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The Purple Cloud

by M. P. Shiel · English · Gutenberg #11229 · 591,419 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Purple Cloud

Author: M. P. Shiel


        
Release date: February 1, 2004 [eBook #11229]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PURPLE CLOUD ***

THE PURPLE CLOUD

By

M.P. Shiel

1901




[Greek: estai kai Samos ammos, eseitai Daelos adaelos]

_Sibylline Prophecy_




INTRODUCTION


About three months ago--that is to say, toward the end of May of this
year of 1900--the writer whose name appears on the title-page received
as noteworthy a letter, and packet of papers, as it has been his lot to
examine. They came from a very good friend of mine, whose name there is
no reason that I should now conceal--Dr. Arthur Lister Browne, M.A.
(Oxon.), F.R.C.P. It happened that for two years I had been spending
most of my time in France, and as Browne had a Norfolk practice, I had
not seen him during my visits to London. Moreover, though our friendship
was of the most intimate kind, we were both atrocious correspondents: so
that only two notes passed between us during those years.

Till, last May, there reached me the letter--and the packet--to which I
refer. The packet consisted of four note-books, quite crowded
throughout with those giddy shapes of Pitman's shorthand, whose
_ensemble_ so resembles startled swarms hovering in flighty poses on the
wing. They were scribbled in pencil, with little distinction between
thick and thin strokes, few vowels: so that their slow deciphering, I
can assure the reader, has been no holiday. The letter also was
pencilled in shorthand; and this letter, together with the second of the
note-books which I have deciphered (it was marked 'III.'), I now
publish.

[I must say, however, that in some five instances there will occur
sentences rather crutched by my own guess-work; and in two instances the
characters were so impossibly mystical, that I had to abandon the
passage with a head-ache. But all this will be found immaterial to the
general narrative.]

The following is Browne's letter:

'DEAR OLD SHIEL,--I have just been lying thinking of you, and wishing
that you were here to give one a last squeeze of the hand before
I--"_go_": for, by all appearance, "going" I am. Four days ago, I began
to feel a soreness in the throat, and passing by old Johnson's surgery
at Selbridge, went in and asked him to have a look at me. He muttered
something about membranous laryngitis which made me smile, but by the
time I reached home I was hoarse, and not smiling: before night I had
dyspnoca and laryngeal stridor. I at once telegraphed to London for
Morgan, and, between him and Johnson, they have been opening my trachea,
and burning my inside with chromic acid and the galvanic cautery. The
difficulty as to breathing has subsided, and it is wonderful how little
I suffer: but I am much too old a hand not to know what's what: the
bronchi are involved--_too far_ involved--and as a matter of absolute
fact, there isn't any hope. Morgan is still, I believe, fondly dwelling
upon the possibility of adding me to his successful-tracheotomy
statistics, but prognosis was always my strong point, and I say No. The
very small consolation of my death will be the beating of a specialist
in his own line. So we shall see.

'I have been arranging some of my affairs this morning, and remembered
these notebooks. I intended letting you have them months ago, but my
habit of putting things off, and the fact that the lady was alive from
whom I took down the words, prevented me. Now she is dead, and as a
literary man, and a student of life, you should be interested, if you
can manage to read them. You may even find them valuable.

'I am under a little morphia at present, propped up in a nice little
state of languor, and as I am able to write without much effort, I will
tell you in the old Pitman's something about her. Her name was Miss Mary
Wilson; she was about thirty when I met her, forty-five when she died,
and I knew her intimately all those fifteen years. Do you know anything
about the philosophy of the hypnotic trance? Well, that was the relation
between us--hypnotist and subject. She had been under another man before
my time, but no one was ever so successful with her as I. She suffered
from _tic douloureux_ of the fifth nerve. She had had most of her teeth
drawn before I saw her, and an attempt had been made to wrench out the
nerve on the left side by the external scission. But it made no
difference: all the clocks in hell tick-tacked in that poor woman's jaw,
and it was the mercy of Providence that ever she came across _me_. My
organisation was found to have almost complete, and quite easy, control
over hers, and with a few passes I could expel her Legion.

'Well, you never saw anyone so singular in personal appearance as my
friend, Miss Wilson. Medicine-man as I am, I could never behold her
suddenly without a sensation of shock: she suggested so inevitably what
we call "the _other_ world," one detecting about her some odour of the
worm, with the feeling that here was rather ghost than woman. And yet I
can hardly convey to you the why of this, except by dry details as to
the contours of her lofty brow, meagre lips, pointed chin, and ashen
cheeks. She was tall and deplorably emaciated, her whole skeleton,
except the thigh-bones, being quite visible. Her eyes were of the bluish
hue of cigarette smoke, and had in them the strangest, feeble, unearthly
gaze; while at thirty-five her paltry wisp of hair was quite white.

'She was well-to-do, and lived alone in old Wooding Manor-house, five
miles from Ash Thomas. As you know, I was "beginning" in these parts at
the time, and soon took up my residence at the manor. She insisted that
I should devote myself to her alone; and that one patient constituted
the most lucrative practice which I ever had.

'Well, I quickly found that, in the state of trance, Miss Wilson
possessed very remarkable powers: remarkable, I mean, not, of course,
because peculiar to herself in _kind_, but because they were so
constant, reliable, exact, and far-reaching, in degree. The veriest
fledgling in psychical science will now sit and discourse finically to
you about the reporting powers of the mind in its trance state--just as
though it was something quite new! This simple fact, I assure you, which
the Psychical Research Society, only after endless investigation, admits
to be scientific, has been perfectly well known to every old crone since
the Middle Ages, and, I assume, long previously. What an unnecessary air
of discovery! The certainty that someone in trance in Manchester can
tell you what is going on in London, or in Pekin, was not, of course,
left to the acumen of an office in Fleet Street; and the society, in
establishing the fact beyond doubt for the general public, has not gone
one step toward explaining it. They have, in fact, revealed nothing that
many of us did not, with absolute assurance, know before.

'But talking of poor Miss Wilson, I say that her powers were
_remarkable_, because, though not exceptional in _genre_, they were so
special in quantity,--so "constant," and "far-reaching." I believe it to
be a fact that, _in general_, the powers of trance manifest themselves
more particularly with regard to space, as distinct from time: the
spirit roams in the present--it travels over a plain--it does not
_usually_ attract the interest of observers by great ascents, or by
great descents. I fancy that is so. But Miss Wilson's gift was special
to this extent, that she travelled in every direction, and easily in all
but one, north and south, up and down, in the past, the present, and the
future.

This I discovered, not at once, but gradually. She would emit a stream
of sounds in the trance state--I can hardly call it _speech_, so
murmurous, yet guttural, was the utterance, mixed with puffy
breath-sounds at the languid lips. This state was accompanied by an
intense contraction of the pupils, absence of the knee-jerk,
considerable rigor, and a rapt and arrant expression. I got into the
habit of sitting long hours at her bed-side, quite fascinated by her,
trying to catch the import of that opiate and visionary language which
came puffing and fluttering in deliberate monotone from her lips.
Gradually, in the course of months, my ear learned to detect the words;
"the veil was rent" for me also; and I was able to follow somewhat the
course of her musing and wandering spirit.

At the end of six months I heard her one day repeat some words which
were familiar to me. They were these: "Such were the arts by which the
Romans extended their conquests, and attained the palm of victory; and
the concurring testimony of different authors enables us to describe
them with precision..." I was startled: they are part of Gibbon's
"Decline and Fall," which I easily guessed that she had never read.

I said in a stern voice: "Where are you?"

She replied, "Us are in a room, eight hundred and eleven miles above. A
man is writing. Us are reading."

I may tell you two things: first, that in trance she never spoke of
herself as "I," nor even as "we," but, for some unknown reason, in the
_objective_ way, as "_us_": "us are," she would say--"us will," "us
went"; though, of course, she was an educated lady, and I don't think
ever lived in the West of England, where they say "us" in that way;
secondly, when wandering in the past, she always represented herself as
being "_above_" (the earth?), and higher the further back in time she
went; in describing present events she appears to have felt herself _on_
(the earth); while, as regards the future, she invariably declared that
"_us_" were so many miles "within" (the earth).

To her excursions in this last direction, however, there seemed to exist
certain fixed limits: I say seemed, for I cannot be sure, and only mean
that, in spite of my efforts, she never, in fact, went far in this
direction. Three, four thousand "miles" were common figures on her lips
in describing her distance "above"; but her distance "within" never got
beyond sixty-three. Usually, she would say twenty, twenty-five. She
appeared, in relation to the future, to resemble a diver in the deep
sea, who, the deeper he strives, finds a more resistant pressure, till,
at no great depth, resistance becomes prohibition, and he can no further
strive.

