; streams of molten lava rolled down, and at in­ter­vals there fell great show­ers of ashes. The shores on ei­ther side were pre­cip­i­tous and rugged be­yond all de­scrip­tion, look­ing like fiery lava streams which had been ar­rested by the flood, and cooled into gloomy, over­hang­ing cliffs. The lava rock was of a deep, dull slate-color, which at a dis­tance looked black; and the black­ness which thus suc­ceeded to the white­ness of the snow be­hind us seemed like the fu­neral pall of na­ture. Through scenes like these we drifted on, and the vol­ca­noes on ei­ther side of the chan­nel tow­ered on high with their fiery floods of lava, their in­ces­sant ex­plo­sions, their fierce out­bursts of flames, and over­head there rolled a dense black canopy of smoke—al­to­gether form­ing a ter­rific ap­proach to that un­known and aw­ful path­way upon which we were go­ing. So we passed this dread por­tal, and then there lay be­fore us—what? Was it a land of life or a land of death? Who could say?

It was evening when we passed through. Night came on, and the dark­ness was il­lu­mi­nated by the fiery glow of the vol­canic flames. Worn out with fa­tigue, we fell asleep. So the night passed, and the cur­rent bore us on un­til, at length, the morn­ing came. We awoke, and now, for the first time in many days, we saw the face of the sun. The clouds had at last bro­ken, the sky was clear, and be­hind us the sun was shin­ing. That sight told us all. It showed us where we were go­ing.

I pointed to the sun.

“Look there,” said I. “There is the sun in the north­ern sky—be­hind us. We have been drift­ing steadily to­ward the south.”

At this Agnew was silent, and sat look­ing back for a long time. There we could still see the glow of the vol­canic fires, though they were now many miles away; while the sun, but lately risen, was ly­ing on a course closer to the hori­zon than we had ever seen it be­fore.

“We are go­ing south,” said I—“to the South Pole. This swift cur­rent can have but one end­ing—there may be an open­ing at the South Pole, or a whirlpool like the Mael­strom.”

Agnew looked around with a smile.

“All these no­tions,” said he, “are dreams, or the­o­ries, or guesses. There is no ev­i­dence to prove them. Why trou­ble your­self about a guess? You and I can guess, and with bet­ter rea­son; for we have now, it seems, come far­ther south than any hu­man be­ing who has ever lived. Do not imag­ine that the sur­face of the Earth is dif­fer­ent at the poles from what it is any­where else. If we get to the South Pole we shall see there what we have al­ways seen—the open view of land or wa­ter, and the bound­ary of the hori­zon. As for this cur­rent, it seems to me like the Gulf Stream, and it ev­i­dently does an im­por­tant work in the move­ment of the ocean wa­ters. It pours on through vast fields of ice on its way to other oceans, where it will prob­a­bly be­come united with new cur­rents. The­o­ries about open­ings at the poles, or whirlpools, must be given up. Since the Mael­strom has been found to be a fic­tion, no one need be­lieve in any other whirlpool. For my own part, I now be­lieve that this cur­rent will bear us on, due south, over the pole, and then still on­ward, un­til at last we shall find our­selves in the South Pa­cific Ocean. So cheer up—don’t be down­hearted; there’s still hope. We have left the ice and snow be­hind, and al­ready the air is warmer. Cheer up; we may find our luck turn at any mo­ment.”

To this I had no re­ply to make. Agnew’s con­fi­dence seemed to me to be as­sumed, and cer­tainly did not al­le­vi­ate my own deep gloom, nor was the scene around cal­cu­lated to rouse me in the slight­est de­gree out of my de­spair. The chan­nel had now less­ened to a width of not more than two miles; the shores on ei­ther side were pre­cip­i­tous cliffs, bro­ken by oc­ca­sional de­cliv­i­ties, but all of solid rock, so dark as to be al­most black, and ev­i­dently of vol­canic ori­gin. At times there arose rugged em­i­nences, scarred and riven, in­de­scrib­ably dis­mal and ap­palling. There was not only an ut­ter ab­sence of life here in these ab­hor­rent re­gions, but an ac­tual im­pos­si­bil­ity of life which was enough to make the stoutest heart quail. The rocks looked like iron. It seemed a land of iron pen­e­trated by this ocean stream which had made for it­self a chan­nel, and now bore us on­ward to a des­ti­na­tion which was be­yond all con­jec­ture.

Through such scenes we drifted all that day. Night came, and in the skies over­head there arose a bril­liant dis­play of the Aurora Aus­tralis, while to­ward the north the vol­canic fires glowed with in­tense lus­tre. That night we slept. On awak­en­ing we no­ticed a change in the scene. The shores, though still black and for­bid­ding, were no longer pre­cip­i­tous, but sloped down grad­u­ally to the wa­ter; the cli­mate was sen­si­bly milder, and far away be­fore us there arose a line of gi­ant moun­tains, whose sum­mits were cov­ered with ice and snow that gleamed white and pur­ple in the rays of the sun.

Sud­denly Agnew gave a cry, and pointed to the op­po­site shore.

“Look!” he cried—“do you see? They are men!”

I looked, and there I saw plainly some mov­ing fig­ures that were, be­yond a doubt, hu­man be­ings.

IV The Sight of Human Beings

The sight of hu­man be­ings, thus un­ex­pect­edly found, filled us with strange feel­ings—feel­ings which I can­not ex­plain. The coun­try was still iron-bound and dark and for­bid­ding, and the stream ran on in a strong cur­rent, deep, black as ink, and re­sist­less as fate; the sky be­hind was lighted up by the vol­canic glare which still shone from afar; and in front the view was bounded by the icy heights of a moun­tain chain. Here was, in­deed, a strange coun­try for a hu­man habi­ta­tion; and strange, in­deed, were the hu­man be­ings whom we saw.

“Shall we land?” said Agnew.

“Oh no,” said I. “Don’t be hasty. The el­e­ments are some­times kinder than men, and I feel safer here, even in this river of death, than ashore with such crea­tures as those.”

Agnew made no re­ply. We watched the fig­ures on the shore. We saw them com­ing down, star­ing and ges­tic­u­lat­ing. We drew on nearer to them till we were able to see them bet­ter. A nearer view did not im­prove them. They were hu­man be­ings, cer­tainly, but of such an ap­palling as­pect that they could only be likened to an­i­mated mum­mies. They were small, thin, shriv­elled, black, with long mat­ted hair and hideous faces. They all had long spears, and wore about the waist short skirts that seemed to be made of the skin of some sea-fowl.

We could not imag­ine how these crea­tures lived, or where. There were no signs of veg­e­ta­tion of any kind—not a tree or a shrub. There were no an­i­mals; but there were great flocks of birds, some of which seemed dif­fer­ent from any­thing that we had ever seen be­fore. The long spears which the na­tives car­ried might pos­si­bly be used for catch­ing these, or for fish­ing pur­poses. This thought made them seem less for­mi­da­ble, since they would thus be in­stru­ments of food rather than weapons of war. Mean­while we drifted on as be­fore, and the na­tives watched us, run­ning along the shore abreast of us, so as to keep up with the boat. There seemed over a hun­dred of them. We could see no signs of any habi­ta­tions—no huts, how­ever hum­ble; but we con­cluded that their abodes were far­ther in­land. As for the na­tives them­selves, the longer we looked at them the more ab­hor­rent they grew. Even the wretched abo­rig­ines of Van Die­man’s Land, who have been classed low­est in the scale of hu­man­ity, were pleas­ing and con­ge­nial when com­pared with these, and the land looked worse than Tierra del Fuego. It looked like a land of iron, and its in­hab­i­tants like fiends.

Agnew again pro­posed to land, but I re­fused.

“No,” I said; “I’d rather starve for a week, and live on hope. Let us drift on. If we go on we may have hope if we choose, but if we land here we shall lose even that. Can we hope for any­thing from such things as these? Even if they prove friendly, can we live among them? To stay here is worse than death; our only hope is to go on.”

Agnew made no re­ply, and we drifted on for two hours, still fol­lowed by the na­tives. They made no hos­tile demon­stra­tions. They merely watched us, ap­par­ently from mo­tives of cu­rios­ity. All this time we were draw­ing steadily nearer to the line of lofty moun­tains, which with their icy crests rose be­fore us like an in­ac­ces­si­ble and im­pass­able bar­rier, ap­par­ently clos­ing up all far­ther progress; nor was there any in­di­ca­tion of any pass or any open­ing, how­ever nar­row, through which the great stream might run. Noth­ing was there but one un­bro­ken wall of iron cliffs and icy sum­mits. At last we saw that the slop­ing shores grew steeper, un­til, about a mile or two be­fore us, they changed to tow­er­ing cliffs that rose up on each side for about a thou­sand feet above the wa­ter; here the stream ran, and be­came lost to view as com­pletely as though swal­lowed up by the Earth.

“We can go no far­ther,” said Agnew. “See—this stream seems to make a plunge there into the moun­tains. There must be some deep canyon there with cataracts. To go on is cer­tain death. We must stop here, if only to de­lib­er­ate. Say, shall we risk it among these na­tives? After all, there is not, per­haps, any dan­ger among them. They are lit­tle crea­tures and seem harm­less. They are cer­tainly not very good-look­ing; but then, you know, ap­pear­ances of­ten de­ceive, and the devil’s not so black as he’s painted. What do you say?”

“I sup­pose we can do noth­ing else,” said I.

In fact, I could see that we had reached a cri­sis in our fate. To go on seemed cer­tain death. To stop was our only al­ter­na­tive; and as we were armed we should not be al­to­gether at the mercy of these crea­tures. Hav­ing made this de­ci­sion we acted upon it at once, for in such a cur­rent there was no time for de­lay; and so, seiz­ing the oars, we soon brought the boat ashore.

As we ap­proached, the crowd of na­tives stood await­ing us, and looked more re­pul­sive than ever. We could see the ema­ci­a­tion of their bony frames; their toes and fin­gers were like birds’ claws; their eyes were small and dull and weak, and sunken in cav­ernous hol­lows, from which they looked at us like corpses—a hor­ri­ble sight. They stood qui­etly, how­ever, and with­out any hos­tile demon­stra­tion, hold­ing their spears care­lessly rest­ing upon the ground.

“I don’t like the looks of them,” said I. “I think I had bet­ter fire a gun.”

“Why?” cried Agnew. “For Heaven’s sake, man, don’t hurt any of them!”

“Oh no,” said I; “I only mean to in­spire a lit­tle whole­some re­spect.”

Say­ing this I fired in the air. The re­port rang out with long echoes, and as the smoke swept away it showed us all the na­tives on the ground. They had seated them­selves with their hands crossed on their laps, and there they sat look­ing at us as be­fore, but with no man­i­fes­ta­tion of fear or even sur­prise. I had ex­pected to see them run, but there was noth­ing of the kind. This puz­zled us. Still, there was no time now for any fur­ther hes­i­ta­tion. The cur­rent was sweep­ing us to­ward the chasm be­tween the cliffs, and we had to land with­out de­lay. This we did, and as I had an­other bar­rel still loaded and a pis­tol, I felt that with these arms and those of Agnew we should be able to de­fend our­selves. It was in this state of mind that we landed, and se­cured the boat by means of the grap­pling-iron.

The na­tives now all crowded around us, mak­ing many strange ges­tures, which we did not un­der­stand. Some of them bowed low, oth­ers pros­trated them­selves; on the whole these seemed like marks of re­spect, and it oc­curred to me that they re­garded us as su­pe­rior be­ings of some sort. It was ev­i­dent that there was noth­ing like hos­til­ity in their minds. At the same time, the closer sur­vey which I now made of them filled me with re­newed hor­ror; their mea­gre frames, small, wa­tery, lack­lus­tre eyes, hol­low, cav­ernous sock­ets, sunken cheeks, pro­trud­ing teeth, claw-like fin­gers, and with­ered skins, all made them look more than ever like an­i­mated mum­mies, and I shrank from them in­vol­un­tar­ily, as one shrinks from con­tact with a corpse.

Agnew, how­ever, was very dif­fer­ent, and it was ev­i­dent that he felt no re­pug­nance what­ever. He bowed and smiled at them, and shook hands with half a dozen of them in suc­ces­sion. The hand­shak­ing was a new thing to them, but they ac­cepted it in a proper spirit, and re­newed their bows and pros­tra­tions. After this they all of­fered us their lances. This cer­tainly seemed like an act of peace and good­will. I shook my head and de­clined to touch them; but Agnew ac­cepted one of them, and of­fered his ri­fle in re­turn. The one to whom he of­fered it re­fused to take it. He seemed im­mensely grat­i­fied be­cause Agnew had taken his lance, and the oth­ers seemed dis­ap­pointed at his re­fusal to take theirs. But I felt my heart quake as I saw him of­fer his ri­fle, and still more when he of­fered it to one or two oth­ers, and only re­gained my com­po­sure as I per­ceived that his of­fer was re­fused by all.

They now made mo­tions to us to fol­low, and we all set forth to­gether.

“My dear More,” said Agnew, cheer­ily, “they’re not a bad lot. They mean well. They can’t help their looks. You’re too sus­pi­cious and re­served. Let’s make friends with them, and get them to help us. Do as I do.”

I tried to, but found it im­pos­si­ble, for my re­pug­nance was im­mov­able. It was like the hor­ror which one feels to­ward rats, cock­roaches, ear­wigs, or ser­pents. It was some­thing that de­fied rea­son. Th­ese crea­tures seemed like hu­man ver­min.

We marched in­land for about half a mile, crossed a ridge, and came to a val­ley, or rather a kind of hol­low, at the other side of which we found a cave with a smoul­der­ing fire in front. The fire was made of coal, which must ex­ist here some­where. It was highly bi­tu­mi­nous, and burned with a great blaze.

The day was now draw­ing to a close; far away I could see the lurid glow of the vol­ca­noes, which grew brighter as the day de­clined: above, the skies twin­kled with in­nu­mer­able stars, and the air was filled with the moan of rush­ing wa­ters.