'I am afraid I can't go on: though I had a good deal to tell you about
this lady. During fifteen years, off and on, I sat listening by her dim
bed-side to her murmuring trances! At last my expert ear could detect
the sense of her faintest sigh. I heard the "Decline and Fall" from
beginning to end. Some of her reports were the most frivolous nonsense:
over others I have hung in a horror of interest. Certainly, my friend, I
have heard some amazing words proceed from those wan lips of Mary
Wilson. Sometimes I could hitch her repeatedly to any scene or subject
that I chose by the mere exercise of my will; at others, the flighty
waywardness of her spirit eluded and baffled me: she resisted--she
disobeyed: otherwise I might have sent you, not four note-books, but
twenty, or forty. About the fifth year it struck me that it would be
well to jot down her more connected utterances, since I knew shorthand.

The note-book marked "I.," [1] which seems to me the most curious,
belongs to the seventh year. Its history, like those of the other three,
is this: I heard her one afternoon murmuring in the intonation used when
_reading_; the matter interested me; I asked her where she was. She
replied: "Us are forty-five miles within: us read, and another writes";
from which I concluded that she was some fifteen to thirty years in the
future, perusing an as yet unpublished work. After that, during some
weeks, I managed to keep her to the same subject, and finally, I fancy,
won pretty well the whole work. I believe you would find it striking,
and hope you will be able to read my notes.

'But no more of Mary Wilson now. Rather let us think a little of A.L.
Browne, F.R.C.P.!--with a breathing-tube in his trachea, and Eternity
under his pillow...' [Dr. Browne's letter then continues on a subject of
no interest here.]

[The present writer may add that Dr. Browne's prognosis of his own case
proved correct, for he passed away two days after writing the above. My
transcription of the shorthand book marked 'III.' I now proceed to give
without comment, merely reminding the reader that the words form the
substance of a book or document to be written, or to be motived
(according to Miss Wilson) in that Future, which, no less than the Past,
substantively exists in the Present--though, like the Past, we see it
not. I need only add that the title, division into paragraphs, &c., have
been arbitrarily contrived by myself for the sake of form and
convenience.]


[Footnote 1: This I intend to publish under the title of 'The Last
Miracle; 'II.' will bear that of 'The Lord of the Sea'; the present book
is marked 'III.' The perusal of 'IV.' I have yet finished, but so far do
not consider it suitable for publication.]




(_Here begins the note-book marked 'III.'_)




THE PURPLE CLOUD


Well, the memory seems to be getting rather impaired now, rather weak.
What, for instance, was the name of that parson who preached, just
before the _Boreal_ set out, about the wickedness of any further attempt
to reach the North Pole? I have forgotten! Yet four years ago it was
familiar to me as my own name.

Things which took place before the voyage seem to be getting a little
cloudy in the memory now. I have sat here, in the loggia of this Cornish
villa, to write down some sort of account of what has happened--God
knows why, since no eye can ever read it--and at the very beginning I
cannot remember the parson's name.

He was a strange sort of man surely, a Scotchman from Ayrshire, big and
gaunt, with tawny hair. He used to go about London streets in shough
and rough-spun clothes, a plaid flung from one shoulder. Once I saw him
in Holborn with his rather wild stalk, frowning and muttering to
himself. He had no sooner come to London, and opened chapel (I think in
Fetter Lane), than the little room began to be crowded; and when, some
years afterwards, he moved to a big establishment in Kensington, all
sorts of men, even from America and Australia, flocked to hear the
thunderstorms that he talked, though certainly it was not an age apt to
fly into enthusiasms over that species of pulpit prophets and
prophecies. But this particular man undoubtedly did wake the strong dark
feelings that sleep in the heart; his eyes were very singular and
powerful; his voice from a whisper ran gathering, like snow-balls, and
crashed, as I have heard the pack-ice in commotion far yonder in the
North; while his gestures were as uncouth and gawky as some wild man's
of the primitive ages.

Well, this man--what _was_ his name?--Macintosh? Mackay? I think--yes,
that was it! _Mackay_. Mackay saw fit to take offence at the new attempt
to reach the Pole in the _Boreal_; and for three Sundays, when the
preparations were nearing completion, stormed against it at Kensington.

The excitement of the world with regard to the North Pole had at this
date reached a pitch which can only be described as _fevered_, though
that word hardly expresses the strange ecstasy and unrest which
prevailed: for the abstract interest which mankind, in mere desire for
knowledge, had always felt in this unknown region, was now, suddenly, a
thousand and a thousand times intensified by a new, concrete interest--a
tremendous _money_ interest.

And the new zeal had ceased to be healthy in its tone as the old zeal
was: for now the fierce demon Mammon was making his voice heard in this
matter.

Within the ten years preceding the _Boreal_ expedition, no less than
twenty-seven expeditions had set out, and failed.

The secret of this new rage lay in the last will and testament of Mr.
Charles P. Stickney of Chicago, that king of faddists, supposed to be
the richest individual who ever lived: he, just ten years before the
_Boreal_ undertaking, had died, bequeathing 175 million dollars to the
man, of whatever nationality, who first reached the Pole.

Such was the actual wording of the will--_'the man who first reached'_:
and from this loose method of designating the person intended had
immediately burst forth a prolonged heat of controversy in Europe and
America as to whether or no the testator meant _the Chief_ of the first
expedition which reached: but it was finally decided, on the highest
legal authority, that, in any case, the actual wording of the document
held good: and that it was the individual, whatever his station in the
expedition, whose foot first reached the 90th degree of north latitude,
who would have title to the fortune.

At all events, the public ferment had risen, as I say, to a pitch of
positive fever; and as to the _Boreal_ in particular, the daily progress
of her preparations was minutely discussed in the newspapers, everyone
was an authority on her fitting, and she was in every mouth a bet, a
hope, a jest, or a sneer: for now, at last, it was felt that success was
probable. So this Mackay had an acutely interested audience, if a
somewhat startled, and a somewhat cynical, one.

A truly lion-hearted man this must have been, after all, to dare
proclaim a point-of-view so at variance with the spirit of his age! One
against four hundred millions, they bent one way, he the opposite,
saying that they were wrong, all wrong! People used to call him 'John
the Baptist Redivivus': and without doubt he did suggest something of
that sort. I suppose that at the time when he had the face to denounce
the _Boreal_ there was not a sovereign on any throne in Europe who, but
for shame, would have been glad of a subordinate post on board.

On the third Sunday night of his denunciation I was there in that
Kensington chapel, and I heard him. And the wild talk he talked! He
seemed like a man delirious with inspiration.

The people sat quite spell-bound, while Mackay's prophesying voice
ranged up and down through all the modulations of thunder, from the
hurrying mutter to the reverberant shock and climax: and those who came
to scoff remained to wonder.

Put simply, what he said was this: That there was undoubtedly some sort
of Fate, or Doom, connected with the Poles of the earth in reference to
the human race: that man's continued failure, in spite of continual
efforts, to reach them, abundantly and super-abundantly proved this; and
that this failure constituted a lesson--_and a warning_--which the race
disregarded at its peril.

The North Pole, he said, was not so very far away, and the difficulties
in the way of reaching it were not, on the face of them, so very great:
human ingenuity had achieved a thousand things a thousand times more
difficult; yet in spite of over half-a-dozen well-planned efforts in
the nineteenth century, and thirty-one in the twentieth, man had never
reached: always he had been baulked, baulked, by some seeming
chance--some restraining Hand: and herein lay the lesson--_herein the
warning_. Wonderfully--really _wonderfully_--like the Tree of
Knowledge in Eden, he said, was that Pole: all the rest of earth lying
open and offered to man--but _That_ persistently veiled and 'forbidden.'
It was as when a father lays a hand upon his son, with: 'Not here, my
child; wheresoever you will--but not here.'

But human beings, he said, were free agents, with power to stop their
ears, and turn a callous consciousness to the whispers and warning
indications of Heaven; and he believed, he said, that the time was now
come when man would find it absolutely in his power to stand on that
90th of latitude, and plant an impious right foot on the head of the
earth--just as it had been given into the absolute power of Adam to
stretch an impious right hand, and pluck of the Fruit of Knowledge; but,
said he--his voice pealing now into one long proclamation of awful
augury--just as the abuse of that power had been followed in the one
case by catastrophe swift and universal, so, in the other, he warned the
entire race to look out thenceforth for nothing from God but a lowering
sky, and thundery weather.

The man's frantic earnestness, authoritative voice, and savage gestures,
could not but have their effect upon all; as for me, I declare, I sat as
though a messenger from Heaven addressed me. But I believe that I had
not yet reached home, when the whole impression of the discourse had
passed from me like water from a duck's back. The Prophet in the
twentieth century was not a success. John Baptist himself, camel-skin
and all, would have met with only tolerant shrugs. I dismissed Mackay
from my mind with the thought: 'He is behind his age, I suppose.'