We en­tered the cave. As we did so the na­tives heaped coal upon the fire, and the flames arose, light­ing up the in­te­rior. We found here a num­ber of women and chil­dren, who looked at us with­out ei­ther fear or cu­rios­ity. The chil­dren looked like lit­tle dwarfs; the women were hags, hideous be­yond de­scrip­tion. One old woman in par­tic­u­lar, who seemed to be in au­thor­ity, was ac­tu­ally ter­ri­ble in her aw­ful and re­pul­sive ug­li­ness. A night­mare dream never fur­nished forth a more fright­ful ob­ject. This night­mare hag pros­trated her­self be­fore each of us with such an air of self-im­mo­la­tion that she looked as though she wished us to kill her at once. The rough cave, the red light of the fire, all made the scene more aw­ful; and a wild thought came to me that we had ac­tu­ally reached, while yet liv­ing, the in­fer­nal world, and that this was the abode of dev­ils. Yet their ac­tions, it must be con­fessed, were far from dev­il­ish. Every­one seemed ea­ger to serve us. Some spread out couches formed of the skins of birds for us to sit on; oth­ers at­tended to the fire; oth­ers of­fered us gifts of large and beau­ti­ful feath­ers, to­gether with nu­mer­ous trin­kets of rare and cu­ri­ous work­man­ship. This kind at­ten­tion on their part was a great puz­zle to me, and I could not help sus­pect­ing that be­neath all this there must be some sin­is­ter de­sign. Re­solv­ing to be pre­pared for the worst, I qui­etly reloaded the empty bar­rel of my ri­fle and watched with the ut­most vig­i­lance. As for Agnew, he took it all in the most un­sus­pi­cious man­ner. He made signs to them, shook hands with them, ac­cepted their gifts, and even tried to do the agree­able to the for­mi­da­ble hags and the child-fiends around him. He soon at­tracted the chief at­ten­tion, and while all looked ad­mir­ingly upon him, I was left to lan­guish in com­par­a­tive ne­glect.

At length a sa­vory odor came through the cave, and a repast was spread be­fore us. It con­sisted of some large fowl that looked like a goose, but was twice as large as the largest tur­key that I had ever seen. The taste was like that of a wild-goose, but rather fishy. Still to us it seemed de­li­cious, for our pro­longed diet of raw seal had made us ready to wel­come any other food what­ever; and this fowl, what­ever it was, would not have been un­wel­come to any hun­gry man. It was ev­i­dent that these peo­ple lived on the flesh of birds of var­i­ous sorts. All around us we saw the skins of birds dried with the feath­ers on, and used for cloth­ing, for mats, and for or­na­ments.

The repast be­ing fin­ished, we both felt greatly strength­ened and re­freshed. Agnew con­tin­ued to cul­ti­vate his new ac­quain­tances, and see­ing me hold­ing back, he said,

“More, old fel­low, these good peo­ple give me to un­der­stand that there is an­other place bet­ter than this, and want me to go with them. Will you go?”

At this a great fear seized me.

“Don’t go!” I cried—“don’t go! We are close by the boat here, and if any­thing hap­pens we can eas­ily get to it.”

Agnew laughed in my face.

“Why, you don’t mean to tell me,” said he, “that you are still sus­pi­cious, and af­ter that din­ner? Why, man, if they wanted to harm us, would they feast us in this style? Non­sense, man! Drop your sus­pi­cions and come along.”

I shook my head ob­sti­nately.

“Well,” said he, “if I thought there was any­thing in your sus­pi­cions I would stay by you; but I’m con­fi­dent they mean noth­ing but kind­ness, so I’m go­ing off to see the place.”

“You’ll be back again?” said I.

“Oh yes,” said he, “of course I’ll come back, and sleep here.”

With these words he left, and nearly all the peo­ple ac­com­pa­nied him. I was left be­hind with the women and chil­dren and about a dozen men. Th­ese men bus­ied them­selves with some work over bird-skins; the women were oc­cu­pied with some other work over feath­ers. No one took any no­tice of me. There did not seem to be any re­straint upon me, nor was I watched in any way. Once the night­mare hag came and of­fered me a small roasted fowl, about the size of a wood­cock. I de­clined it, but at the same time this del­i­cate at­ten­tion cer­tainly sur­prised me.

I was now be­gin­ning to strug­gle with some suc­cess against my feel­ings of ab­hor­rence, when sud­denly I caught sight of some­thing which chased away ev­ery other thought, and made my blood turn cold in my veins. It was some­thing out­side. At the mouth of the cave—by the fire which was still blaz­ing bright, and light­ing up the scene—I saw four men who had just come to the cave: they were car­ry­ing some­thing which I at first sup­posed to be a sick or wounded com­pan­ion. On reach­ing the fire they put it down, and I saw, with a thrill of dis­may, that their bur­den was nei­ther sick nor wounded, but dead, for the corpse lay rigid as they had placed it. Then I saw the night­mare hag ap­proach it with a knife. An aw­ful thought came to me—the crown­ing hor­ror! The thought soon proved to be but too well founded. The night­mare hag be­gan to cut, and in an in­stant had de­tached the arm of the corpse, which she thrust among the coals in the very place where lately she had cooked the fowl. Then she went back for more.

For a mo­ment my brain reeled, and I gasped for breath. Then I rose and stag­gered out, I know not how. No one tried to stop me, nor did any­one fol­low me; and, for my part, I was ready to blow out the brains of the first who dared to ap­proach me. In this way I reached the open air, and passed by the hag and the four men as they were busy at their aw­ful work. But at this point I was ob­served and fol­lowed. A num­ber of men and women came af­ter me, jab­ber­ing their un­couth lan­guage and ges­tic­u­lat­ing. I warned them off, an­grily. They per­sisted, and though none of them were armed, yet I saw that they were un­will­ing to have me leave the cave, and I sup­posed that they would try to pre­vent me by force.

The ab­sence of Agnew made my po­si­tion a dif­fi­cult one. Had it not been for this I would have burst through them and fled to the boat; but as long as he was away I felt bound to wait; and though I longed to fly, I could not for his sake. The boat seemed to be a haven of rest. I longed to be in her once more, and drift away, even if it should be to my death. Na­ture was here less ter­ri­ble than man; and it seemed bet­ter to drown in the wa­ters, to per­ish amid rocks and whirlpools, than to linger here amid such hor­rors as these. Th­ese peo­ple were not like hu­man be­ings. The vilest and low­est sav­ages that I had ever seen were not so odi­ous as these. A herd of mon­keys would be far more con­ge­nial, a flock of wolves less ab­hor­rent. They had the car­i­ca­ture of the hu­man form; they were the low­est of hu­man­ity; their speech was a mock­ery of lan­guage; their faces dev­il­ish, their kind­ness a cun­ning pre­tence; and most hideous of all was the night­mare hag that pre­pared the can­ni­bal repast.

I could not be­gin hos­til­i­ties, for I had to wait for Agnew; so I stood and looked, and then walked away for a lit­tle dis­tance. They fol­lowed me closely, with ea­ger words and ges­tic­u­la­tions, though as yet no one touched me or threat­ened me. Their tone seemed rather one of per­sua­sion. After a few paces I stood still, with all of them around me. The hor­ri­ble repast showed plainly all that was in store for us. They re­ceived us kindly and fed us well only to de­vote us to the most ab­hor­rent of deaths. Agnew, in his mad con­fi­dence, was only in­sur­ing his own doom. He was putting him­self com­pletely in the power of dev­ils, who were in­ca­pable of pity and strangers to hu­man­ity. To make friends with such fiends was im­pos­si­ble, and I felt sure that our only plan was to rule by ter­ror—to seize, to slay, to con­quer. But still I had to wait for him, and did not dare to re­sort to vi­o­lence while he was ab­sent; so I waited, while the sav­ages gath­ered round me, con­tent­ing them­selves with guard­ing me, and nei­ther touch­ing me nor threat­en­ing me. And all this time the hag went on, in­tent on her prepa­ra­tion of the hor­ri­ble repast.

While stand­ing there look­ing, lis­ten­ing, wait­ing for Agnew, I no­ticed many things. Far away the vol­ca­noes blazed, and the north­ern sky was red with a lurid light. There, too, higher up, the moon was shin­ing over­head, the sky was gleam­ing with stars; and all over the heav­ens there shone the lus­tre of the Aurora Aus­tralis, brighter than any I had ever seen—sur­pass­ing the moon and il­lu­mi­nat­ing all. It lighted up the hag­gard faces of the dev­ils around me, and it again seemed to me as though I had died and gone to the land of woe—an iron land, a land of de­spair, with lurid fires all aglow and faces of fear.

Sud­denly, there burst upon my ears the re­port of a gun, which sounded like a thun­der-peal, and echoed in long re­ver­ber­a­tions. At once I un­der­stood it. My fears had proved true. Th­ese sav­ages had en­ticed Agnew away to de­stroy him. In an in­stant I burst through the crowd around me, and ran wildly in the di­rec­tion of that sound, call­ing his name, as I ran, at the top of my voice.

I heard a loud cry; then an­other re­port. I hur­ried on, shout­ing his name in a kind of frenzy. The strange courage of these sav­ages had al­ready im­pressed me deeply. They did not fear our guns. They were all at­tack­ing him, and he was alone, fight­ing for his life.

Then there was an­other re­port; it was his pis­tol. I still ran on, and still shouted to him.

At last I re­ceived an an­swer. He had per­haps heard me, and was an­swer­ing, or, at any rate, he was warn­ing me.

“More,” he cried, “fly, fly, fly to the boat! Save your­self!”

“Where are you?” I cried, as I still rushed on.

“Fly, More, fly! Save your­self! You can’t save me. I’m lost. Fly for your life!”

Judg­ing from his cries, he did not seem far away. I hur­ried on. I could see noth­ing of him. All the time the sav­ages fol­lowed me. None were armed; but it seemed to me that they were pre­par­ing to fling them­selves upon me and over­power me with their num­bers. They would cap­ture me alive, I thought, bind me, and carry me back, re­serv­ing me for a fu­ture time!

I turned and waved them back. They took no no­tice of my ges­ture. Then I ran on once more. They fol­lowed. They could not run so fast as I did, and so I gained on them rapidly, still shout­ing to Agnew. But there was no re­sponse. I ran back­ward and for­ward, cross­ing and re­cross­ing, dou­bling and turn­ing, pur­sued all the time by the sav­ages. At last, in rage and de­spair, I fired upon them, and one of them fell. But, to my dis­may, the oth­ers did not seem to care one whit; they did not stop for one mo­ment, but pur­sued as be­fore.

My sit­u­a­tion was now plain in all its truth. They had en­ticed Agnew away; they had at­tacked him. He had fought, and had been over­pow­ered. He had tried to give me warn­ing. His last words had been for me to fly—to fly: yes, for he well knew that it was bet­ter far for me to go to death through the rag­ing tor­rent than to meet the fate which had fallen upon him­self. For him there was now no more hope. That he was lost was plain. If he were still alive he would call to me; but his voice had been si­lenced for some time. All was over, and that no­ble heart that had with­stood so bravely and cheer­ily the rig­ors of the storm, and the hor­rors of our des­per­ate voy­age, had been stilled in death by the vilest of mis­cre­ants.

I paused for a mo­ment. Even though Agnew was dead, I could not bear to leave him, but felt as though I ought to share his fate. The sav­ages came nearer. At their ap­proach I hes­i­tated no longer. That fate was too ter­ri­ble: I must fly.

But be­fore I fled I turned in fury to wreak vengeance upon them for their crimes. Full of rage and de­spair, I dis­charged my re­main­ing ri­fle-bar­rel into the midst of the crowd. Then I fled to­ward the boat. On the way I had a fright­ful thought that she might have been sent adrift; but, on ap­proach­ing the place, I found her there just as I had left her. The sav­ages, with their usual fear­less­ness, still pur­sued. For a mo­ment I stood on the shore, with the grap­ple in my hand and the boat close by, and as they came near I dis­charged my pis­tol into the midst of them. Then I sprang into the boat; the swift cur­rent bore me away, and in a few min­utes the crowd of pur­su­ing demons dis­ap­peared from view.

V The Torrent Sweeping Under the Mountains

The boat drifted on. The light given by the au­rora and the low moon seemed to grow fainter; and as I looked be­hind I saw that the dis­tant glow from the vol­canic fires had be­come more bril­liant in the in­creas­ing dark­ness. The sides of the chan­nel grew steeper, un­til at last they be­came rocky precipices, ris­ing to an un­known height. The chan­nel it­self grew nar­rower, till from a width of two miles it had con­tracted to a tenth of those di­men­sions; but with this less­en­ing width the wa­ters seemed to rush far more swiftly. Here I drifted help­lessly, and saw the gloomy, rocky cliffs sweep past me as I was hurled on­ward on the breast of the tremen­dous flood. I was in de­spair. The fate of Agnew had pre­pared me for my own, and I was only thank­ful that my fate, since it was in­evitable, would be less ap­palling. Death seemed cer­tain, and my chief thought now was as to the mo­ment when it would come. I was pre­pared. I felt that I could meet it calmly, sternly, even thank­fully; far bet­ter was a death here amid the roar of wa­ters than at the hands of those ab­hor­rent be­ings by whose treach­ery my friend had fallen.

As I went on, the precipices rose higher and seemed to over­hang, the chan­nel grew nar­rower, the light grew fainter, un­til at last all around me grew dark. I was float­ing at the bot­tom of a vast chasm, where the sides seemed to rise pre­cip­i­tously for thou­sands of feet, where nei­ther wa­tery flood nor rocky wall was vis­i­ble, and where, far above, I could see the line of sky be­tween the sum­mits of the cliffs, and watch the glow­ing stars. And as I watched them there came to me the thought that this was my last sight on Earth, and I could only hope that the life which was so swiftly ap­proach­ing its end might live again some­where among those glit­ter­ing orbs. So I thought; and with these thoughts I drifted on, I can­not tell how long, un­til at length there ap­peared a vast black mass, where the open sky above me ter­mi­nated, and where the lus­tre of the stars and the light of the heav­ens were all swal­lowed up in ut­ter dark­ness.

This, then, I thought, is the end. Here, amid this dark­ness, I must make the aw­ful plunge and find my death I fell upon my knees in the bot­tom of the boat and prayed. As I knelt there the boat drew nearer, the black mass grew blacker. The cur­rent swept me on. There were no break­ers; there was no phos­pho­res­cent sparkle of seething wa­ters, and no white­ness of foam. I thought that I was on the brink of some tremen­dous cataract a thou­sand times deeper than Ni­a­gara; some fall where the wa­ters plunged into the depths of the earth; and where, gath­er­ing for the ter­rific de­scent, all other move­ments—all dash­ings and writhings and twist­ings—were oblit­er­ated and lost in the one over­whelm­ing on­ward rush. Sud­denly all grew dark—dark be­yond all ex­pres­sion; the sky above was in a mo­ment snatched from view; I had been flung into some tremen­dous cav­ern; and there, on my knees, with ter­ror in my heart, I waited for death.