But haven't I thought differently of Mackay since, my God...?

       *       *       *       *       *

Three weeks--it was about that--before that Sunday night discourse, I
was visited by Clark, the chief of the coming expedition--a mere visit
of friendship. I had then been established about a year at No. II,
Harley Street, and, though under twenty-five, had, I suppose, as _élite_
a practice as any doctor in Europe.

_Élite_--but small. I was able to maintain my state, and move among the
great: but now and again I would feel the secret pinch of
moneylessness. Just about that time, in fact, I was only saved from
considerable embarrassment by the success of my book, 'Applications of
Science to the Arts.'

In the course of conversation that afternoon, Clark said to me in his
light hap-hazard way:

'Do you know what I dreamed about you last night, Adam Jeffson? I
dreamed that you were with us on the expedition.'

I think he must have seen my start: on the same night I had myself
dreamed the same thing; but not a word said I about it now. There was a
stammer in my tongue when I answered:

'Who? I?--on the expedition?--I would not go, if I were asked.'

'Oh, you would.'

'I wouldn't. You forget that I am about to be married.'

'Well, we need not discuss the point, as Peters is not going to die,'
said he. 'Still, if anything did happen to him, you know, it is you I
should come straight to, Adam Jeffson.'

'Clark, you jest,' I said: 'I know really very little of astronomy, or
magnetic phenomena. Besides, I am about to be married....'

'But what about your botany, my friend? _There's_ what we should be
wanting from you: and as for nautical astronomy, poh, a man with your
scientific habit would pick all that up in no time.'

'You discuss the matter as gravely as though it were a possibility,
Clark,' I said, smiling. 'Such a thought would never enter my head:
there is, first of all, my _fiancée_----'

'Ah, the all-important Countess, eh?--Well, but she, as far as I know
the lady, would be the first to force you to go. The chance of stamping
one's foot on the North Pole does not occur to a man every day, my son.'

'Do talk of something else!' I said. 'There is Peters....'

'Well, of course, there is Peters. But believe me, the dream I had was
so clear----'

'Let me alone with your dreams, and your Poles!' I laughed.

Yes, I remember: I pretended to laugh loud! But my secret heart knew,
even _then_, that one of those crises was occurring in my life which,
from my youth, has made it the most extraordinary which any creature of
earth ever lived. And I knew that this was so, firstly, because of the
two dreams, and secondly, because, when Clark was gone, and I was
drawing on my gloves to go to see my _fiancée_, I heard distinctly the
old two Voices talk within me: and One said: 'Go not to see her now!'
and the Other: 'Yes, go, go!'

The two Voices of my life! An ordinary person reading my words would
undoubtedly imagine that I mean only two ordinary contradictory
impulses--or else that I rave: for what modern man could comprehend how
real-seeming were those voices, how loud, and how, ever and again, I
heard them contend within me, with a nearness 'nearer than breathing,'
as it says in the poem, and 'closer than hands and feet.'

About the age of seven it happened first to me. I was playing one summer
evening in a pine-wood of my father's; half a mile away was a
quarry-cliff; and as I played, it suddenly seemed as if someone said to
me, inside of me: 'Just take a walk toward the cliff'; and as if someone
else said: 'Don't go that way at all'--mere whispers then, which
gradually, as I grew up, seemed to swell into cries of wrathful
contention! I did go toward the cliff: it was steep, thirty feet high,
and I fell. Some weeks later, on recovering speech, I told my astonished
mother that 'someone had pushed me' over the edge, and that someone else
'had caught me' at the bottom!

One night, soon after my eleventh birthday, lying in bed, the thought
struck me that my life must be of great importance to some thing or
things which I could not see; that two Powers, which hated each other,
must be continually after me, one wishing for some reason to kill me,
and the other for some reason to keep me alive, one wishing me to do so
and so, and the other to do the opposite; that I was not a boy like
other boys, but a creature separate, special, marked for--something.
Already I had notions, touches of mood, passing instincts, as occult and
primitive, I verily believe, as those of the first man that stepped; so
that such Biblical expressions as 'The Lord spake to So-and-so, saying'
have hardly ever suggested any question in my mind as to how the Voice
was heard: I did not find it so very difficult to comprehend that
originally man had more ears than two; nor should have been surprised to
know that I, in these latter days, more or less resembled those primeval
ones.

But not a creature, except perhaps my mother, has ever dreamed me what I
here state that I was. I seemed the ordinary youth of my time, bow in my
'Varsity eight, cramming for exams., dawdling in clubs. When I had to
decide as to a profession, who could have suspected the conflict that
transacted itself in my soul, while my brain was indifferent to the
matter--that agony of strife with which the brawling voices shouted, the
one: 'Be a scientist--a doctor,' and the other: 'Be a lawyer, an
engineer, an artist--be _anything_ but a doctor!'

A doctor I became, and went to what had grown into the greatest of
medical schools--Cambridge; and there it was that I came across a man,
named Scotland, who had a rather odd view of the world. He had rooms, I
remember, in the New Court at Trinity, and a set of us were generally
there. He was always talking about certain 'Black' and 'White Powers,
till it became absurd, and the men used to call him
'black-and-white-mystery-man,' because, one day, when someone said
something about 'the black mystery of the universe,' Scotland
interrupted him with the words: 'the black-and-white mystery.'

Quite well I remember Scotland now--the sweetest, gentle soul he was,
with a passion for cats, and Sappho, and the Anthology, very short in
stature, with a Roman nose, continually making the effort to keep his
neck straight, and draw his paunch in. He used to say that the universe
was being frantically contended for by two Powers: a White and a Black;
that the White was the stronger, but did not find the conditions on our
particular planet very favourable to his success; that he had got the
best of it up to the Middle Ages in Europe, but since then had been
slowly and stubbornly giving way before the Black; and that finally the
Black would win--not everywhere perhaps, but _here_--and would carry
off, if no other earth, at least _this_ one, for his prize.

This was Scotland's doctrine, which he never tired of repeating; and
while others heard him with mere toleration, little could they divine
with what agony of inward interest, I, cynically smiling there, drank in
his words. Most profound, most profound, was the impression they made
upon me.

       *       *       *       *       *

But I was saying that when Clark left me, I was drawing on my gloves to
go to see my _fiancée_, the Countess Clodagh, when I heard the two
voices most clearly.

Sometimes the urgency of one or other impulse is so overpowering, that
there is no resisting it: and it was so then with the one that bid me
go.

I had to traverse the distance between Harley Street and Hanover Square,
and all the time it was as though something shouted at my physical ear:
'Since you go, breathe no word of the _Boreal_, and Clark's visit'; and
another shout: 'Tell, tell, hide nothing!'

It seemed to last a month: yet it was only some minutes before I was in
Hanover Square, and Clodagh in my arms.

She was, in my opinion, the most superb of creatures, Clodagh--that
haughty neck which seemed always scorning something just behind her left
shoulder. Superb! but ah--I know it now--a godless woman, Clodagh, a
bitter heart.

Clodagh once confessed to me that her favourite character in history was
Lucrezia Borgia, and when she saw my horror, immediately added: 'Well,
no, I am only joking!' Such was her duplicity: for I see now that she
lived in the constant effort to hide her heinous heart from me. Yet, now
I think of it, how completely did Clodagh enthral me!

Our proposed marriage was opposed by both my family and hers: by mine,
because her father and grandfather had died in lunatic asylums; and by
hers, because, forsooth, I was neither a rich nor a noble match. A
sister of hers, much older than herself, had married a common country
doctor, Peters of Taunton, and this so-called _mésalliance_ made the
so-called _mésalliance_ with me doubly detestable in the eyes of her
relatives. But Clodagh's extraordinary passion for me was to be stemmed
neither by their threats nor prayers. What a flame, after all, was
Clodagh! Sometimes she frightened me.

She was at this date no longer young, being by five years my senior, as
also, by five years, the senior of her nephew, born from the marriage of
her sister with Peters of Taunton. This nephew was Peter Peters, who was
to accompany the _Boreal_ expedition as doctor, botanist, and
meteorological assistant.

On that day of Clark's visit to me I had not been seated five minutes
with Clodagh, when I said:

'Dr. Clark--ha! ha! ha!--has been talking to me about the Expedition. He
says that if anything happened to Peters, I should be the first man he
would run to. He has had an absurd dream...'

The consciousness that filled me as I uttered these words was the
_wickedness_ of me--the crooked wickedness. But I could no more help it
than I could fly.

Clodagh was standing at a window holding a rose at her face. For quite a
minute she made no reply. I saw her sharp-cut, florid face in profile,
steadily bent and smelling. She said presently in her cold, rapid way:

'The man who first plants his foot on the North Pole will certainly be
ennobled. I say nothing of the many millions... I only wish that I was
a man!'