The mo­ments passed, and death de­layed to come. The aw­ful plunge was still put off; and though I re­mained on my knees and waited long, still the end came not. The wa­ters seemed still, the boat mo­tion­less. It was borne upon the sur­face of a vast stream as smooth as glass; but who could tell how deep that stream was, or how wide? At length I rose from my knees and sank down upon the seat of the boat, and tried to peer through the gloom. In vain. Noth­ing was vis­i­ble. It was the very black­ness of dark­ness. I lis­tened, but heard noth­ing save a deep, dull, dron­ing sound, which seemed to fill all the air and make it all tremu­lous with its vi­bra­tions. I tried to col­lect my thoughts. I re­called that old the­ory which had been in my mind be­fore this, and which I had men­tioned to Agnew. This was the no­tion that at each pole there is a vast open­ing; that into one of them all the wa­ters of the ocean pour them­selves, and, af­ter pass­ing through the Earth, come out at the other pole, to pass about its sur­face in in­nu­mer­able streams. It was a wild fancy, which I had laughed at un­der other cir­cum­stances, but which now oc­curred to me once more, when I was over­whelmed with de­spair, and my mind was weak­ened by the hor­rors which I had ex­pe­ri­enced; and I had a vague fear that I had been drawn into the very chan­nel through which the ocean wa­ters flowed in their course to that ter­rific, that un­par­al­leled abyss. Still, there was as yet no sign what­ever of any­thing like a de­scent, for the boat was on even keel, and per­fectly level as be­fore, and it was im­pos­si­ble for me to tell whether I was mov­ing swiftly or slowly, or stand­ing per­fectly still; for in that dark­ness there were no vis­i­ble ob­jects by which I could find out the rate of my progress; and as those who go up in bal­loons are ut­terly in­sen­si­ble of mo­tion, so was I on those calm but swift wa­ters.

At length there came into view some­thing which ar­rested my at­ten­tion and en­grossed all my thoughts. It was faint glow that at first caught my gaze; and, on turn­ing to see it bet­ter, I saw a round red spot glow­ing like fire. I had not seen this be­fore. It looked like the moon when it rises from be­hind clouds, and glows red and lurid from the hori­zon; and so this glowed, but not with the steady light of the moon, for the light was fit­ful, and some­times flashed into a bale­ful bright­ness, which soon sub­sided into a dim­mer lus­tre. New alarm arose within me, for this new sight sug­gested some­thing more ter­ri­ble than any­thing that I had thus far thought of. This, then, I thought, was to be the end of my voy­age; this was my goal—a pit of fire, into which I should be hurled! Would it be well, I thought, to wait for such a fate, and ex­pe­ri­ence such a death-agony? Would it not be bet­ter for me to take my own life be­fore I should know the worst? I took my pis­tol and loaded it, so as to be pre­pared, but hes­i­tated to use it un­til my fate should be more ap­par­ent. So I sat, hold­ing my pis­tol, pre­pared to use it, watch­ing the light, and await­ing the time when the glow­ing fires should make all fur­ther hope im­pos­si­ble. But time passed, and the light grew no brighter; on the con­trary, it seemed to grow fainter. There was also an­other change. In­stead of shin­ing be­fore me, it ap­peared more on my left. From this it went on chang­ing its po­si­tion un­til at length it was astern. All the time it con­tin­ued to grow fainter, and it seemed cer­tain that I was mov­ing away from it rather than to­ward it. In the midst of this there oc­curred a new thought, which seemed to ac­count for this light—this was, that it arose from these same vol­ca­noes which had il­lu­mi­nated the north­ern sky when I was ashore, and fol­lowed me still with their glare. I had been car­ried into this dark­ness, through some vast open­ing which now lay be­hind me, dis­clos­ing the red vol­cano glow, and this it was that caused that round­ness and re­sem­blance to the moon. I saw that I was still mov­ing on away from that light as be­fore, and that its chang­ing po­si­tion was due to the turn­ing of the boat as the wa­ter drifted it along, now stern fore­most, now side­wise, and again bow fore­most. From this it seemed plainly ev­i­dent that the wa­ters had borne me into some vast cav­ern of un­known ex­tent, which went un­der the moun­tains—a sub­ter­ranean chan­nel, whose is­sue I could not con­jec­ture. Was this the be­gin­ning of that course which should ul­ti­mately be­come a plunge deep down into some un­ut­ter­able abyss? or might I ever hope to emerge again into the light of day—per­haps in some other ocean—some land of ice and frost and eter­nal night? But the old the­ory of the flow of wa­ter through the Earth had taken hold of me and could not be shaken off. I knew some sci­en­tific men held the opin­ion that the Earth’s in­te­rior is a mass of molten rock and pent-up fire, and that the Earth it­self had once been a burn­ing orb, which had cooled down at the sur­face; yet, af­ter all, this was only a the­ory, and there were other the­o­ries which were to­tally dif­fer­ent. As a boy I had read wild works of fic­tion about lands in the in­te­rior of the Earth, with a sun at the cen­tre, which gave them the light of a per­pet­ual day. Th­ese, I knew, were only the cre­ations of fic­tion; yet, af­ter all, it seemed pos­si­ble that the Earth might con­tain vast hol­low spa­ces in its in­te­rior—realms of eter­nal dark­ness, cav­erns in com­par­i­son with which the hugest caves on the sur­face were but the tini­est cells. I was now be­ing borne on to these. In that case there might be no sud­den plunge, af­ter all. The stream might run on for many thou­sand miles through this ter­rific cav­ern gloom, in ac­cor­dance with nat­u­ral laws; and I might thus live, and drift on in this dark­ness, un­til I should die a lin­ger­ing death of hor­ror and de­spair.

There was no pos­si­ble way of form­ing any es­ti­mate as to speed. All was dark, and even the glow be­hind was fad­ing away; nor could I make any con­jec­ture what­ever as to the size of the chan­nel. At the open­ing it had been con­tracted and nar­row; but here it might have ex­panded it­self to miles, and its vaulted top might reach al­most to the sum­mit of the lofty moun­tains. While sight thus failed me, sound was equally un­avail­ing, for it was al­ways the same—a sus­tained and un­in­ter­mit­tent roar, a low, dron­ing sound, deep and ter­ri­ble, with no vari­a­tions of dash­ing break­ers or rush­ing rapids or fall­ing cataracts. Vague thoughts of fi­nal es­cape came and went; but in such a sit­u­a­tion hope could not be sus­tained. The thick dark­ness op­pressed the soul; and at length even the glow of the dis­tant vol­ca­noes, which had been grad­u­ally di­min­ish­ing, grew dim­mer and fainter, and fi­nally faded out al­to­gether. That seemed to me to be my last sight of earthly things. After this noth­ing was left. There was no longer for me such a thing as sight; there was noth­ing but dark­ness—per­pet­ual and eter­nal night. I was buried in a cav­ern of rush­ing wa­ters, to which there would be no end, where I should be borne on­ward help­lessly by the re­sist­less tide to a mys­te­ri­ous and an ap­palling doom.

The dark­ness grew so in­tol­er­a­ble that I longed for some­thing to dis­pel it, if only for a mo­ment. I struck a match. The air was still, and the flame flashed out, light­ing up the boat and show­ing the black wa­ter around me. This made me ea­ger to see more. I loaded both bar­rels of the ri­fle, keep­ing my pis­tol for an­other pur­pose, and then fired one of them. There was a tremen­dous re­port, that rang in my ears like a hun­dred thun­der-vol­leys, and rolled and re­ver­ber­ated far along, and died away in end­less echoes. The flash lighted up the scene for an in­stant, and for an in­stant only; like the sud­den light­ning, it re­vealed all around. I saw a wide ex­panse of wa­ter, black as ink—a Sty­gian pool; but no rocks were vis­i­ble, and it seemed as though I had been car­ried into a sub­ter­ranean sea.

I loaded the empty bar­rel and waited. The flash of light had re­vealed noth­ing, yet it had dis­tracted my thoughts, and the work of reload­ing was an ad­di­tional dis­trac­tion. Any­thing was bet­ter than in­ac­tion. I did not wish to waste my am­mu­ni­tion, yet I thought that an oc­ca­sional shot might serve some good pur­pose, if it was only to af­ford me some re­lief from de­spair.

And now, as I sat with the ri­fle in my hands, I was aware of a sound—new, ex­cit­ing, dif­fer­ent al­to­gether from the mur­mur of in­nu­mer­able wa­ters that filled my ears, and in sharp con­trast with the dron­ing echoes of the rush­ing flood. It was a sound that spoke of life. I heard quick, heavy pant­ings, as of some great liv­ing thing; and with this there came the noise of reg­u­lar move­ments in the wa­ter, and the foam­ing and gur­gling of waves. It was as though some liv­ing, breath­ing crea­ture were here, not far away, mov­ing through these mid­night wa­ters; and with this dis­cov­ery there came a new fear—the fear of pur­suit. I thought that some sea-mon­ster had scented me in my boat, and had started to at­tack me. This new fear aroused me to ac­tion. It was a dan­ger quite un­like any other which I had ever known; yet the fear which it in­spired was a feel­ing that roused me to ac­tion, and prompted me, even though the com­ing dan­ger might be as sure as death, to rise against it and re­sist to the last. So I stood up with my ri­fle and lis­tened, with all my soul in my sense of hear­ing. The sounds arose more plainly. They had come nearer. They were im­me­di­ately in front. I raised my ri­fle and took aim. Then in quick suc­ces­sion two re­ports thun­dered out with tremen­dous up­roar and in­ter­minable echoes, but the long re­ver­ber­a­tions were un­heeded in the blaze of sud­den light and the vi­sion that was re­vealed. For there full be­fore me I saw, though but for an in­stant, a tremen­dous sight. It was a vast mon­ster, mov­ing in the wa­ters against the stream and to­ward the boat. Its head was raised high, its eyes were in­flamed with a bale­ful light, its jaws, opened wide, bris­tled with sharp teeth, and it had a long neck joined to a body of enor­mous bulk, with a tail that lashed all the wa­ter into foam. It was but for an in­stant that I saw it, and then with a sud­den plunge the mon­ster dived, while at the same mo­ment all was as dark as be­fore.

Full of ter­ror and ex­cite­ment, I loaded my ri­fle again and waited, lis­ten­ing for a re­newal of the noise. I felt sure that the mon­ster, balked of his prey, would re­turn with re­dou­bled fury, and that I should have to re­new the con­flict. I felt that the dan­gers of the sub­ter­ranean pas­sage and of the rush­ing wa­ters had passed away, and that a new peril had arisen from the as­sault of this mon­ster of the deep. Nor was it this one alone that was to be dreaded. Where one was, oth­ers were sure to be; and if this one should pass me by it would only leave me to be as­sailed by mon­sters of the same kind, and these would prob­a­bly in­crease in num­ber as I ad­vanced far­ther into this realm of dark­ness. And yet, in spite of these grisly thoughts, I felt less of hor­ror than be­fore, for the fear which I had was now as­so­ci­ated with ac­tion; and as I stood wait­ing for the on­set and lis­ten­ing for the ap­proach of the en­emy, the ex­cite­ment that en­sued was a pos­i­tive re­lief from the dull de­spair into which I had sunk but a mo­ment be­fore.

Yet, though I waited for a new at­tack, I waited in vain. The mon­ster did not come back. Either the flash and the noise had ter­ri­fied him, or the bul­lets had hit him, or else in his vast­ness he had been in­dif­fer­ent to so fee­ble a crea­ture as my­self; but what­ever may have been the cause, he did not emerge again out of the dark­ness and si­lence into which he had sunk. For a long time I stood wait­ing; then I sat down, still watch­ful, still lis­ten­ing, but with­out any re­sult, un­til at length I be­gan to think that there was no chance of any new at­tack. In­deed, it seemed now as though there had been no at­tack at all, but that the mon­ster had been swim­ming at ran­dom with­out any thought of me, in which case my ri­fle-flashes had ter­ri­fied him more than his fear­ful form had ter­ri­fied me. On the whole this in­ci­dent had greatly ben­e­fited me. It had roused me from my de­spair. I grew reck­less, and felt a dis­po­si­tion to ac­qui­esce in what­ever fate might have in store for me.

And now, worn out with fa­tigue and ex­hausted from long watch­ful­ness and anx­i­ety, I sank down in the bot­tom of the boat and fell into a deep sleep.

VI The New World

How long I slept I do not know. My sleep was pro­found, yet dis­turbed by trou­bled dreams, in which I lived over again all the event­ful scenes of the past; and these were all in­ter­min­gled in the wildest con­fu­sion. The can­ni­bals beck­oned to us from the peak, and we landed be­tween the two vol­ca­noes. There the body of the dead sailor re­ceived us, and af­ter­ward chased us to the boat. Then came snow and vol­canic erup­tions, and we drifted amid ice­bergs and molten lava un­til we en­tered an iron por­tal and plunged into dark­ness. Here there were vast swim­ming mon­sters and burn­ing orbs of fire and thun­der­ous cataracts fall­ing from in­con­ceiv­able heights, and the sweep of im­mea­sur­able tides and the cir­cling of in­fi­nite whirlpools; while in my ears there rang the never-end­ing roar of re­morse­less wa­ters that came af­ter us, with all their waves and bil­lows rolling upon us. It was a dream in which all the ma­te­rial ter­rors of the past were re­newed; but these were all as noth­ing when com­pared with a cer­tain deep un­der­ly­ing feel­ing that pos­sessed my soul—a sense of loss ir­re­triev­able, an ex­pec­ta­tion of im­pend­ing doom, a drear and im­mit­i­ga­ble de­spair.

In the midst of this I awoke. It was with a sud­den start, and I looked all around in speech­less be­wil­der­ment. The first thing of which I was con­scious was a great blaze of light—light so lately lost, and sup­posed to be lost for­ever, but now fill­ing all the uni­verse—bright, bril­liant, glow­ing bring­ing hope and joy and glad­ness, with all the splen­dor of deep blue skies and the mul­ti­tudi­nous laugh­ter of ocean waves that danced and sparkled in the sun. I flung up my arms and laughed aloud. Then I burst into tears, and fall­ing on my knees, I thanked the Almighty Ruler of the skies for this mar­vel­lous de­liv­er­ance.

Ris­ing from my knees I looked around, and once more amaze­ment over­whelmed me. I saw a long line of moun­tains tow­er­ing up to im­mea­sur­able heights, their sum­mits cov­ered with eter­nal ice and snow. There the sun blazed low in the sky, el­e­vated but a few de­grees above the moun­tain crests, which gleamed in gold and pur­ple un­der its fiery rays. The sun seemed en­larged to un­usual di­men­sions, and the moun­tains ran away on ev­ery side like the seg­ment of some in­fi­nite cir­cle. At the base of the moun­tains lay a land all green with veg­e­ta­tion, where cul­ti­vated fields were vis­i­ble, and vine­yards and or­chards and groves, to­gether with forests of palm and all man­ner of trees of ev­ery va­ri­ety of hue, which ran up the sides of the moun­tains till they reached the lim­its of veg­e­ta­tion and the re­gions of snow and ice.

Here in all di­rec­tions there were un­mis­tak­able signs of hu­man life—the out­lines of pop­u­lous cities and busy towns and ham­lets; roads wind­ing far away along the plain or up the moun­tain­sides, and mighty works of in­dus­try in the shape of mas­sive struc­tures, ter­raced slopes, long rows of arches, pon­der­ous pyra­mids, and bat­tle­mented walls.

From the land I turned to the sea. I saw be­fore me an ex­panse of wa­ter in­tensely blue—an ex­tent so vast that never be­fore in all my ocean voy­ages had any­thing ap­peared at all com­pa­ra­ble with it. Out at sea, wher­ever I had been, the wa­ter had al­ways lim­ited the view; the hori­zon had never seemed far away; ships soon sank be­low it, and the vis­i­ble sur­face of the Earth was thus al­ways con­tracted; but here, to my be­wil­der­ment, the hori­zon ap­peared to be re­moved to an im­mea­sur­able dis­tance and raised high in the air, while the wa­ters were pro­longed end­lessly. Start­ing from where I was, they went away to in­con­ceiv­able dis­tances, and the view be­fore me seemed like a wa­tery de­cliv­ity reach­ing for a thou­sand miles, till it ap­proached the hori­zon far up in the sky. Nor was it any delu­sion of the senses that caused this un­par­al­leled spec­ta­cle. I was fa­mil­iar with the phe­nom­ena of the mi­rage, and knew well that there was noth­ing of that kind here; for the mi­rage al­ways shows great sur­faces of still­ness, or a reg­u­lar vi­bra­tion—glassy tides and in­dis­tinct dis­tances; but here ev­ery­thing was sharply de­fined in the clear at­mos­phere: the sky over­hung a deep blue vault; the waves danced and sparkled in the sun; the wa­ters rolled and foamed on ev­ery side; and the fresh breeze, as it blew over the ocean, brought with it such ex­hil­a­rat­ing in­flu­ences that it acted upon me like some re­viv­ing cor­dial.

From the works of na­ture I turned to those of man. Th­ese were vis­i­ble ev­ery­where: on the land, in cities and cul­ti­vated fields and mighty con­struc­tions; on the sea, in float­ing craft, which ap­peared wher­ever I turned my eyes—boats like those of fish­er­men, ships long and low, some like gal­leys, pro­pelled by a hun­dred oars, oth­ers pro­vided with one huge square-sail, which en­abled them to run be­fore the wind. They were un­like any ships which I had ever seen; for nei­ther in the Mediter­ranean nor in Chi­nese wa­ters were there any craft like these, and they re­minded me rather of those an­cient gal­leys which I had seen in pic­tures.

I was lost in won­der as to where I was, and what land this could be to which I had been brought. I had not plunged into the in­te­rior of the Earth, but I had been car­ried un­der the moun­tains, and had emerged again into the glad light of the sun. Could it be pos­si­ble, I thought, that Agnew’s hope had been re­al­ized, and that I had been car­ried into the warm re­gions of the South Pa­cific Ocean? Yet in the South Pa­cific there could be no place like this—no im­mea­sur­able ex­panse of wa­ters, no hori­zon raised moun­tain high. It seemed like a vast basin-shaped world, for all around me the sur­face ap­peared to rise, and I was in what looked like a de­pres­sion; yet I knew that the basin and the de­pres­sion were an il­lu­sion, and that this ap­pear­ance was due to the im­mense ex­tent of level sur­face with the en­vi­ron­ment of lofty moun­tains. I had crossed the Antarc­tic Cir­cle; I had been borne on­ward for an im­mense dis­tance. Over all the known sur­face of the Earth no one had ever seen any­thing like this; there were but two places where such an im­mea­sur­able plain was pos­si­ble, and those were at the flat­tened poles. Where I was I now knew well. I had reached the Antarc­tic pole. Here the earth was flat—an im­mense level with no round­ness to lessen the reach of the hori­zon but an al­most even sur­face that gave an unim­peded view for hun­dreds of miles.

The sub­ter­ranean chan­nel had rushed through the moun­tains and had car­ried me here. Here came all the wa­ters of the North­ern ocean pour­ing into this vast po­lar sea, per­haps to is­sue forth from it by some sim­i­lar pas­sage. Here, then, was the South Pole—a world by it­self: and how dif­fer­ent from that ter­ri­ble, that iron land on the other side of the moun­tains!—not a world of ice and frost, but one of beauty and light, with a cli­mate that was al­most trop­i­cal in its warmth, and lands that were cov­ered with the rank lux­u­ri­ance of a teem­ing veg­etable life. I had passed from that outer world to this in­ner one, and the pas­sage was from death unto life, from agony and de­spair to sun­light and splen­dor and joy. Above all, in all around me that which most im­pressed me now was the rich and su­per­abun­dant life, and a warmth of air which made me think of In­dia. It was an amaz­ing and an un­ac­count­able thing, and I could only at­tribute it to the flat­ten­ing of the poles, which brought the sur­face nearer to the sup­posed cen­tral fires of the Earth, and there­fore cre­ated a heat as great as that of the equa­to­rial re­gions. Here I found a trop­i­cal cli­mate—a land warmed not by the sun, but from the Earth it­self. Or an­other cause might be found in the warm ocean cur­rents. What­ever the true one might be, I was ut­terly un­able to form a con­jec­ture.

But I had no time for such spec­u­la­tions as these. After the first emo­tions of won­der and ad­mi­ra­tion had some­what sub­sided, I be­gan to ex­pe­ri­ence other sen­sa­tions. I be­gan to re­mem­ber that I had eaten noth­ing for a length of time that I had no means of cal­cu­lat­ing, and to look around to see if there was any way of sat­is­fy­ing my hunger. The ques­tion arose now, What was to be done? After my re­cent ter­ri­ble ex­pe­ri­ence I nat­u­rally shrank from again com­mit­ting my­self to the ten­der mer­cies of strange tribes; yet fur­ther thought and ex­am­i­na­tion showed me that the peo­ple of this strange land must be very dif­fer­ent from those fright­ful sav­ages on the other side of the moun­tains. Every­where I be­held the man­i­fest signs of cul­ti­va­tion and civ­i­liza­tion. Still, I knew that even civ­i­lized peo­ple would not nec­es­sar­ily be any kinder than sav­ages, and that I might be seized and flung into hope­less im­pris­on­ment or slav­ery.

So I hes­i­tated, yet what could I do? My hunger was be­gin­ning to be in­sup­port­able. I had reached a place where I had to choose be­tween star­va­tion on the one hand, or a ven­ture among these peo­ple on the other. To go back was im­pos­si­ble. Who could breast those wa­ters in the tremen­dous sub­ter­ranean chan­nel, or force his way back through such ap­palling dan­gers? Or, if that were pos­si­ble, who could ever hope to breast those mighty cur­rents be­yond, or work his way amid ev­er­last­ing ice and im­mea­sur­able seas? No; re­turn was im­pos­si­ble. I had been flung into this world of won­ders, and here would be my home for the re­main­der of my days; though I could not now imag­ine whether those days would be passed in peace or in bit­ter slav­ery and sor­row. Yet the de­ci­sion must be made and the risk must be run. It must be so. I must land here, ven­ture among these peo­ple, and trust in that Prov­i­dence which had hith­erto sus­tained me.

Hav­ing thus re­solved at all haz­ards to try my fate, I rowed in to­ward the shore. Thus far I had seen gal­leys pass­ing and small boats, but they had taken no no­tice of me, for the rea­son that they were too far away to per­ceive any­thing about me that dif­fered from any other boat; but now, as I rowed, I no­ticed a gal­ley com­ing down to­ward me. She seemed to be go­ing in to­ward the shore at the very point at which I was aim­ing, and her course and mine must soon meet if I con­tin­ued to row. After some hes­i­ta­tion I con­cluded to make sig­nals to her, so as to at­tract at­ten­tion; for, now that I had re­solved to ven­ture among the peo­ple here, I was anx­ious to end my sus­pense as soon as pos­si­ble. So I con­tin­ued row­ing, and grad­u­ally drew nearer. The gal­ley was pro­pelled by oars, of which there were fifty on ei­ther side. The stem was raised, and cov­ered in like a cabin. At length I ceased row­ing, and sat watch­ing her. I soon saw that I was no­ticed, but this did not oc­cur till the gal­ley was close by me—so close, in­deed, that I thought they would pass with­out per­ceiv­ing me. I raised my hands, waved them, and gave a cry. The gal­ley at once stopped, a boat was low­ered, and some men de­scended and rowed to­ward me.

They were men of strange ap­pear­ance—very small in stature and slen­der in frame. Their hair was black and straight, their fea­tures were quite reg­u­lar, and their gen­eral ex­pres­sion was one of great gen­tle­ness. I was sur­prised to no­tice that they kept their eyes al­most closed, as though they were weak and trou­bled by the glare of the sun. With their half-closed eyes they blinked at me, and then one who ap­peared to be their chief spoke to me. I un­der­stood not a word; and then I an­swered him in English, which, of course, was equally un­in­tel­li­gi­ble to him. I then made signs, point­ing to the moun­tains and en­deav­or­ing to make known to him that I had come from be­yond them—that I had suf­fered ship­wreck, that I had drifted here, and that I needed as­sis­tance. Of all this it was quite ev­i­dent that they un­der­stood noth­ing ex­cept the fact that I needed help. The mo­ment that they com­pre­hended this they took me in tow and rowed back to the gal­ley.

I found the gal­ley to be about one hun­dred and fifty feet in length. For about two thirds of this length for­ward it was open and filled with seats, where there were about a hun­dred row­ers, who all looked like those that I had first seen, all be­ing of small stature, slen­der frames, and, more­over, all be­ing ap­par­ently dis­tressed by the sun­light. There was in all of them the same mild and gen­tle ex­pres­sion. In com­plex­ion and gen­eral out­line of fea­tures they were not un­like Arabs, but they were en­tirely des­ti­tute of that hard­ness and aus­ter­ity which the lat­ter have. They all had beards, which were dressed in a pe­cu­liar way in plaits. Their cos­tume var­ied. The row­ers wore a coarse tu­nic, with a gir­dle of rope. The of­fi­cers wore tu­nics of fine cloth and very el­e­gant man­tles, richly em­broi­dered, and with bor­ders of down. They all wore broad-brimmed hats, and the one who seemed to be chief had on his some golden or­na­ments.

Here once more I tried to ex­plain to them who I was. They looked at me, ex­am­in­ing me all over, in­spect­ing my gun, pis­tol, coat, trousers, boots, and hat, and talk­ing all the time among them­selves. They did not touch me, but merely showed the nat­u­ral cu­rios­ity which is felt at the sight of a for­eigner who has ap­peared un­ex­pect­edly. There was a scrupu­lous del­i­cacy and a care­ful and even cer­e­mo­ni­ous po­lite­ness in their at­ti­tude to­ward me which was at once amaz­ing and de­light­ful. All fear and anx­i­ety had now left me; in the gen­tle man­ners and ami­able faces of these peo­ple I saw enough to as­sure me of kind treat­ment; and in my deep joy and grat­i­tude for this even my hunger was for a time for­got­ten.

At length the chief mo­tioned to me to fol­low him. He led the way to the cabin, where, open­ing the door, he en­tered, and I fol­lowed, af­ter which the oth­ers came in also and then the door was shut. At first I could see noth­ing. There were no win­dows what­ever, and only one or two slight crevices through which the light came. After a time my eyes grew more ac­cus­tomed to the dark­ness, and I could see that the cabin was a spa­cious com­part­ment, adorned with rich hang­ings of some un­known ma­te­rial. There was a large ta­ble and seats. Tak­ing me by the hand, the chief led me to this, where I seated my­self, while the oth­ers re­mained stand­ing. Then some of them went away, and soon re­turned with food and drink. The food was of dif­fer­ent kinds—some tast­ing like goose, oth­ers like tur­key, oth­ers like par­tridge. It was all the flesh of fowls, though, judg­ing from the slices be­fore me, they must have been of great size. I won­dered much at the be­hav­ior of the of­fi­cers of the ship, who all, and the chief him­self more than all, stood and waited upon me; but it was a new world, and I sup­posed that this must be the fash­ion; so I made no ob­jec­tions, but ac­cepted the sit­u­a­tion and ate with a thank­ful heart.

As the first keen­ness of my ap­petite was sat­is­fied I had more leisure to make ob­ser­va­tions. I no­ticed that the eyes of my new friends no longer blinked; they were wide open; and, so far as I could make them out, their faces were much im­proved. Weak­ness of eyes seemed com­mon among these peo­ple, and there­fore the of­fi­cers had their cabin dark­ened, while the un­for­tu­nate row­ers had to la­bor in the blaz­ing sun. Such was my con­clu­sion, and the fact re­minded me of the mis­er­able fel­lahin of Egypt, who have oph­thalmia from the blaz­ing sun and burn­ing sand.

After the repast they brought me wa­ter in a basin, and all stood around me. One held the basin, an­other a towel, an­other a flask, an­other took a sponge and pro­ceeded to wash my face and hands. This was all strange to me, yet there was noth­ing left for me but sub­mis­sion. Then the chief, who had stood look­ing on with a smile on his face took off his rich furred man­tle and handed it to me. I was half in­clined to refuse it, but was afraid of giv­ing of­fence, so I ac­cepted it, and he him­self fas­tened it around my shoul­ders. The oth­ers seemed ac­tu­ally to envy the chief, as though he had gained some un­com­mon good-for­tune. Then they of­fered me var­i­ous drinks, of which I tasted sev­eral kinds. Some were sweet wa­ters of dif­fer­ent fla­vors, oth­ers tasted like mild wine, one was a fer­mented drink, light, sweet, and very agree­able to the palate. I now wished to show my gen­er­ous en­ter­tain­ers that I was grate­ful; so I raised my cup, bowed to all of them, par­tic­u­larly the chief, and drank their health. They all watched this cer­e­mony with very sober faces, and I could not quite make out whether they took my mean­ing or not. They cer­tainly did not look pleased, and it seemed to me as though they felt hurt at any ex­pres­sion of grat­i­tude, so I con­cluded for the fu­ture to ab­stain from all such demon­stra­tions.