'I don't know that I have any special ambition that way,' I rejoined. 'I
am very happy in my warm Eden with my Clodagh. I don't like the outer
Cold.'

'Don't let me think little of you!' she answered pettishly.

'Why should you, Clodagh? I am not bound to desire to go to the North
Pole, am I?'

'But you _would_ go, I suppose, if you could?'

'I might--I--doubt it. There is our marriage....'

'Marriage indeed! It is the one thing to transform our marriage from a
sneaking difficulty to a ten times triumphant event.'

'You mean if _I_ personally were the first to stand at the Pole. But
there are many in an expedition. It is very unlikely that _I_,
personally--'

'For _me_ you will, Adam--' she began.

'"_Will_," Clodagh?' I cried. 'You say "_will_"? there is not even the
slightest shadow of a probability--!'

'But why? There are still three weeks before the start. They say...'

She stopped, she stopped.

'They say what?'

Her voice dropped:

'That Peter takes atropine.'

Ah, I started then. She moved from the window, sat in a rocking-chair,
and turned the leaves of a book, without reading. We were silent, she
and I; I standing, looking at her, she drawing the thumb across the
leaf-edges, and beginning again, contemplatively. Then she laughed dryly
a little--a dry, mad laugh.

'Why did you start when I said that?' she asked, reading now at random.

'_I_! I did not start, Clodagh! What made you think that I started? I
did not start! Who told you, Clodagh, that Peters takes atropine?'

'He is my nephew: I should know. But don't look dumbfoundered in that
absurd fashion: I have no intention of poisoning him in order to see you
a multimillionaire, and a Peer of the Realm....'

'My dearest Clodagh!'

'I easily might, however. He will be here presently. He is bringing Mr.
Wilson for the evening.' (Wilson was going as electrician of the
expedition.)

'Clodagh.' I said, 'believe me, you jest in a manner which does not
please me.'

'Do I really?' she answered with that haughty, stiff half-turn of her
throat: 'then I must be more exquisite. But, thank Heaven, it is only a
jest. Women are no longer admired for doing such things.'

'Ha! ha! ha!--no--no longer admired, Clodagh! Oh, my good Lord! let us
change this talk....'

But now she could talk of nothing else. She got from me that afternoon
the history of all the Polar expeditions of late years, how far they
reached, by what aids, and why they failed. Her eyes shone; she listened
eagerly. Before this time, indeed, she had been interested in the
_Boreal_, knew the details of her outfitting, and was acquainted with
several members of the expedition. But now, suddenly, her mind seemed
wholly possessed, my mention of Clark's visit apparently setting her
well a-burn with the Pole-fever.

The passion of her kiss as I tore myself from her embrace that day I
shall not forget. I went home with a pretty heavy heart.

The house of Dr. Peter Peters was three doors from mine, on the opposite
side of the street. Toward one that night, his footman ran to knock me
up with the news that Peters was very ill. I hurried to his bed-side,
and knew by the first glance at his deliriums and his staring pupils
that he was poisoned with atropine. Wilson, the electrician, who had
passed the evening with him at Clodagh's in Hanover Square, was there.

'What on earth is the matter?' he said to me.

'Poisoned,' I answered.

'Good God! what with?'

'Atropine.'

'Good Heavens!'

'Don't be frightened: I think he will recover.'

'Is that certain?'

'Yes, I think--that is, if he leaves off taking the drug, Wilson.'

'What! it is he who has poisoned himself?'

I hesitated, I hesitated. But I said:

'He is in the habit of taking atropine, Wilson.'

Three hours I remained there, and, God knows, toiled hard for his life:
and when I left him in the dark of the fore-day, my mind was at rest: he
would recover.

I slept till 11 A.M., and then hurried over again to Peters. In the room
were my two nurses, and Clodagh.

My beloved put her forefinger to her lips, whispering:

'Sh-h-h! he is asleep....'

She came closer to my ear, saying:

'I heard the news early. I am come to stay with him, till--the last....'

We looked at each other some time--eye to eye, steadily, she and I: but
mine dropped before Clodagh's. A word was on my mouth to say, but I said
nothing.

The recovery of Peters was not so steady as I had expected. At the end
of the first week he was still prostrate. It was then that I said to
Clodagh:

'Clodagh, your presence at the bed-side here somehow does not please me.
It is so unnecessary.'

'Unnecessary certainly,' she replied: 'but I always had a genius for
nursing, and a passion for watching the battles of the body. Since no
one objects, why should you?'

'Ah!... I don't know. This is a case that I dislike. I have half a mind
to throw it to the devil.'

'Then do so.'

'And you, too--go home, go home, Clodagh!'

'But _why_?--if one does no harm. In these days of "the corruption of
the upper classes," and Roman decadence of everything, shouldn't every
innocent whim be encouraged by you upright ones who strive against the
tide? Whims are the brakes of crimes: and this is mine. I find a
sensuous pleasure, almost a sensual, in dabbling in delicate drugs--like
Helen, for that matter, and Medea, and Calypso, and the great antique
women, who were all excellent chymists. To study the human ship in a
gale, and the slow drama of its foundering--isn't that a quite thrilling
distraction? And I want you to get into the habit at once of letting me
have my little way----'

Now she touched my hair with a lofty playfulness that soothed me: but
even then I looked upon the rumpled bed, and saw that the man there was
really very sick.

I have still a nausea to write about it! Lucrezia Borgia in her own age
may have been heroic: but Lucrezia in this late century! One could retch
up the heart...

The man grew sick on that bed, I say. The second week passed, and only
ten days remained before the start of the expedition.

At the end of that second week, Wilson, the electrician, was one evening
sitting by Peter's bedside when I entered.

At the moment, Clodagh was about to administer a dose to Peters; but
seeing me, she put down the medicine-glass on the night table, and came
toward me; and as she came, I saw a sight which stabbed me: for Wilson
took up the deposited medicine-glass, elevated it, looked at it,
smelled into it: and he did it with a kind of hurried, light-fingered
stealth; and he did it with an under-look, and a meaningness of
expression which, I thought, proved mistrust....

Meantime, Clark came each day. He had himself a medical degree, and
about this time I called him in professionally, together with Alleyne of
Cavendish Square, to consultation over Peters. The patient lay in a
semi-coma broken by passionate vomitings, and his condition puzzled us
all. I formally stated that he took atropine--had been originally
poisoned by atropine: but we saw that his present symptoms were not
atropine symptoms, but, it almost seemed, of some other vegetable
poison, which we could not precisely name.

'Mysterious thing,' said Clark to me, when we were alone.

'_I_ don't understand it,' I said.

'Who are the two nurses?'

'Oh, highly recommended people of my own.'

'At any rate, my dream about you comes true, Jeffson. It is clear that
Peters is out of the running now.'

I shrugged.

'I now formally invite you to join the expedition,' said Clark: 'do you
consent?'

I shrugged again.

'Well, if that means consent,' he said, 'let me remind you that you have
only eight days, and all the world to do in them.'

This conversation occurred in the dining-room of Peters' house: and as
we passed through the door, I saw Clodagh gliding down the passage
outside--rapidly--away from us.

Not a word I said to her that day about Clark's invitation. Yet I asked
myself repeatedly: Did she not know of it? Had she not _listened_, and
heard?

However that was, about midnight, to my great surprise, Peters opened
his eyes, and smiled. By noon the next day, his fine vitality, which so
fitted him for an Arctic expedition, had re-asserted itself. He was then
leaning on an elbow, talking to Wilson, and except his pallor, and
strong stomach-pains, there was now hardly a trace of his late approach
to death. For the pains I prescribed some quarter-grain tablets of
sulphate of morphia, and went away.

Now, David Wilson and I never greatly loved each other, and that very
day he brought about a painful situation as between Peters and me, by
telling Peters that I had taken his place in the expedition. Peters, a
touchy fellow, at once dictated a letter of protest to Clark; and Clark
sent Peters' letter to me, marked with a big note of interrogation in
blue pencil.

Now, all Peters' preparations were made, mine not; and he had six days
in which to recover himself. I therefore wrote to Clark, saying that the
changed circumstances of course annulled my acceptance of his offer,
though I had already incurred the inconvenience of negotiating with a
_locum tenens_.

This decided it: Peters was to go, I stay. The fifth day before the
departure dawned. It was a Friday, the 15th June. Peters was now in an
arm-chair. He was cheerful, but with a fevered pulse, and still the
stomach-pains. I was giving him three quarter-grains of morphia a day.
That Friday night, at 11 P.M., I visited him, and found Clodagh there,
talking to him. Peters was smoking a cigar.