Yet with ev­ery mo­ment the man­ners of these peo­ple grew more be­wil­der­ing. It was strange, in­deed, for me to find my­self so sud­denly the cen­tre of in­ter­est and of gen­er­ous in­ten­tions. For a mo­ment the thought oc­curred to me that they re­garded me as some won­der­ful be­ing with su­pe­rior pow­ers, and were try­ing to pro­pi­ti­ate me by these ser­vices; yet I soon saw that these ser­vices were not at all acts of pro­pi­ti­a­tion; they looked rather like those lov­ing and pro­fuse at­ten­tions which a fam­ily show­ers down upon some dear one long ab­sent and at last re­turned, and with this my won­der grew greater than ever.

The gal­ley had long since re­sumed her progress. I heard the steady beat of the oars as they all moved in time, and at length the mo­tion ceased. The chief then signed to me and went out. I fol­lowed, and the rest came af­ter. And now as I emerged from the gloom of the cabin, I found my­self once more in the glo­ri­ous light of day, and saw that we had reached the land. The gal­ley was hauled up along­side a stone quay, and on the shore there were build­ings and walls and trees and peo­ple. The chief went ashore at once and I ac­com­pa­nied him. We walked for some dis­tance along a road with stone walls on ei­ther side, from be­hind which there arose trees that from a dis­tance had looked like palms. I now found them to be gi­ant ferns, arch­ing over­head with their broad fan­like leaves and branches in dense masses, mak­ing the road­way quite dark in the shadow. As­ton­ished as I was at the sight of these trees, I soon for­got them in a still more as­ton­ish­ing sight, for af­ter go­ing on­ward about a hun­dred paces I stopped, and found my­self in a wide space where four cross­roads met. Here there were three birds of gi­gan­tic stature. They had vast bod­ies, short legs, short necks, and seemed as large as an or­di­nary-sized ox. Their wings were short, and ev­i­dently could not be used for flight; their beaks were like that of a seag­ull; each one had a man on his back, and was har­nessed to a car. The chief mo­tioned to me to en­ter one of these cars. I did so. He fol­lowed, and there­upon the driver started the bird, which set forth with long, rapid strides, at a pace fast as that of a trot­ting horse. So as­ton­ished was I that for some time I did not no­tice any­thing else; but at length, when my first feel­ing had sub­sided, I be­gan to re­gard other ob­jects. All the way the dense fern fo­liage arched over­head, throw­ing down deep shad­ows. They grew on ei­ther side in dense rows, but be­tween their stalks I could see the coun­try be­yond, which lay all bright in the sun­light.

Here were broad fields, all green with ver­dure; far­ther away arose clumps of tree-ferns; at ev­ery step of the way new vis­tas opened; amid the ver­dure and the fo­liage were the roofs of struc­tures that looked like pavil­ions, and more mas­sive ed­i­fices with pyra­mi­dal roofs. Our road con­stantly as­cended, and at length we came to a cross­ing. This was a wide ter­race at the slope of the moun­tain; on the lower side was a row of mas­sive stone ed­i­fices with pyra­mi­dal roofs, while on the up­per there were por­tals which seemed to open into ex­ca­vated cav­erns. Here, too, on ei­ther side arose the gi­ant ferns, over­ar­ch­ing and dark­en­ing the ter­race with their deep shadow. From this point I looked back, and through the trunks of the tree-ferns I could see fields and pavil­ions and the pyra­mi­dal roofs of mas­sive ed­i­fices, and broad, ver­dant slopes, while in the dis­tance there were peeps of the bound­less sea. We con­tin­ued on our way with­out stop­ping, and passed sev­eral suc­ces­sive ter­races like the first, with the same cav­erns on the up­per side and mas­sive ed­i­fices on the lower, un­til at last the as­cent ended at the fifth ter­race, and here we turned to the left. Now the view be­came more var­ied. The tree-ferns arose on ei­ther side, arch­ing over­head; on my right were the por­tals that opened into cav­erns, on my left solid and mas­sive houses, built of great blocks of stone, with pyra­mi­dal roofs. As far as I could judge, I was in a city built on the slope of a moun­tain, with its streets formed thus of suc­ces­sive ter­races and their con­nect­ing cross­ways, one half its habi­ta­tions con­sist­ing of cav­erns, while the other half were pavil­ions and mas­sive stone struc­tures. Few peo­ple, how­ever, were to be seen. Oc­ca­sion­ally I saw one or two grop­ing along with their eyes half shut, seek­ing the dark­est shad­ows; and it seemed to me that this ex­tra­or­di­nary race of men had some nat­u­ral and uni­ver­sal pe­cu­liar­ity of eye­sight which made them shun the sun­light, and seek the dark­ness of caves and of dense, over­shad­ow­ing fo­liage.

At length we came to a place where the ter­race ran back till it formed a semi­cir­cle against the moun­tain slope, when sev­eral vast por­tals ap­peared. Here there was a large space, where the tree-ferns grew in long lines cross­ing each other, and mak­ing a denser shade than usual. On the lower side were sev­eral stone ed­i­fices of im­mense size; and in the mid­dle of the place there arose a sin­gu­lar struc­ture, shaped like a half pyra­mid, with three sides slop­ing, and the fourth per­pen­dic­u­lar, flat on the top, which was ap­proached by a flight of steps. We now went on un­til we reached the cen­tral por­tal of the range of cav­erns, and here we stopped. The chief got out and beck­oned to me. I fol­lowed. He then led the way into the cav­ern, while I, full of won­der, walked be­hind him.

VII Scientific Theories and Scepticism

Thus far Melick had been read­ing the man­u­script, but at this point he was in­ter­rupted by the an­nounce­ment that din­ner was ready. Upon this he stopped abruptly; for on board the Fal­con din­ner was the great event of the day, and in its pres­ence even the man­u­script had to be laid aside. Be­fore long they were all seated around the din­ing-ta­ble in the sump­tu­ous cabin, pre­pared to dis­cuss the repast which had been served up by the ge­nius of the French chef whom Lord Feather­stone had brought with him.

Let us pause here for a mo­ment to take a mi­nuter sur­vey of these four friends. In the first place, there was Lord Feather­stone him­self, young, hand­some, lan­guid, good-na­tured to a fault, with plenty of mus­cle if he chose to ex­ert it, and plenty of brain if he chose to make use of it—a man who had be­come weary of the monotony of high life, and, like many of his or­der, was fond of seek­ing re­lief from the en­nui of pros­per­ity amid the ex­cite­ments of the sea. Next to him was Dr. Con­greve, a mid­dle-aged man, with iron-gray hair, short beard and mus­tache, short nose, gray eyes, with spec­ta­cles, and stoutish body. Next came Noel Ox­en­den, late of Trin­ity Col­lege, Cam­bridge, a col­lege friend of Feather­stone’s—a tall man, with a re­fined and in­tel­lec­tual face and re­served man­ner. Fi­nally, there was Otto Melick, a lit­ter­a­teur from Lon­don, about thirty years of age, with a wiry and mus­cu­lar frame, and the rest­less man­ner of one who lives in a per­pet­ual fid­get.

For some time noth­ing was said; they par­took of the repast in si­lence; but at length it be­came ev­i­dent that they were think­ing of the mys­te­ri­ous man­u­script. Feather­stone was the first to speak.

“A deuced queer sort of thing this, too,” said he, “this man­u­script. I can’t quite make it out. Who ever dreamed of peo­ple liv­ing at the South Pole—and in a warm cli­mate, too? Then it seems deuced odd, too, that we should pick up this cop­per cylin­der with the man­u­script. I hardly know what to think about it.”

Melick smiled. “Why, it isn’t much to see through,” said he.

“See through what?” said the doc­tor, hastily, prick­ing up his ears at this, and peer­ing keenly at Melick through his spec­ta­cles.

“Why, the man­u­script, of course.”

“Well,” said the doc­tor, “what is it that you see? What do you make out of it?”

“Why, any­one can see,” said Melick, “that it’s a trans­par­ent hoax, that’s all. You don’t mean to say, I hope, that you re­ally re­gard it in any other light?”

“A trans­par­ent hoax!” re­peated the doc­tor. “Will you please state why you re­gard it in that light?”

“Cer­tainly,” said Melick. “Some fel­low wanted to get up a sen­sa­tion novel and in­tro­duce it to the world with a great flour­ish of trum­pets, and so he has taken this way of go­ing about it. You see, he has counted on its be­ing picked up, and per­haps pub­lished. After this he would come for­ward and own the au­thor­ship.”

“And what good would that do?” asked the doc­tor, mildly. “He couldn’t prove the au­thor­ship, and he couldn’t get the copy­right.”

“Oh, of course not; but he would gain no­to­ri­ety, and that would give him a great sale for his next ef­fort.”

The doc­tor smiled. “See here, Melick,” said he, “you’ve a very vivid imag­i­na­tion, my dear fel­low; but come, let us dis­cuss this for a lit­tle while in a com­mon­sense way. Now how long should you sup­pose that this man­u­script has been afloat?”

“Oh, a few months or so,” said Melick.

“A few months!” said the doc­tor. “A few years you mean. Why, man, there are suc­ces­sive lay­ers of bar­na­cles on that cop­per cylin­der which show a sub­mer­sion of at least three years, per­haps more.”

“By Jove! yes,” re­marked Feather­stone. “Your sen­sa­tion nov­el­ist must have been a lu­natic if he chose that way of pub­lish­ing a book.”

“Then, again,” con­tin­ued the doc­tor, “how did it get here?”

“Oh, eas­ily enough,” an­swered Melick. “The ocean cur­rents brought it.”

“The ocean cur­rents!” re­peated the doc­tor. “That’s a very vague ex­pres­sion. What do you mean? Of course it has been brought here by the ocean cur­rents.”

“Why, if it were thrown off the coast of Eng­land it would be car­ried away, in the or­di­nary course of things, and might make the tour of the world.”

“The ocean cur­rents,” said the doc­tor, “have un­doubt­edly brought this to us. Of that I shall have more to say presently—but just now, in ref­er­ence to your no­tion of a sen­sa­tion nov­el­ist, and an English ori­gin, let me ask your opin­ion of the ma­te­rial on which it is writ­ten. Did you ever see any­thing like it be­fore? Is it pa­per?”

“No,” said Melick; “it is ev­i­dently some veg­etable sub­stance. No doubt the writer has had it pre­pared for this very pur­pose, so as to make it look nat­u­ral.”

“Do you know what is is?” asked the doc­tor.

“No.”

“Then I’ll tell you; it’s pa­pyrus.”

“Papyrus?”

“Yes, ac­tual pa­pyrus. You can find but lit­tle of that in ex­is­tence at the present day. It is only to be found here and there in mu­se­ums. I know it per­fectly well, how­ever, and saw what it was at the first glance. Now, I hold that a sen­sa­tion nov­el­ist would never have thought of pa­pyrus. If he didn’t wish to use pa­per, he could have found a dozen other things. I don’t see how he could have found any­one able to pre­pare such a sub­stance as this for writ­ing. It must have come from a coun­try where it is ac­tu­ally in use. Now, mark you, the pa­pyrus-plant may still be found grow­ing wild on the banks of the up­per Nile, and also in Si­cily, and it is made use of for ropes and other things of that sort. But as to mak­ing writ­ing ma­te­rial out of it, that is hardly pos­si­ble for the art is lost. The an­cient process was very elab­o­rate and this man­u­script is writ­ten on leaves which re­sem­bled in a mar­vel­lous man­ner those of the Egyp­tian pa­pyrus books. There are two rolls at Mar­seilles which I have seen and ex­am­ined, and they are iden­ti­cal with this. Now these pa­pyrus leaves in­di­cate much me­chan­i­cal skill, and have a pro­fes­sional look. They seem like the work of an ex­pe­ri­enced man­u­fac­turer.”

“I don’t see,” said Melick, ob­sti­nately, “why one shouldn’t get pa­pyrus now and have it made up into writ­ing ma­te­rial.”

“Oh, that’s out of the ques­tion,” said the doc­tor. “How could it ever en­ter into any­one’s head? How could your mere sen­sa­tion-mon­ger pro­cure the raw ma­te­rial? That of it­self would be a work of im­mense dif­fi­culty. How could he get it made up? That would be im­pos­si­ble. But, apart from this, just con­sider the strong in­ter­nal ev­i­dence that there is as to the au­then­tic­ity of the man­u­script. Now, in the first place, there is the de­scrip­tion of Deso­la­tion Is­land, which is per­fectly ac­cu­rate. But it is on his nar­ra­tive be­yond this that I lay chief stress. I can prove that the state­ments here are cor­rob­o­rated by those of Cap­tain Ross in his ac­count of that great voy­age from which he re­turned not very long ago.”

The doc­tor, who had been talk­ing with much en­thu­si­asm, paused here to take breath, and then went on:

“I hap­pen to know all about that voy­age, for I read a full re­port of it just be­fore we started, and you can see for your­selves whether this man­u­script is cred­i­ble or not.

“Cap­tain James Clarke Ross was sent forth on his ex­pe­di­tion in 1839. On Jan­uary 1, 1841, he passed the Antarc­tic Cir­cle in 178° east lon­gi­tude. On the 11th he dis­cov­ered land in 70° 41′ south lat­i­tude, 172° 36′ east lon­gi­tude. He found that the land was a con­tin­u­ous coast, trend­ing south­ward, and ris­ing to peaks of ten thou­sand feet in height, all cov­ered with ice and snow. On the 12th he landed and took pos­ses­sion in the name of the Queen. After this he con­tin­ued his course as far as 78° 4′ south lat­i­tude, trac­ing a coast­line of six hun­dred miles. Ob­serve, now how all this co­in­cides with More’s nar­ra­tive. Well, I now come to the crown­ing state­ment. In 77° 32′ south lat­i­tude, 167° east lon­gi­tude, he came in sight of two enor­mous vol­ca­noes over twelve thou­sand feet in height. One of these was in an ac­tive state of erup­tion. To this he gave the name of Mount Ere­bus. The other was quiet; it was of some­what less height, and he gave it the name of Mount Ter­ror. Mark, now, how won­der­fully this re­sem­bles More’s ac­count. Well, just here his progress was ar­rested by a bar­rier which pre­sented a per­pen­dic­u­lar wall of over a hun­dred and fifty feet in height, along which he coasted for some dis­tance. On the fol­low­ing year he pen­e­trated six miles far­ther south, namely, 78° 11′ south lat­i­tude, 161° 27′ west lon­gi­tude. At this point he was again stopped by the im­pass­able cliffs, which arose here like an eter­nal bar­rier, while be­yond them he saw a long line of lofty moun­tains cov­ered with ice and snow.”