'Ah,' Clodagh said, 'I was waiting for you, Adam. I didn't know whether
I was to inject anything to-night. Is it Yes or No?'

'What do you think, Peters?' I said: 'any more pains?'

'Well, perhaps you had better give us another quarter,' he answered:
'there's still some trouble in the tummy off and on.'

'A quarter-grain, then, Clodagh, 'I said.

As she opened the syringe-box, she remarked with a pout:

'Our patient has been naughty! He has taken some more atropine.'

I became angry at once.

'Peters,' I cried, 'you know you have no right to be doing things like
that without consulting me! Do that once more, and I swear I have
nothing further to do with you!'

'Rubbish,' said Peters: 'why all this unnecessary heat? It was a mere
flea-bite. I felt that I needed it.'

'He injected it with his own hand...' remarked Clodagh.

She was now standing at the mantel-piece, having lifted the syringe-box
from the night-table, taken from its velvet lining both the syringe and
the vial containing the morphia tablets, and gone to the mantel-piece to
melt one of the tablets in a little of the distilled water there. Her
back was turned upon us, and she was a long time. I was standing; Peters
in his arm-chair, smoking. Clodagh then began to talk about a Charity
Bazaar which she had visited that afternoon.

She was long, she was long. The crazy thought passed through some dim
region of my soul: 'Why is she so _long_?'

'Ah, that was a pain!' went Peters: 'never mind the bazaar, aunt--think
of the morphia.'

Suddenly an irresistible impulse seized me--to rush upon her, to dash
syringe, tabloids, glass, and all, from her hands. I _must_ have obeyed
it--I was on the tip-top point of obeying--my body already leant prone:
but at that instant a voice at the opened door behind me said:

'Well, how is everything?'

It was Wilson, the electrician, who stood there. With lightning
swiftness I remembered an under-look of mistrust which I had once seen
on his face. Oh, well, I would not, and could not!--she was my love--I
stood like marble...

Clodagh went to meet Wilson with frank right hand, in the left being the
fragile glass containing the injection. My eyes were fastened on her
face: it was full of reassurance, of free innocence. I said to myself:
'I must surely be mad!'

An ordinary chat began, while Clodagh turned up Peters' sleeve, and,
kneeling there, injected his fore-arm. As she rose, laughing at
something said by Wilson, the drug-glass dropped from her hand, and her
heel, by an apparent accident, trod on it. She put the syringe among a
number of others on the mantel-piece.

'Your friend has been naughty, Mr. Wilson,' she said again with that
same pout: 'he has been taking more atropine.'

'Not really?' said Wilson.

'Let me alone, the whole of you,' answered Peters: 'I ain't a child.'

These were the last intelligible words he ever spoke. He died shortly
before 1 A.M. He had been poisoned by a powerful dose of atropine.

From that moment to the moment when the _Boreal_ bore me down the
Thames, all the world was a mere tumbling nightmare to me, of which
hardly any detail remains in my memory. Only I remember the inquest, and
how I was called upon to prove that Peters had himself injected himself
with atropine. This was corroborated by Wilson, and by Clodagh: and the
verdict was in accordance.

And in all that chaotic hurry of preparation, three other things only,
but those with clear distinctness now, I remember.

The first--and chief--is that tempest of words which I heard at
Kensington from that big-mouthed Mackay on the Sunday night. What was it
that led me, busy as I was, to that chapel that night? Well, perhaps I
know.

There I sat, and heard him: and most strangely have those words of his
peroration planted themselves in my brain, when, rising to a passion of
prophecy, he shouted: 'And as in the one case, transgression was
followed by catastrophe swift and universal, so, in the other, I warn
the entire race to look out thenceforth for nothing from God but a
lowering sky, and thundery weather.'

And this second thing I remember: that on reaching home, I walked into
my disordered library (for I had had to hunt out some books), where I
met my housekeeper in the act of rearranging things. She had apparently
lifted an old Bible by the front cover to fling it on the table, for as
I threw myself into a chair my eye fell upon the open print near the
beginning. The print was very large, and a shaded lamp cast a light upon
it. I had been hearing Mackay's wild comparison of the Pole with the
tree of Eden, and that no doubt was the reason why such a start
convulsed me: for my listless eyes had chanced to rest upon some words.

'The woman gave me of the tree, and I did eat....'

And a third thing I remember in all that turmoil of doubt and flurry:
that as the ship moved down with the afternoon tide a telegram was put
into my hand; it was a last word from Clodagh; and she said only this:

'Be first--for Me.'

       *       *       *       *       *

The _Boreal_ left St. Katherine's Docks in beautiful weather on the
afternoon of the 19th June, full of good hope, bound for the Pole.

All about the docks was one region of heads stretched far in innumerable
vagueness, and down the river to Woolwich a continuous dull roar and
murmur of bees droned from both banks to cheer our departure.

The expedition was partly a national affair, subvented by Government:
and if ever ship was well-found it was the _Boreal_. She had a frame
tougher far than any battle-ship's, capable of ramming some ten yards of
drift-ice; and she was stuffed with sufficient pemmican, codroe,
fish-meal, and so on, to last us not less than six years.

We were seventeen, all told, the five Heads (so to speak) of the
undertaking being Clark (our Chief), John Mew (commander), Aubrey
Maitland (meteorologist), Wilson (electrician), and myself (doctor,
botanist, and assistant meteorologist).

The idea was to get as far east as the 100°, or the 120°, of longitude;
to catch there the northern current; to push and drift our way
northward; and when the ship could no further penetrate, to leave her
(either three, or else four, of us, on ski), and with sledges drawn by
dogs and reindeer make a dash for the Pole.

This had also been the plan of the last expedition--that of the
_Nix_--and of several others. The _Boreal_ only differed from the _Nix_,
and others, in that she was a thing of nicer design, and of more
exquisite forethought.

Our voyage was without incident up to the end of July, when we
encountered a drift of ice-floes. On the 1st August we were at Kabarova,
where we met our coal-ship, and took in a little coal for emergency,
liquid air being our proper motor; also forty-three dogs, four reindeer,
and a quantity of reindeer-moss; and two days later we turned our bows
finally northward and eastward, passing through heavy 'slack' ice under
sail and liquid air in crisp weather, till, on the 27th August, we lay
moored to a floe off the desolate island of Taimur.

The first thing which we saw here was a bear on the shore, watching for
young white-fish: and promptly Clark, Mew, and Lamburn (engineer) went
on shore in the launch, I and Maitland following in the pram, each party
with three dogs.

It was while climbing away inland that Maitland said to me:

'When Clark leaves the ship for the dash to the Pole, it is three, not
two, of us, after all, that he is going to take with him, making a party
of four.'

_I_: 'Is that so? Who knows?'

_Maitland_: 'Wilson does. Clark has let it out in conversation with
Wilson.'

_I_: 'Well, the more the merrier. Who will be the three?'

_Maitland_: 'Wilson is sure to be in it, and there may be Mew, making
the third. As to the fourth, I suppose _I_ shall get left out in the
cold.'

_I_: 'More likely I.'

_Maitland_: 'Well, the race is between us four: Wilson, Mew, you and I.
It is a question of physical fitness combined with special knowledge.
You are too lucky a dog to get left out, Jeffson.'

_I_: 'Well, what does it matter, so long as the expedition as a whole is
successful? That is the main thing.'

_Maitland_: 'Oh yes, that's all very fine talk, Jeffson! But is it quite
sincere? Isn't it rather a pose to affect to despise $175,000,000? _I_
want to be in at the death, and I mean to be, if I can. We are all more
or less self-interested.'

'Look,' I whispered--'a bear.'

It was a mother and cub: and with determined trudge she came wagging her
low head, having no doubt smelled the dogs. We separated on the
instant, doubling different ways behind ice-boulders, wanting her to go
on nearer the shore, before killing; but, passing close, she spied, and
bore down at a trot upon me. I fired into her neck, and at once, with a
roar, she turned tail, making now straight in Maitland's direction. I
saw him run out from cover some hundred yards away, aiming his long-gun:
but no report followed: and in half a minute he was under her fore-paws,
she striking out slaps at the barking, shrinking dogs. Maitland roared
for my help: and at that moment, I, poor wretch, in far worse plight
than he, stood shivering in ague: for suddenly one of those wrangles of
the voices of my destiny was filling my bosom with loud commotion, one
urging me to fly to Maitland's aid, one passionately commanding me be
still. But it lasted, I believe, some seconds only: I ran and got a shot
into the bear's brain, and Maitland leapt up with a rent down his face.

But singular destiny! Whatever I did--if I did evil, if I did good--the
result was the same: tragedy dark and sinister! Poor Maitland was doomed
that voyage, and my rescue of his life was the means employed to make
his death the more certain.

I think that I have already written, some pages back, about a man
called Scotland, whom I met at Cambridge. He was always talking about
certain 'Black' and 'White' beings, and their contention for the earth.
We others used to call him the black-and-white mystery-man, because, one
day--but that is no matter now. Well, with regard to all that, I have a
fancy, a whim of the mind--quite wide of the truth, no doubt--but I have
it here in my brain, and I will write it down now. It is this: that
there may have been some sort of arrangement, or understanding, between
Black and White, as in the case of Adam and the fruit, that, should
mankind force his way to the Pole and the old forbidden secret biding
there, then some mishap should not fail to overtake the race of man;
that the White, being kindly disposed to mankind, did not wish this to
occur, and intended, for the sake of the race, to destroy our entire
expedition before it reached; and that the Black, knowing that the White
meant to do this, and by what means, used me--_me_!--to outwit this
design, first of all working that I should be one of the party of four
to leave the ship on ski.

But the childish attempt, my God, to read the immense riddle of the
world! I could laugh loud at myself, and at poor Black-and-White
Scotland, too. The thing can't be so simple.

Well, we left Taimur the same day, and good-bye now to both land and
open sea. Till we passed the latitude of Cape Chelyuskin (which we did
not sight), it was one succession of ice-belts, with Mew in the
crow's-nest tormenting the electric bell to the engine-room, the anchor
hanging ready to drop, and Clark taking soundings. Progress was slow,
and the Polar night gathered round us apace, as we stole still onward
and onward into that blue and glimmering land of eternal frore. We now
left off bed-coverings of reindeer-skin and took to sleeping-bags. Eight
of the dogs had died by the 25th September, when we were experiencing
19° of frost. In the darkest part of our night, the Northern Light
spread its silent solemn banner over us, quivering round the heavens in
a million fickle gauds.

The relations between the members of our little crew were
excellent--with one exception: David Wilson and I were not good friends.

There was a something--a tone--in the evidence which he had given at the
inquest on Peters, which made me mad every time I thought of it. He had
heard Peters admit just before death that he, Peters, had administered
atropine to himself: and he had had to give evidence of that fact. But
he had given it in a most half-hearted way, so much so, that the coroner
had asked him: 'What, sir, are you hiding from me?' Wilson had replied:
'Nothing. I have nothing to tell.'

And from that day he and I had hardly exchanged ten words, in spite of
our constant companionship in the vessel; and one day, standing alone on
a floe, I found myself hissing with clenched fist: 'If he dared suspect
Clodagh of poisoning Peters, I could _kill_ him!'

Up to 78° of latitude the weather had been superb, but on the night of
the 7th October--well I remember it--we experienced a great storm. Our
tub of a ship rolled like a swing, drenching the whimpering dogs at
every lurch, and hurling everything on board into confusion. The
petroleum-launch was washed from the davits; down at one time to 40°
below zero sank the thermometer; while a high aurora was whiffed into a
dishevelled chaos of hues, resembling the smeared palette of some
turbulent painter of the skies, or mixed battle of long-robed seraphim,
and looking the very symbol of tribulation, tempest, wreck, and
distraction. I, for the first time, was sick.

It was with a dizzy brain, therefore, that I went off watch to my bunk.
Soon, indeed, I fell asleep: but the rolls and shocks of the ship,
combined with the heavy Greenland anorak which I had on, and the state
of my body, together produced a fearful nightmare, in which I was
conscious of a vain struggle to move, a vain fight for breath, for the
sleeping-bag turned to an iceberg on my bosom. Of Clodagh was my gasping
dream. I dreamed that she let fall, drop by drop, a liquid, coloured
like pomegranate-seeds, into a glass of water; and she presented the
glass to Peters. The draught, I knew, was poisonous as death: and in a
last effort to break the bands of that dark slumber, I was conscious, as
I jerked myself upright, of screaming aloud:

'Clodagh! Clodagh! _Spare the man...!_'

My eyes, starting with horror, opened to waking; the electric light was
shining in the cabin; and there stood David Wilson looking at me.

Wilson was a big man, with a massively-built, long face, made longer by
a beard, and he had little nervous contractions of the flesh at the
cheek-bones, and plenty of big freckles. His clinging pose, his smile of
disgust, his whole air, as he stood crouching and lurching there, I can
shut my eyes, and see now.

What he was doing in my cabin I did not know. To think, my good God,
that he should have been led there just then! This was one of the
four-men starboard berths: _his_ was a-port: yet there he was! But he
explained at once.

'Sorry to interrupt your innocent dreams, says he: 'the mercury in
Maitland's thermometer is frozen, and he asked me to hand him his
spirits-of-wine one from his bunk...'

I did not answer. A hatred was in my heart against this man.

The next day the storm died away, and either three or four days later
the slush-ice between the floes froze definitely. The _Boreal's_ way was
thus blocked. We warped her with ice-anchors and the capstan into the
position in which she should lay up for her winter's drift. This was in
about 79° 20' N. The sun had now totally vanished from our bleak sky,
not to reappear till the following year.

Well, there was sledging with the dogs, and bear-hunting among the
hummocks, as the months, one by one, went by. One day Wilson, by far our
best shot, got a walrus-bull; Clark followed the traditional pursuit of
a Chief, examining Crustacea; Maitland and I were in a relation of close
friendship, and I assisted his meteorological observations in a snow-hut
built near the ship. Often, through the twenty-four hours, a clear blue
moon, very spectral, very fair, suffused all our dim and livid clime.

It was five days before Christmas that Clark made the great
announcement: he had determined, he said, if our splendid northward
drift continued, to leave the ship about the middle of next March for
the dash to the Pole. He would take with him the four reindeer, all the
dogs, four sledges, four kayaks, and three companions. The companions
whom he had decided to invite were: Wilson, Mew, and Maitland.

He said it at dinner; and as he said it, David Wilson glanced at my wan
face with a smile of pleased malice: for _I_ was left out.

I remember well: the aurora that night was in the sky, and at its edge
floated a moon surrounded by a ring, with two mock-moons. But all shone
very vaguely and far, and a fog, which had already lasted some days,
made the ship's bows indistinct to me, as I paced the bridge on my
watch, two hours after Clark's announcement.

For a long time all was very still, save for the occasional whine of a
dog. I was alone, and it grew toward the end of my watch, when Maitland
would succeed me. My slow tread tolled like a passing-bell, and the
mountainous ice lay vague and white around me, its sheeted ghastliness
not less dreadfully silent than eternity itself.

Presently, several of the dogs began barking together, left off, and
began again.

I said to myself; 'There is a bear about somewhere.'

And after some five minutes I saw--I thought that I saw--it. The fog
had, if anything thickened; and it was now very near the end of my
watch.

It had entered the ship, I concluded, by the boards which slanted from
an opening in the port bulwarks down to the ice. Once before, in
November, a bear, having smelled the dogs, had ventured on board at
midnight: but _then_ there had resulted a perfect hubbub among the dogs.
_Now_, even in the midst of my excitement, I wondered at their
quietness, though some whimpered--with fear, I thought. I saw the
creature steal forward from the hatchway toward the kennels a-port; and
I ran noiselessly, and seized the watch-gun which stood always loaded by
the companionway.

By this time, the form had passed the kennels, reached the bows, and now
was making toward me on the starboard side. I took aim. Never, I
thought, had I seen so huge a bear--though I made allowance for the
magnifying effect of the fog.

My finger was on the trigger: and at that moment a deathly shivering
sickness took me, the wrangling voices shouted at me, with 'Shoot!'
'Shoot not!' 'Shoot!' Ah well, that latter shout was irresistible. I
drew the trigger. The report hooted through the Polar night.

The creature dropped; both Wilson and Clark were up at once: and we
three hurried to the spot.

But the very first near glance showed a singular kind of bear. Wilson
put his hand to the head, and a lax skin came away at his touch.... It
was Aubrey Maitland who was underneath it, and I had shot him dead.

For the past few days he had been cleaning skins, among them the skin of
the bear from which I had saved him at Taimur. Now, Maitland was a born
pantomimist, continually inventing practical jokes; and perhaps to
startle me with a false alarm in the very skin of the old Bruin which
had so nearly done for him, he had thrown it round him on finishing its
cleaning, and so, in mere wanton fun, had crept on deck at the hour of
his watch. The head of the bear-skin, and the fog, must have prevented
him from seeing me taking aim.

This tragedy made me ill for weeks. I saw that the hand of Fate was upon
me. When I rose from bed, poor Maitland was lying in the ice behind the
great camel-shaped hummock near us.