“Did you hear the re­sult of the Amer­i­can ex­pe­di­tion?” asked Melick.

“Yes,” replied the doc­tor. “Wilkes pre­tends to have found a con­ti­nent, but his ac­count of it makes it quite ev­i­dent to my mind that he saw noth­ing but ice. I be­lieve that Wilkes’s Antarc­tic con­ti­nent will some day be pen­e­trated by ships, which will sail for hun­dreds of miles far­ther south. All that is wanted is a fa­vor­able sea­son. But mark the co­in­ci­dence be­tween Ross’s re­port and More’s man­u­script. This must have been writ­ten at least three years ago, and the writer could not have known any­thing about Ross’s dis­cov­er­ies. Above all, he could not have thought of those two vol­ca­noes un­less he had seen them.”

“But these vol­ca­noes men­tioned by More are not the Ere­bus and Ter­ror, are they?” said Lord Feather­stone.

“Of course not; they are on the other side of the world.”

“The whole story,” said Melick, “may have been writ­ten by one of Ross’s men and thrown over­board. If I’d been on that ex­pe­di­tion I should prob­a­bly have writ­ten it to be­guile the time.”

“Oh yes,” said the doc­tor; “and you would also have man­u­fac­tured the pa­pyrus and the cop­per cylin­der on board to be­guile the time.”

“I dare say the writer picked up that pa­pyrus and the cop­per cylin­der in China or Ja­pan, and made use of it in this way.”

“Where do you make out the po­si­tion of More’s vol­ca­noes?” asked Feather­stone.

“It is dif­fi­cult to make it out ac­cu­rately,” said the doc­tor. “More gives no data. In fact he had none to give. He couldn’t take any ob­ser­va­tions.”

“The fact is,” said Melick, “it’s not a sailor’s yarn at all. No sailor would ever ex­press him­self in that way. That’s what struck me from the first. It has the ring of a con­founded sen­sa­tion-mon­ger all through.”

The doc­tor el­e­vated his eye­brows, but took no no­tice of this.

“You see,” he con­tin­ued, ad­dress­ing him­self to the oth­ers, “Deso­la­tion Is­land is in 50° south lat­i­tude and 70° east lon­gi­tude. As I make out, More’s course led him over about ten de­grees of lon­gi­tude in a south­west course. That course de­pended al­to­gether upon the ocean cur­rents. Now there is a great Antarc­tic drift-cur­rent, which flows round the Cape of Good Hope and di­vides there, one half flow­ing past the east coast of Africa and the other set­ting across the In­dian Ocean. Then it unites with a cur­rent which flows round the south of Van Die­man’s Land, which also di­vides, and the south­ern­most cur­rent is sup­posed to cross the Pa­cific un­til it strikes Cape Horn, around which it flows, di­vid­ing as be­fore. Now my the­ory is, that south of Deso­la­tion Is­land—I don’t know how far—there is a great cur­rent set­ting to­ward the South Pole, and run­ning south­west through de­grees of lon­gi­tude 60°, 50°, 40°, 30°, 20°, 10°, east of Green­wich; and fi­nally sweep­ing on, it would reach More’s vol­ca­noes at a point which I should judge to be about 80° south lat­i­tude and 10° west lon­gi­tude. There it passes be­tween the vol­ca­noes and bursts through the vast moun­tain bar­rier by a sub­ter­ranean way, which has been formed for it in past ages by some primeval con­vul­sion of na­ture. After this it prob­a­bly sweeps around the great South Po­lar ocean, and emerges at the op­po­site side, not far from the vol­ca­noes Ere­bus and Ter­ror.”

Here the doc­tor paused, and looked around with some self-com­pla­cency.

“Oh,” said Melick, “if you take that tone, you have us all at your mercy. I know no more about the ge­og­ra­phy of the Antarc­tic Cir­cle than I do of the moon. I sim­ply crit­i­cize from a lit­er­ary point of view, and I don’t like his un­der­ground cav­ern with the stream run­ning through it. It sounds like one of the voy­ages of Sin­bad the Sailor. Nor do I like his de­scrip­tion; he ev­i­dently is writ­ing for ef­fect. Be­sides, his style is vi­cious; it is too stilted. Fi­nally, he has re­course to the stale de­vice of a sea-ser­pent.”

“A sea-ser­pent!” re­peated the doc­tor. “Well, for my part I feel by no means in­clined to sneer at a sea-ser­pent. Its ex­is­tence can­not be proved, yet it can­not be pooh-poohed. Every school­boy knows that the wa­ters of the sea were once filled with mon­sters more tremen­dous than the great­est sea-ser­pent that has ever been imag­ined. The Ple­siosaurus, with its snake­like head, if it ex­isted now, would be called a sea-ser­pent. Some of these so-called fos­sil an­i­mals may have their rep­re­sen­ta­tives still liv­ing in the re­moter parts of the world. Think of the re­cently dis­cov­ered or­nithorhynchus of Aus­tralia!”

“If you please, I’d re­ally much rather not,” said Melick with a ges­ture of de­spair. “I haven’t the honor of the gen­tle­man’s ac­quain­tance.”

“Well, what do you think of his no­tice of the sun, and the long light, and his low po­si­tion on the hori­zon?”

“Oh, that’s all right,” said Melick. “Any­one who chose to get up this thing would of course read up about the po­lar day, and all that. Every­one knows that at the poles there is a six-months’ day, fol­lowed by a six-months’ night.”

“You are a de­ter­mined scep­tic,” said the doc­tor.

“How is it about the po­lar day?” asked Feather­stone.

“Well,” said the doc­tor, “at the poles them­selves there is one day of six months, dur­ing which the sun never sets, and one night of six months, dur­ing which he never rises. In the spa­ces be­tween the po­lar cir­cles the quan­ti­ties of the con­tin­u­ous day and con­tin­u­ous night vary in ac­cor­dance with the dis­tance from the pole. At the north point of Nova Zem­bla, 75° north lat­i­tude, there is un­in­ter­rupted light from May 1st to Au­gust 12th, and un­in­ter­rupted dark­ness from Novem­ber 8th to Fe­bru­ary 9th. At the arc­tic cir­cle at the sum­mer sol­stice the day is twenty-four hours long. At the Antarc­tic Cir­cle at the same time the night is twenty-four hours long.”

Upon this Melick filled the doc­tor’s wine­glass with a great deal of cer­e­mony.

“After all those sta­tis­tics,” he said, “you must feel rather dry. You should take a drink be­fore ven­tur­ing any fur­ther.”

The doc­tor made no re­ply, but raised the glass to his lips and swal­lowed the wine in an ab­stracted way.

“The thing that struck me most,” said Ox­en­den, “in all that has been read thus far, is the flat­ness of the South Pole, and the pe­cu­liar ef­fect which this pro­duces on the land­scape.”

“I must say,” added Melick, “that the writer has got hold of a very good idea there, and has taken care to put it for­ward in a very prom­i­nent fash­ion.”

“What is the dif­fer­ence,” asked Ox­en­den, “be­tween the two di­am­e­ters of the Earth, the po­lar and the equa­to­rial? Is it known?”

“By Jove!” said Feather­stone, “that’s the very ques­tion I was go­ing to ask. I’ve al­ways heard that the Earth is flat­tened at the poles, but never knew how much. Is there any way by which peo­ple can find out?”

The doc­tor drew a long breath, and beamed upon the com­pany with a benev­o­lent smile.

“Oh yes,” said he; “I can an­swer that ques­tion, if you care to know and won’t feel bored.”

“An­swer it, then, my dear fel­low, by all means,” said Feather­stone, in his most lan­guid tone.

“There are two ways,” said the doc­tor, “by which the po­lar com­pres­sion of the Earth has been found out. One is by the mea­sure­ment of arcs on the Earth’s sur­face; the other is by ex­per­i­ments with pen­du­lums or weights with re­gard to the Earth’s grav­ity at dif­fer­ent places. The for­mer of these meth­ods is, per­haps, the more sat­is­fac­tory. Mea­sure­ments of arcs have been made on a very ex­ten­sive scale in dif­fer­ent parts of the world—in Eng­land, France, La­p­land, Peru, and In­dia. Mr. Ivory, who de­voted him­self for years to an ex­haus­tive ex­am­i­na­tion of the sub­ject, has de­duced that the equa­to­rial ra­dius of the Earth is over 3,962 miles, and the po­lar ra­dius over 3,949 miles. This makes the de­pres­sion at ei­ther pole up­ward of thir­teen miles. A de­pres­sion of over thir­teen miles, as you must plainly see, should pro­duce strange re­sults in the scenery at the poles. Of course, if there are moun­tains, no dif­fer­ence would be no­ticed be­tween this and any other part of the Earth’s sur­face; but if there is wa­ter, why, we ought to ex­pect some such state of things as More de­scribes. The grav­i­ta­tion test has also been tried, with very nearly the same re­sult. The sur­face of the Earth at the equa­tor, be­ing far­thest from the cen­tre of grav­ity, in­di­cates the least weight in bod­ies; but at the poles, where the sur­face is near­est the cen­tre of grav­ity, there must be the great­est weight. It is found, in fact, that the weight of bod­ies in­creases in pass­ing from the equa­tor to the poles. By ex­per­i­ments made in this way the po­lar com­pres­sion is as­cer­tained to be the same as I have men­tioned.”

“What ef­fect would this have on the cli­mate at the poles?” asked Ox­en­den.

“That’s a com­pli­cated ques­tion,” said the doc­tor. “In an­swer to that we must leave as­cer­tained facts and trust to the­o­ries, un­less, in­deed, we ac­cept as valid the state­ments of this re­mark­able man­u­script. For my own part, I see no rea­son why it should not be as More says. Re­mem­ber, this po­lar world is thir­teen miles nearer to the cen­tre of the Earth. Whether this should af­fect the cli­mate or not, de­pends upon the na­ture of the Earth’s in­te­rior. That in­te­rior, ac­cord­ing to the pop­u­lar the­ory of the present day is a mass of fire. This the­ory af­firms that the Earth was once a red-hot mass, which has cooled down; but the cool­ing process has only taken place on the sur­face, leav­ing the in­te­rior still a molten mass of mat­ter in a state of in­tense heat and com­bus­tion. At the poles the sur­face is thus thir­teen miles nearer to these tremen­dous fires. Of course it may be sup­posed that the Earth’s crust is of about equal thick­ness on all parts; yet still, even if this be so, thir­teen miles ought to make some dif­fer­ence. Now at the North Pole there seem to be causes at work to coun­ter­bal­ance the ef­fect of the in­ter­nal heat, chiefly in the enor­mous ac­cu­mu­la­tion of po­lar ice which prob­a­bly hems it in on ev­ery side; and though many be­lieve in an open po­lar sea of warm wa­ter at the North Pole, yet still the ef­fect of vast ice-masses and of cold sub­ma­rine cur­rents must be to ren­der the cli­mate se­vere. But at the South Pole it is dif­fer­ent. The ob­ser­va­tions of Ross and of More show us that there is a chain of moun­tains of im­mense height, which seem to en­cir­cle the pole. If this be so, and I see no rea­son to dis­be­lieve it, then the ice of the outer seas must be kept away al­to­gether from that strange in­ner sea of which More speaks. Ross saw the vol­ca­noes Ere­bus and Ter­ror; More saw two oth­ers. How many more there may be it is im­pos­si­ble to say; but all this shows that the ef­fect of the Earth’s in­ter­nal fires is very man­i­fest in that re­gion, and More has pen­e­trated to a se­cluded world, which lies apart by it­self, free from the in­flu­ence of ice-masses, left to feel the ef­fect of the in­ter­nal fires, and pos­sess­ing what is vir­tu­ally a trop­i­cal cli­mate.”

“Well,” said Melick, “there is no the­ory how­ever wild and fan­tas­tic, which some man of sci­ence will not be ready to sup­port and to for­tify by end­less ar­gu­ments, all of the most plau­si­ble kind. For my own part, I still be­lieve More and his south po­lar world to be no more au­then­tic than Sind­bad the Sailor.”

But the oth­ers ev­i­dently sym­pa­thized with the doc­tor’s view, and re­garded Melick as car­ry­ing his scep­ti­cism to an ab­surd ex­cess.

“How large do you sup­pose this south po­lar ocean to be?” asked Feather­stone.

“It is im­pos­si­ble to an­swer that ques­tion ex­actly,” said the doc­tor. “It may be, as More hints, a thou­sand miles in ex­tent, or only five hun­dred, or two hun­dred. For my own part, how­ever, I feel like tak­ing More’s state­ments at their ut­most value; and the idea that I have gath­ered from his nar­ra­tive is that of a vast sea like the Mediter­ranean, sur­rounded by im­pass­able moun­tains, by great and fer­tile coun­tries, peo­pled with an im­mense va­ri­ety of an­i­mals, with a fauna and flora quite un­like those of the rest of the world; and, above all, with great na­tions pos­sess­ing a rare and unique civ­i­liza­tion, and be­long­ing to a race al­to­gether dif­fer­ent from any of the known races of men.”

“Well,” said Melick, “that at least is the idea which the writer of the man­u­script tries to con­vey.”

By this time they had fin­ished din­ner.

“And now,” said Feather­stone, “let’s have some more of the man­u­script. Melick is tired of it, I dare say. I would re­lieve him, but I’m an in­fer­nally bad reader. Doc­tor, what do you say? Will you read the next in­stal­ment!”

“With all my heart,” said the doc­tor, briskly.

“Very well, then,” said Feather­stone; “we will all be your at­ten­tive hear­ers.”

And now the doc­tor took up the man­u­script and be­gan to read.