By the end of January we had drifted to 80° 55'; and it was then that
Clark, in the presence of Wilson, asked me if I would make the fourth
man, in the place of poor Maitland, for the dash in the spring. As I
said 'Yes, I am willing,' David Wilson spat with a disgusted emphasis. A
minute later he sighed, with 'Ah, poor Maitland...' and drew in his
breath with a _tut! tut!_

God knows, I had an impulse to spring then and there at his throat, and
strangle him: but I curbed myself.

There remained now hardly a month before the dash, and all hands set to
work with a will, measuring the dogs, making harness and seal-skin shoes
for them, overhauling sledges and kayaks, and cutting every possible
ounce of weight. But we were not destined, after all, to set out that
year. About the 20th February, the ice began to pack, and the ship was
subjected to an appalling pressure. We found it necessary to make
trumpets of our hands to shout into one another's ears, for the whole
ice-continent was crashing, popping, thundering everywhere in terrific
upheaval. Expecting every moment to see the _Boreal_ crushed to
splinters, we had to set about unpacking provisions, and placing
sledges, kayaks, dogs and everything in a position for instant flight.
It lasted five days, and was accompanied by a tempest from the north,
which, by the end of February, had driven us back south into latitude
79° 40'. Clark, of course, then abandoned the thought of the Pole for
that summer.

And immediately afterwards we made a startling discovery: our stock of
reindeer-moss was found to be somehow ridiculously small. Egan, our
second mate, was blamed; but that did not help matters: the sad fact
remained. Clark was advised to kill one or two of the deer, but he
pig-headedly refused: and by the beginning of summer they were all dead.

Well, our northward drift recommenced. Toward the middle of February we
saw a mirage of the coming sun above the horizon; there were flights of
Arctic petrels and snow-buntings; and spring was with us. In an ice-pack
of big hummocks and narrow lanes we made good progress all the summer.

When the last of the deer died, my heart sank; and when the dogs killed
two of their number, and a bear crushed a third, I was fully expecting
what actually came; it was this: Clark announced that he could now take
only two companions with him in the spring: and they were Wilson and
Mew. So once more I saw David Wilson's pleased smile of malice.

We settled into our second winter-quarters. Again came December, and all
our drear sunless gloom, made worse by the fact that the windmill would
not work, leaving us without the electric light.

Ah me, none but those who have felt it could dream of one half the
mental depression of that long Arctic night; how the soul takes on the
hue of the world; and without and within is nothing but gloom, gloom,
and the reign of the Power of Darkness.

Not one of us but was in a melancholic, dismal and dire mood; and on the
13th December Lamburn, the engineer, stabbed Cartwright, the old
harpooner, in the arm.

Three days before Christmas a bear came close to the ship, and then
turned tail. Mew, Wilson, I and Meredith (a general hand) set out in
pursuit. After a pretty long chase we lost him, and then scattered
different ways. It was very dim, and after yet an hour's search, I was
returning weary and disgusted to the ship, when I saw some shadow like a
bear sailing away on my left, and at the same time sighted a man--I did
not know whom--running like a handicapped ghost some little distance to
the right. So I shouted out:

'There he is--come on! This way!'

The man quickly joined me, but as soon as ever he recognised me, stopped
dead. The devil must have suddenly got into him, for he said:

'No, thanks, Jeffson: alone with you I am in danger of my life....'

It was Wilson. And I, too, forgetting at once all about the bear,
stopped and faced him.

'I see,' said I. 'But, Wilson, you are going to explain to me _now_ what
you mean, you hear? What _do_ you mean, Wilson?'

'What I say,' he answered deliberately, eyeing me up and down: 'alone
with you I am in danger of my life. Just as poor Maitland was, and just
as poor Peters was. Certainly, you are a deadly beast.'

Fury leapt, my God, in my heart. Black as the tenebrous Arctic night was
my soul.

'Do you mean,' said I, 'that I want to put you out of the way in order
to go in your place to the Pole? Is that your meaning, man?'

'That's about my meaning, Jeffson,' says he: 'you are a deadly beast,
you know.'

'Stop!' I said, with blazing eye. 'I am going to kill _you_, Wilson--as
sure as God lives: but I want to hear first. Who _told_ you that I
killed Peters?'

'Your lover killed him--with _your_ collusion. Why, I heard you, man, in
your beastly sleep, calling the whole thing out. And I was pretty sure
of it before, only I had no proofs. By God, I should enjoy putting a
bullet into you, Jeffson!'

'You wrong me--you, you wrong me!' I shrieked, my eyes staring with
ravenous lust for his blood; 'and now I am going to pay you well for it.
_Look out, you!_'

I aimed my gun for his heart, and I touched the trigger. He held up his
left hand.

'Stop,' he said, 'stop.' (He was one of the coolest of men ordinarily.)
'There is no gallows on the _Boreal_, but Clark could easily rig one for
you. I want to kill you, too, because there are no criminal courts up
here, and it would be doing a good action for my country. But not
here--not now. Listen to me--don't shoot. Later we can meet, when all is
ready, so that no one may be the wiser, and fight it all out.'

As he spoke I let the gun drop. It was better so. I knew that he was
much the best shot on the ship, and I an indifferent one: but I did not
care, I did not care, if I was killed.

It is a dim, inclement land, God knows: and the spirit of darkness and
distraction is there.

Twenty hours later we met behind the great saddle-shaped hummock, some
six miles to the S.E. of the ship. We had set out at different times, so
that no one might suspect. And each brought a ship's-lantern.

Wilson had dug an ice-grave near the hummock, leaving at its edge a
heap of brash-ice and snow to fill it. We stood separated by an interval
of perhaps seventy yards, the grave between us, each with a lantern at
his feet.

Even so we were mere shadowy apparitions one to the other. The air
glowered very drearily, and present in my inmost soul were the frills of
cold. A chill moon, a mere abstraction of light, seemed to hang far
outside the universe. The temperature was at 55° below zero, so that we
had on wind-clothes over our anoraks, and heavy foot-bandages under our
Lap boots. Nothing but a weird morgue seemed the world, haunted with
despondent madness; and exactly like that world about us were the minds
of us two poor men, full of macabre, bleak, and funereal feelings.

Between us yawned an early grave for one or other of our bodies.

I heard Wilson cry out:

'Are you ready, Jeffson?'

'Aye, Wilson!' cried I.

'_Then here goes!_' cries he.

Even as he spoke, he fired. Surely, the man was in deadly earnest to
kill me.

But his shot passed harmlessly by me: as indeed was only likely: we
were mere shadows one to the other.

I fired perhaps ten seconds later than he: but in those ten seconds he
stood perfectly revealed to me in clear, lavender light.

An Arctic fire-ball had traversed the sky, showering abroad, a
sulphurous glamour over the snow-landscape. Before the intenser blue of
its momentary shine had passed away, I saw Wilson stagger forward, and
drop. And him and his lantern I buried deep there under the rubble ice.

       *       *       *       *       *

On the 13th March, nearly three months later, Clark, Mew and I left the
Boreal in latitude 85° 15'.

We had with us thirty-two dogs, three sledges, three kayaks, human
provisions for 112 days, and dog provisions for 40. Being now about 340
miles from the Pole, we hoped to reach it in 43 days, then, turning
south, and feeding living dogs with dead, make either Franz Josef Land
or Spitzbergen, at which latter place we should very likely come up with
a whaler.

Well, during the first days, progress was very slow, the ice being rough
and laney, and the dogs behaving most badly, stopping dead at every
difficulty, and leaping over the traces. Clark had had the excellent
idea of attaching a gold-beater's-skin balloon, with a lifting power of
35 pounds, to each sledge, and we had with us a supply of zinc and
sulphuric-acid to repair the hydrogen-waste from the bags; but on the
third day Mew over-filled and burst his balloon, and I and Clark had to
cut ours loose in order to equalise weights, for we could neither leave
him behind, turn back to the ship, nor mend the bag. So it happened that
at the end of the fourth day out, we had made only nineteen miles, and
could still from a hummock discern afar the leaning masts of the old
Boreal. Clark led on ski, captaining a sledge with 400 lbs. of
instruments, ammunition, pemmican, aleuronate bread; Mew followed, his
sledge containing provisions only; and last came I, with a mixed
freight. But on the third day Clark had an attack of snow-blindness, and
Mew took his place.

Pretty soon our sufferings commenced, and they were bitter enough. The
sun, though constantly visible day and night, gave no heat. Our
sleeping-bags (Clark and Mew slept together in one, I in another) were
soaking wet all the night, being thawed by our warmth; and our fingers,
under wrappings of senne-grass and wolf-skin, were always bleeding.
Sometimes our frail bamboo-cane kayaks, lying across the sledges, would
crash perilously against an ice-ridge--and they were our one hope of
reaching land. But the dogs were the great difficulty: we lost six
mortal hours a day in harnessing and tending them. On the twelfth day
Clark took a single-altitude observation, and found that we were only in
latitude 86° 45'; but the next day we passed beyond the furthest point
yet reached by man, viz. 86° 53', attained by the _Nix_ explorers four
years previously.