VIII The Cave-Dwellers

The cav­ern into which the chief led me was very spa­cious, but had no light ex­cept that which en­tered through the por­tal. It was with dif­fi­culty that I could see any­thing, but I found that there were many peo­ple here mov­ing about, all as in­tent upon their own pur­suits as those which one en­coun­ters in the streets of our cities. As we went on far­ther the dark­ness in­creased, un­til at last I lost sight of the chief al­to­gether, and he had to come back and lead me. After go­ing a lit­tle far­ther we came to a long, broad pas­sage­way like a sub­ter­ranean street, about twenty feet in width, and as many in height. Here there were dis­cernible a few twin­kling lamps, which served to make the dark­ness less in­tense and en­abled me to see the shad­owy fig­ures around. Th­ese were nu­mer­ous, and all seemed busy, though what their oc­cu­pa­tion might be I could not guess. I was amazed at the ex­tent of these cav­erns, and at the mul­ti­tude of the peo­ple. I saw also that from the na­ture of their eyes the sun­light dis­tressed them, and in this cav­ern gloom they found their most con­ge­nial dwelling-place. From what I had thus far seen, this ex­tra­or­di­nary peo­ple shrank from the sun­light; and when they had to move abroad they passed over roads which were dark­ened as much as pos­si­ble by the deep shad­ows of mighty ferns, while for the most part they re­mained in dark cav­erns, in which they lived and moved and had their be­ing. It was a puz­zle to me whether the weak­ness of their eyes had caused this dis­like of light, or the habit of cave-dwelling had caused this weak­ness of eyes. Here, in this dark­ness, where there was but a faint twin­kle from the fee­ble lamps, their eyes seemed to serve them as well as mine did in the outer light of day; and the chief, who out­side had moved with an un­cer­tain step, and had blinked painfully at ob­jects with his eyes al­most closed, now ap­peared to be in his proper el­e­ment; and while I hes­i­tated like a blind man and groped along with a fal­ter­ing step, he guided me, and seemed to see ev­ery­thing with per­fect vi­sion.

At length we stopped, and the chief raised up a thick, heavy mat which hung like an un­wieldly cur­tain in front of a door­way. This the chief lifted. At once a blaze of light burst forth, gleam­ing into the dark, and ap­pear­ing to blind him. His eyes closed. He held up the veil for me to pass through. I did so. He fol­lowed, and then groped his way slowly along, while I ac­com­pa­nied and as­sisted him.

I now found my­self in a large grotto with an arched roof, from which was sus­pended an enor­mous lamp, ei­ther golden or gilded. All around were nu­mer­ous lamps. The walls were adorned with rich hang­ings; couches were here, with soft cush­ions, and di­vans and ot­tomans; soft mats were on the floor, and ev­ery­thing gave in­di­ca­tions of lux­ury and wealth. Other doors, cov­ered with over­hang­ing mats, seemed to lead out of this grotto. To one of these the chief walked, and rais­ing the mat he led the way into an­other grotto like the last, with the same bright lights and the same adorn­ments, but of smaller size. Here I saw some­one who at once took up all my at­ten­tion.

It was a young maiden. Her face and form, but es­pe­cially her eyes, showed her to be of quite a dif­fer­ent race from these oth­ers. To me she was of medium height, yet she was taller than any of the peo­ple here that I had hith­erto seen. Her com­plex­ion was much lighter; her hair was dark, lux­u­ri­ant, and wavy, and ar­ranged in a coif­fure se­cured with a golden band. Her fea­tures were of a dif­fer­ent cast from those of the peo­ple here, for they were reg­u­lar in out­line and of ex­quis­ite beauty; her nose was straight; she had a short up­per lip, arched eye­brows finely pen­cilled, thin lips, and well-rounded chin. But the chief con­trast was in her eyes. Th­ese were large, dark, liq­uid, with long lashes, and with a splen­did glow in their lus­trous depths. She stood look­ing at me with her face full of amaze­ment; and as I caught the gaze of her glo­ri­ous eyes I re­joiced that I had at last found one who lived in the light and loved it—one who did not blink like a bat, but looked me full in the face, and al­lowed me to see all her soul re­vealed. The chief, who still was pained by the glare of light, kept his eyes cov­ered, and said a few hasty words to the maiden. After this he hur­ried away, leav­ing me there.

The maiden stood for a mo­ment look­ing at me. As the chief spoke to her a change came over her face. She looked at me in si­lence, with an ex­pres­sion of sad and mourn­ful in­ter­est, which seemed to in­crease ev­ery mo­ment. At length she ap­proached and said some­thing in the same strange lan­guage which the chief had used. I shook my head and replied in English, where­upon she shook her head with a look of per­plex­ity. Then, anx­ious to con­cil­i­ate her, I held out my hand. She looked at it in some sur­prise. Upon this I took her hand, and pressed it to my lips, feel­ing, how­ever, some­what doubt­ful as to the way in which she might re­ceive such an ad­vance. To my great de­light she ac­cepted it in a friendly spirit, and seemed to con­sider it my for­eign fash­ion of show­ing friend­ship and re­spect. She smiled and nod­ded, and pointed to my gun, which thus far I had car­ried in my hand. I smiled and laid it down. Then she pointed to a seat. I sat down, and then she seated her­self close by me, and we looked at each other in mu­tual won­der and mu­tual in­quiry.

I was full of amaze­ment at thus meet­ing with so ex­quis­ite a be­ing, and lost my­self in con­jec­tures as to her race, her of­fice, and her po­si­tion here. Who was she, or what? She was un­like the oth­ers, and re­minded me of those Ori­en­tal beau­ties whose por­traits I had seen in an­nu­als and il­lus­trated books. Her cos­tume was in keep­ing with such a char­ac­ter. She wore a long tu­nic that reached from the neck to the ground, se­cured at the waist with a golden gir­dle; the sleeves were long and loose; over this she had a long man­tle; on her feet were light slip­pers, white and glis­ten­ing. All about her, in her room and in her cos­tume, spoke of light and splen­dor and lux­ury. To these oth­ers who shrank so from the light she could not be re­lated in any way. The re­spect with which she was treated by the chief, the pe­cu­liar splen­dor of her apart­ments, seemed to in­di­cate some high rank. Was she, then, the queen of the land? Was she a princess? I could not tell. At any rate, what­ever she was, she seemed anx­ious to show me the ut­most at­ten­tion. Her man­ner was full of dig­nity and sweet gra­cious­ness, and she ap­peared par­tic­u­larly anx­ious to make her­self un­der­stood. At first she spoke in a lan­guage that sounded like that of the chief, and was full of gut­turals and broad vow­els; af­ter­ward she spoke in an­other that was far more eu­pho­nious. I, on the other hand spoke in English and in French; but of course I was as un­in­tel­li­gi­ble to her as she was to me.

Lan­guage was, there­fore, of no use. It was nec­es­sary to go back to first prin­ci­ples and make use of signs, or try to gain the most el­e­men­tary words of her lan­guage; so first of all I pointed to her, and tried to in­di­cate that I wanted to know her name. She caught my mean­ing at once, and, point­ing to her­self, she looked fixedly at me and said, “Almah, Almah!”

I re­peated these words af­ter her, say­ing, “Almah, Almah!” She smiled and nod­ded, and then pointed to me with a look of in­quiry that plainly asked for my name. I said “Adam More.” She re­peated this, and it sounded like “A-tam-or.” But as she spoke this slowly her smile died away. She looked anx­ious and trou­bled, and once more that ex­pres­sion of won­der­ing sad­ness came over her face. She re­peated my name over and over in this way with a mourn­ful in­to­na­tion that thrilled through me, and ex­cited fore­bod­ings of evil. “Atam-or, Atam-or!” And al­ways af­ter that she called me “Atam-or.”

But now she sat for some time, look­ing at me with a face full of pity and dis­tress. At this I was greatly as­ton­ished; for but a mo­ment be­fore she had been full of smiles, and it was as though some­thing in my name had ex­cited sor­row­ful thoughts. Yet how could that be, since she could never by any pos­si­bil­ity have heard my name be­fore? The beau­ti­ful Almah seemed to be not al­to­gether happy, or why should she be so quick to sad­ness? There was a mys­tery about all this which was quite un­ac­count­able.

It was a sin­gu­lar sit­u­a­tion, and one which ex­cited within me feel­ings of un­ut­ter­able de­light. This light and splen­dor, this warmth and peace—what a con­trast it of­fered to the scenes through which I had but lately passed! Those scenes of hor­ror, of ice and snow, of storm and tem­pest, of cold and hunger, of riven cliff and fu­ri­ous ocean stream, and, above all, that crown­ing agony in the bleak iron-land of the can­ni­bals—from all these I had es­caped. I had been drawn down un­der the Earth to ex­pe­ri­ence the ter­rors of that un­speak­able pas­sage, and had at last emerged to light and life, to joy and hope. In this grotto I had found the cul­mi­na­tion of all hap­pi­ness. It was like a fairy realm; and here was one whose very look was enough to in­spire the most de­spair­ing soul with hope and peace and hap­pi­ness. The only thing that was now left to trou­ble me was this mourn­ful face of Almah. Why did she look at me with such sad in­ter­est and such melan­choly mean­ing? Did she know of any evil fate in store for me? Yet how could there be any evil fate to be feared from peo­ple who had re­ceived me with such un­par­al­leled gen­eros­ity? No, it could not be; so I re­solved to try to bring back again the smile that had faded out of her face.

I pointed to her, and said, “Almah.”

She said, “Atam-or.”

And the smile did not come back, but the sad­ness re­mained in her face.

My ea­ger de­sire now was to learn her lan­guage, and I re­solved at once to ac­quire as many words and phrases as pos­si­ble. I be­gan by ask­ing the names of things, such as “seat,” “ta­ble,” “mat,” “coat,” “hat,” “shoe,” “lamp,” “floor,” “wall,” and all the com­mon ob­jects around. She gave all the names, and soon be­came so deeply in­ter­ested that her sad­ness de­parted, and the smile came back once more. For my own part, I was al­ways rather quick at learn­ing lan­guages. I had a cor­rect ear and a re­ten­tive mem­ory; in my wan­der­ings round the world I had picked up a smat­ter­ing of many lan­guages, such as French, Ital­ian, Span­ish, Ara­bic, Ger­man, Hin­dus­tani, and a few oth­ers. The words which I learned from Almah had a re­mote re­sem­blance to Ara­bic; and, in fact, my knowl­edge of Ara­bic was ac­tu­ally of some as­sis­tance, though how it was that these peo­ple should have a lan­guage with that re­sem­blance was cer­tainly a mys­tery, and I did not try to solve it. The beau­ti­ful Almah soon grew im­mensely in­ter­ested in my ef­forts to learn, and also in the English words which I gave when I pointed to any ob­ject.

Thus I pointed to my­self, and said “Man,” then point­ing to her, I said, “Wo­man.” She laughed, and point­ing to me said “Iz,” and point­ing to her­self said, “Izza.” Then I pointed to the row of lights, and said “Light;” she did the same, and said, “Or.” Then her face grew mourn­ful, and she pointed to me, say­ing “Atam-or.” It struck me then that there was some chance re­sem­blance be­tween “or,” the word mean­ing “light,” and one of the syl­la­bles of my name as she pro­nounced it, and that this might cause her sad­ness; but as I could make out noth­ing of this, I dis­missed the thought, and went on with my ques­tions. This took up the time, un­til at length some­one ap­peared who looked like a ser­vant. He said some­thing, where­upon Almah arose and beck­oned to me to fol­low. I did so, and we went to a neigh­bor­ing apart­ment, where there was spread a boun­teous repast. Here we sat and ate, and Almah told me the names of all the dishes. After din­ner we re­turned to the room.

It was a sin­gu­lar and a de­light­ful po­si­tion. I was left alone with the beau­ti­ful Almah, who her­self showed the ut­most gra­cious­ness and the kind­est in­ter­est in me. I could not un­der­stand it, nor did I try to; it was enough that I had such a happy lot. For hours we thus were to­gether, and I learned many words. To in­sure re­mem­brance, I wrote them down in my mem­o­ran­dum-book with a pen­cil and both of these were re­garded by Almah with great­est cu­rios­ity. She felt the pa­per, in­spected it, touched it with her tongue, and seemed to ad­mire it greatly; but the pen­cil ex­cited still greater ad­mi­ra­tion. I signed to her to write in the book. She did so, but the char­ac­ters were quite un­like any­thing that I had ever seen. They were not joined like our writ­ing and like Ara­bic let­ters, but were sep­a­rate like our printed type, and were formed in an ir­reg­u­lar man­ner. She then showed me a book made of a strange sub­stance. It was filled with char­ac­ters like those which she had just writ­ten. The leaves were not at all like pa­per, but seemed like some veg­etable prod­uct, such as the leaves of a plant or the bark of a tree. They were very thin, very smooth, all cut into reg­u­lar size, and fas­tened to­gether by means of rings. This man­u­script is writ­ten upon the same ma­te­rial. I af­ter­ward found that it was uni­ver­sally used here, and was made of a reed that grows in marshes.

Here in these vast cav­erns there was no way by which I could tell the progress of time, but Almah had her own way of find­ing out when the hours of wake­ful life were over. She arose and said, “Salonla.” This I af­ter­ward found out to be com­mon salu­ta­tion of the coun­try. I said it af­ter her. She then left me. Shortly af­ter­ward a ser­vant ap­peared, who took me to a room, which I un­der­stood to be mine. Here I found ev­ery­thing that I could wish, ei­ther for com­fort or lux­ury; and as I felt fa­tigue, I flung my­self upon the soft bed of down, and soon was sound asleep.

I slept for a long time. When I awoke I heard sounds in the dis­tance, and knew that peo­ple were mov­ing. Here in these cav­erns there was no dif­fer­ence be­tween day and night, but, by modes of which I was ig­no­rant, a reg­u­lar suc­ces­sion was ob­served of wak­ing times and sleep­ing times.

IX The Cavern of the Dead

On go­ing forth into the outer grotto I saw the ta­ble spread with a sump­tu­ous repast, and the apart­ment in a blaze of light. Almah was not here; and though some ser­vants made signs for me to eat, yet I could not un­til I should see whether she was com­ing or not. I had to wait for a long time, how­ever; and while I was wait­ing the chief en­tered, shad­ing his eyes with his hand from the painful light. He bowed low with the most pro­found cour­tesy, say­ing, “Salonla,” to which I re­sponded in the same way. He seemed much pleased at this, and made a few re­marks, which I did not un­der­stand; where­upon, anx­ious to lose no time in learn­ing the lan­guage, I re­peated to him all the words I knew, and asked af­ter oth­ers. I pointed to him and asked his name. He said, “Ko­hen.” This, how­ever, I af­ter­ward found was not a name, but a ti­tle. The “Ko­hen” did not re­main long, for the light was painful. After his de­par­ture I was alone for some time, and at length Almah made her ap­pear­ance. I sprang to meet her, full of joy, and took her hand in both of mine and pressed it warmly. She smiled, and ap­peared quite free from the melan­choly of the pre­vi­ous day.

We ate our break­fast to­gether, af­ter which we went out into the world of light, grop­ing our way along through the dark pas­sages amid the busy crowd. Almah could see bet­ter than I in the dark­ness; but she was far from see­ing well, and did not move with that easy step and per­fect cer­tainty which all the oth­ers showed. Like me, she was a child of light, and the dark­ness was dis­tress­ing to her. As we went on we were seen by all, but were ap­par­ently not con­sid­ered pris­on­ers. On the con­trary, all looked at us with the deep­est re­spect, and bowed low or moved aside, and oc­ca­sion­ally made lit­tle of­fer­ings of fruit or flow­ers to one or the other of us. It seemed to me that we were treated with equal dis­tinc­tion; and if Almah was their queen, I, their guest, was re­garded with equal honor. What­ever her rank might be, how­ever, she was to all ap­pear­ance the most ab­so­lute mis­tress of her own ac­tions, and moved about among all these peo­ple with the in­de­pen­dence and dig­nity of some per­son of ex­alted rank.

At length we emerged into the open air. Here the con­trast to the cav­ern gloom in­side gave to the outer world un­usual bright­ness and splen­dor, so that even un­der the heavy over­ar­ch­ing tree-ferns, which had seemed so dark when I was here be­fore, it now ap­peared light and cheer­ful. Almah turned to the right, and we walked along the ter­race. But few peo­ple were vis­i­ble. They shrank from the light, and kept them­selves in the cav­erns. Then af­ter a few steps we came to the base of a tall half-pyra­mid, the sum­mit of which was above the tops of the trees. I pointed to this, as though I wished to go up. Almah hes­i­tated for a mo­ment, and seemed to shrink back, but at length, over­com­ing her re­luc­tance, be­gan the as­cent. A flight of stony steps led up. On reach­ing the top, I found it about thirty feet long by fif­teen wide, with a high stone ta­ble in the mid­dle. At that mo­ment, how­ever, I scarce no­ticed the pyra­mid sum­mit, and I only de­scribe it now be­cause I was fated be­fore long to see it with dif­fer­ent feel­ings. What I then no­ticed was the vast and won­drous dis­play of all the glo­ries of na­ture that burst at once upon my view. There was that same bound­less sea, ris­ing up high to­ward the hori­zon, as I had seen it be­fore, and sug­gest­ing in­fi­nite ex­tent. There were the blue wa­ters break­ing into foam, the ships travers­ing the deep, the far-en­cir­cling shores green in veg­e­ta­tion, the high ram­part of ice­bound moun­tains that shut in the land, mak­ing it a world by it­self. There was the sun, low on the hori­zon, which it tra­versed on its long or­bit, light­ing up all these scenes till the six-months day should end and the six-months night be­gin.

For a long time I stood feast­ing my eyes upon all this splen­dor, and at length turned to see whether Almah shared my feel­ings. One look was enough. She stood ab­sorbed in the scene, as though she were drink­ing in deep draughts of all this match­less beauty. I felt amazed at this; I saw how dif­fer­ent she seemed from the oth­ers, and could not ac­count for it. But as yet I knew too lit­tle of the lan­guage to ques­tion her, and could only hope for a fu­ture ex­pla­na­tion when I had learned more.

We de­scended at length and walked about the ter­race and up and down the side streets. All were the same as I had no­ticed be­fore—ter­raced streets, with cav­erns on one side and mas­sive stone struc­tures on the other. I saw deep chan­nels, which were used as drains to carry down moun­tain tor­rents. I did not see all at this first walk, but I in­spected the whole city in many sub­se­quent walks un­til its out­lines were all fa­mil­iar. I found it about a mile long and about half a mile wide, con­structed in a se­ries of ter­races, which rose one above an­other in a hol­low of the moun­tains round a har­bor of the sea. On my walks I met with but few peo­ple on the streets, and they all seemed trou­bled with the light. I saw also oc­ca­sion­ally some more of those great birds, the name of which I learned from Almah; it was “op­kuk.”

For some time my life went on most de­light­fully. I found my­self sur­rounded with ev­ery com­fort and lux­ury. Almah was my con­stant as­so­ciate, and all around re­garded us with the pro­found­est re­spect. The peo­ple were the mildest, most gen­tle, and most gen­er­ous that I had ever seen. The Ko­hen seemed to pass most of his time in mak­ing new con­trivances for my hap­pi­ness. This strange peo­ple, in their deal­ings with me and with one an­other, seemed an­i­mated by a uni­ver­sal de­sire to do kindly acts; and the only pos­si­ble ob­jec­tion against them was their sin­gu­lar love of dark­ness.

My free­dom was ab­so­lute. No one watched me. Almah and I could go where we chose. So far as I could per­ceive, we were quite at lib­erty, if we wished, to take a boat and es­cape over the sea. It seemed also quite likely that if we had or­dered out a gal­ley and a gang of oars­men, we should have been sup­plied with all that we might want in the most cheer­ful man­ner. Such a thought, how­ever, was ab­surd. Flight! Why should I think of fly­ing?

I had long ago lost all idea of time; and here, where it was for the present per­pet­ual day, I was more at a loss than ever. I sup­posed that it was some­where in the month of March, but whether at the be­gin­ning or the end I could not tell. The peo­ple had a reg­u­lar sys­tem of wake-time and sleep-time, by which they or­dered their lives; but whether these re­spec­tive times were longer or shorter than the days and nights at home I could not tell at that time, though I af­ter­ward learned all about it. On the whole, I was per­fectly con­tent—nay, more, per­fectly happy; more so, in­deed, than ever in my life, and quite will­ing to for­get home and friends and ev­ery­thing in the so­ci­ety of Almah. While in her com­pany there was al­ways one pur­pose upon which I was most in­tent, and that was to mas­ter the lan­guage. I made rapid progress, and while she was ab­sent I sought out oth­ers, es­pe­cially the Ko­hen, with whom to prac­tice. The Ko­hen was al­ways most ea­ger to aid me in ev­ery con­ceiv­able way or to any con­ceiv­able thing; and he had such a gen­tle man­ner and showed such gen­er­ous qual­i­ties that I soon learned to re­gard him with pos­i­tive af­fec­tion.

Almah was al­ways ab­sent for sev­eral hours af­ter I rose in the morn­ing, and when she made her ap­pear­ance it was with the face and man­ner of one who had re­turned from some un­pleas­ant task. It al­ways took some time for her to re­gain that cheer­ful­ness which she usu­ally showed. I soon felt a deep cu­rios­ity to learn the na­ture of her em­ploy­ment and of­fice here, and as my knowl­edge of the lan­guage in­creased I be­gan to ques­tion her. My first at­tempts were vain. She looked at me with in­de­scrib­able mourn­ful­ness and shook her head. This, how­ever, only con­firmed me in my sus­pi­cions that her du­ties, what­ever they might be, were of a painful na­ture; so I urged her to tell me, and asked her as well as I could if I might not share them or help her in some way. To all this, how­ever, she only re­turned sighs and mourn­ful looks for an an­swer. It seemed to me, from her man­ner and from the gen­eral be­hav­ior of the peo­ple, that there was no ex­press pro­hi­bi­tion on my learn­ing any­thing, do­ing any­thing, or go­ing any­where; and so, af­ter this, I be­sought her to let me ac­com­pany her some time. But this too she re­fused. My re­quests were of­ten made, and as I learned more and more of the lan­guage I was able to make them with more earnest­ness and ef­fect, un­til at length I suc­ceeded in over­com­ing her ob­jec­tions.

“It is for your own sake,” said she, “that I have re­fused, Atam-or. I do not wish to lessen your hap­pi­ness. But you must know all soon; and so, if you wish to come with me and see what I have to do, why, you may come the next jom.”

This meant the next day, jom be­ing the di­vi­sion of time cor­re­spond­ing with our day. At this prom­ise I was so full of grat­i­tude that I for­got all about the dark sug­ges­tive­ness of her words. The next jom I arose sooner than usual and went forth. I found Almah wait­ing for me. She looked trou­bled, and greeted me with a mourn­ful smile.

“You will find pain in this,” said she; “but you wish it, and if you still wish it, why, I will take you with me.”

At this I only per­sisted the more, and so we set forth. We went through the cav­ern pas­sages. Few peo­ple were there; all seemed asleep. Then we went out-of-doors and came into the full blaze of that day which here knew no night, but pro­longed it­self into months. For a while Almah stood look­ing forth be­tween the trees to where the bright sun­light sparkled on the sea, and then with a sigh she turned to the left. I fol­lowed. On com­ing to the next por­tal she went in. I fol­lowed, and found my­self in a rough cav­ern, dark and for­bid­ding. Travers­ing this we came to an in­ner door­way, closed with a heavy mat. This she raised, and passed through, while I went in af­ter her.

I found my­self in a vast cav­ern, full of dim, sparkling lights, which served not to il­lu­mi­nate it, but merely to in­di­cate its enor­mous ex­tent. Far above rose the vaulted roof, to a height of ap­par­ently a hun­dred feet. Un­der this there was a lofty half-pyra­mid with stone steps. All around, as far as I could see in the ob­scure light, there were niches in the walls, each one con­tain­ing a fig­ure with a light burn­ing at its feet. I took them for stat­ues. Almah pointed in si­lence to one of these which was near­est, and I went up close so as to see it.

The first glance that I took made me re­coil with hor­ror. It was no statue that I saw in that niche, but a shriv­elled hu­man form—a hideous sight. It was dark and dried; it was fixed in a sit­ting pos­ture, with its hands rest­ing on its knees, and its hol­low eyes look­ing for­ward. On its head was the mock­ery of a wreath of flow­ers, while from its heart there pro­jected the han­dle and half of the blade of a knife which had been thrust there. What was the mean­ing of this knife? It seemed to tell of a vi­o­lent death. Yet the flow­ers must surely be a mark of honor. A vi­o­lent death with honor, and the em­balmed re­mains—these things sug­gested noth­ing else than the hor­rid thought of a hu­man sac­ri­fice. I looked away with ea­ger and ter­ri­ble cu­rios­ity. I saw all the niches, hun­dreds upon hun­dreds, all filled with these fear­ful oc­cu­pants. I turned again with a sink­ing heart to Almah. Her face was full of an­guish.

“This is my duty,” said she. “Every jom I must come here and crown these vic­tims with fresh flow­ers.”

A feel­ing of sick­en­ing hor­ror over­whelmed me. Almah had spo­ken these words and stood look­ing at me with a face of woe. This, then, was that daily task from which she was wont to re­turn in such sad­ness—an ab­hor­rent task to her, and one to which fa­mil­iar­ity had never rec­on­ciled her. What was she do­ing here? What dark fate was it that thus bound this child of light to these chil­dren of dark­ness? or why was she thus com­pelled to per­form a ser­vice from which all her na­ture re­volted? I read in her face at this mo­ment a hor­ror equal to my own; and at the sight of her dis­tress my own was less­ened, and there arose within me a pro­found sym­pa­thy and a strong de­sire to do some­thing to al­le­vi­ate her mis­ery.

“This is no place for you,” con­tin­ued Almah. “Go, and I will soon join you.”

“No,” said I, us­ing her lan­guage af­ter my own bro­ken fash­ion—“no, I will not go—I will stay, I will help, if you will per­mit.”

She looked at me earnestly, and seemed to see that my res­o­lu­tion was firmly fixed, and that I was not to be dis­suaded from it.

“Very well,” said she; “if you do stay and help me, it will be a great re­lief.”

With these sim­ple words she pro­ceeded to carry out her work. At the foot of the pyra­mid there was a heap of wreaths made out of fresh flow­ers, and these were to be placed by her on the heads of the em­balmed corpses.

“This work,” said she, “is con­sid­ered here the high­est and most hon­or­able that can be per­formed. It is given to me out of kind­ness, and they can­not un­der­stand that I can have any other feel­ings in the per­for­mance than those of joy and ex­ul­ta­tion—here among the dead and in the dark.”

I said noth­ing, but fol­lowed and watched her, car­ry­ing the wreaths and sup­ply­ing her. She went to each niche in suc­ces­sion, and af­ter tak­ing the wreath off each corpse she placed a fresh one on, say­ing a brief for­mula at each act. By keep­ing her sup­plied with wreaths I was able to lighten her task, so much so that, whereas it usu­ally oc­cu­pied her more than two hours, on the present oc­ca­sion it was fin­ished in less than half an hour. She in­formed me that those which she crowned were the corpses of men who had been sac­ri­ficed dur­ing the present sea­son—by sea­son mean­ing the six months of light; and that though many more were here, yet they wore crowns of gold. At the end of ten years they were re­moved to pub­lic sepul­chres. The num­ber of those which had to be crowned by her was about a hun­dred. Her work was only to crown them, the la­bor of col­lect­ing the flow­ers and weav­ing the wreaths and at­tend­ing to the lamps be­ing per­formed by oth­ers.

I left this place with Almah, sad and de­pressed. She had not told me why these vic­tims had been sac­ri­ficed, nor did I feel in­clined to ask. A dark sus­pi­cion had come to me that these peo­ple, un­der­neath all their ami­able ways, con­cealed thoughts, habits, and mo­tives of a fright­ful kind; and that be­yond all my present bright­ness and hap­pi­ness there might be a fate await­ing me too hor­ri­ble for thought. Yet I did not wish to bor­row trou­ble. What I had seen and heard was quite enough for one oc­ca­sion. I was anx­ious, rather, to for­get it all. Nor did Almah’s words or man­ner in any way re­as­sure me. She was silent and sad and pre­oc­cu­pied. It was as though she knew the worst, and know­ing it, dared not speak; as though there was some­thing more hor­ri­ble which she dared not re­veal. For my part, I feared it so that I dared not ask. It was enough for me just then to know that my mild and self-deny­ing and gen­er­ous en­ter­tain­ers were ad­dicted to the ab­hor­rent cus­tom of hu­man sac­ri­fices.