       *       *       *       *       *

Our one secret thought now was food, food--our day-long lust for the
eating-time. Mew suffered from 'Arctic thirst.

       *       *       *       *       *

Under these conditions, man becomes in a few days, not a savage only,
but a mere beast, hardly a grade above the bear and walrus. Ah, the ice!
A long and sordid nightmare was that, God knows.

On we pressed, crawling our little way across the Vast, upon whose hoar
silence, from Eternity until then, Bootes only, and that Great Bear, had
watched.

       *       *       *       *       *

After the eleventh day our rate of march improved: all lanes
disappeared, and ridges became much less frequent. By the fifteenth day
I was leaving behind the ice-grave of David Wilson at the rate of ten to
thirteen miles a day.

Yet, as it were, his arm reached out and touched me, even there.

His disappearance had been explained by a hundred different guesses on
the ship--all plausible enough. I had no idea that anyone connected me
in any way with his death.

But on our twenty-second day of march, 140 miles from our goal, he
caused a conflagration of rage and hate to break out among us three.

It was at the end of a march, when our stomachs were hollow, our frames
ready to drop, and our mood ravenous and inflamed. One of Mew's dogs was
sick: it was necessary to kill it: he asked me to do it.

'Oh,' said I, 'you kill your own dog, of course.'

'Well, I don't know,' he replied, catching fire at once, 'you ought to
be used to killing, Jeffson.'

'How do you mean, Mew?' said I with a mad start, for madness and the
flames of Hell were instant and uppermost in us all: 'you mean because
my profession----'

'Profession! damn it, no,' he snarled like a dog: 'go and dig up David
Wilson--I dare say you know where to find him--and he will tell you my
meaning, right enough.'

I rushed at once to Clark, who was stooping among the dogs,
unharnessing: and savagely pushing his shoulder, I exclaimed:

'That beast accuses me of murdering David Wilson!'

'Well?' said Clark.

'I'd split his skull as clean----!'

'Go away, Adam Jeffson, and let me be!' snarled Clark.

'Is that all you've got to say about it, then--you?'

'To the devil with you, man, say I, and let me be!' cried he: 'you know
your own conscience best, I suppose.'

Before this insult I stood with grinding teeth, but impotent. However,
from that moment a deeper mood of brooding malice occupied my spirit.
Indeed the humour of us all was one of dangerous, even murderous,
fierceness. In that pursuit of riches into that region of cold, we had
become almost like the beasts that perish.

       *       *       *       *       *

On the 10th April we passed the 89th parallel of latitude, and though
sick to death, both in spirit and body, pressed still on. Like the lower
animals, we were stricken now with dumbness, and hardly once in a week
spoke a word one to the other, but in selfish brutishness on through a
real hell of cold we moved. It is a cursed region--beyond doubt
cursed--not meant to be penetrated by man: and rapid and awful was the
degeneration of our souls. As for me, never could I have conceived that
savagery so heinous could brood in a human bosom as now I felt it brood
in mine. If men could enter into a country specially set apart for the
habitation of devils, and there become possessed of evil, as we were so
would they be.

       *       *       *       *       *

As we advanced, the ice every day became smoother; so that, from four
miles a day, our rate increased to fifteen, and finally (as the sledges
lightened) to twenty.

It was now that we began to encounter a succession of strange-looking
objects lying scattered over the ice, whose number continually
increased as we proceeded. They had the appearance of rocks, or pieces
of iron, incrusted with glass-fragments of various colours, and they
were of every size. Their incrustations we soon determined to be
diamonds, and other precious stones. On our first twenty-mile day Mew
picked up a diamond-crystal as large as a child's foot, and such objects
soon became common. We thus found the riches which we sought, beyond all
dream; but as the bear and the walrus find them: for ourselves we had
lost; and it was a loss of riches barren as ashes, for all those
millions we would not have given an ounce of fish-meal. Clark grumbled
something about their being meteor-stones, whose ferruginous substance
had been lured by the magnetic Pole, and kept from frictional burning in
their fall by the frigidity of the air: and they quickly ceased to
interest our sluggish minds, except in so far as they obstructed our
way.

       *       *       *       *       *

We had all along had good weather: till, suddenly, on the morning of the
13th April, we were overtaken by a tempest from the S.W., of such mighty
and solemn volume that the heart quailed beneath it. It lasted in its
full power only an hour, but during that time snatched two of our
sledges long distances, and compelled us to lie face-downward. We had
travelled all the sun-lit night, and were gasping with fatigue; so as
soon as the wind allowed us to huddle together our scattered things, we
crawled into the sleeping-bags, and instantly slept.

We knew that the ice was in awful upheaval around us; we heard, as our
eyelids sweetly closed, the slow booming of distant guns, and brittle
cracklings of artillery. This may have been a result of the tempest
stirring up the ocean beneath the ice. Whatever it was, we did not care:
we slept deep.

We were within ten miles of the Pole.

       *       *       *       *       *

In my sleep it was as though someone suddenly shook my shoulder with
urgent '_Up! up_!' It was neither Clark nor Mew, but a dream merely: for
Clark and Mew, when I started up, I saw lying still in their
sleeping-bag.

I suppose it must have been about noon. I sat staring a minute, and my
first numb thought was somehow this: that the Countess Clodagh had
prayed me 'Be first'--for her. Wondrous little now cared I for the
Countess Clodagh in her far unreal world of warmth--precious little for
the fortune which she coveted: millions on millions of fortunes lay
unregarded around me. But that thought, _Be first!_ was deeply suggested
in my brain, as if whispered there. Instinctively, brutishly, as the
Gadarean swine rushed down a steep place, I, rubbing my daft eyes,
arose.

The first thing which my mind opened to perceive was that, while the
tempest was less strong, the ice was now in extraordinary agitation. I
looked abroad upon a vast plain, stretched out to a circular, but waving
horizon, and varied by many hillocks, boulders, and sparkling
meteor-stones that everywhere tinselled the blinding white, some big as
houses, most small as limbs. And this great plain was now rearranging
itself in a widespread drama of havoc, withdrawing in ravines like
mutual backing curtsies, then surging to clap together in passionate
mountain-peaks, else jostling like the Symplegades, fluent and
inconstant as billows of the sea, grinding itself, piling itself,
pouring itself in cataracts of powdered ice, while here and there I saw
the meteor-stones leap spasmodically, in dusts and heaps, like geysers
or spurting froths in a steamer's wake, a tremendous uproar, meantime,
filling all the air. As I stood, I plunged and staggered, and I found
the dogs sprawling, with whimperings, on the heaving floor.

I did not care. Instinctively, daftly, brutishly, I harnessed ten of
them to my sledge; put on Canadian snow-shoes: and was away
northward--alone.

The sun shone with a clear, benign, but heatless shining: a ghostly,
remote, yet quite limpid light, which seemed designed for the lighting
of other planets and systems, and to strike here by happy chance. A
great wind from the S.W., meantime, sent thin snow-sweepings flying
northward past me.

The odometer which I had with me had not yet measured four miles, when I
began to notice two things: first that the jewelled meteor-stones were
now accumulating beyond all limit, filling my range of vision to the
northern horizon with a dazzling glister: in mounds, and parterres, and
scattered disconnection they lay, like largesse of autumn leaves, spread
out over those Elysian fields and fairy uplands of wealth, trillions of
billions, so that I had need to steer my twining way among them. Now,
too, I noticed that, but for these stones, all roughness had
disappeared, not a trace of the upheaval going on a little further south
being here, for the ice lay positively as smooth as a table before me.
It is my belief that this stretch of smooth ice has never, never felt
one shock, or stir, or throe, and reaches right down to the bottom of
the deep.

       *       *       *       *       *

And now with a wild hilarity I flew. Gradually, a dizziness, a lunacy,
had seized upon me, till finally, up-buoyed on air, and dancing mad, I
sped, I spun, with grinning teeth that chattered and gibbered, and
eyeballs of distraction: for a Fear, too--most cold and dreadful--had
its hand of ice upon my heart, I being so alone in that place, face to
face with the Ineffable: but still with a giddy levity, and a fatal joy,
and a blind hilarity, on I sped, I spun.

       *       *       *       *       *

The odometer measured nine miles from my start. I was in the immediate
neighbourhood of the Pole.

I cannot say when it began, but now I was conscious of a sound in my
ears, distinct and near, a steady sound of splashing, or fluttering,
resembling the noising of a cascade or brook: and it grew. Forty more
steps I took (slide I could not now for the meteorites)--perhaps
sixty--perhaps eighty: and now, to my sudden horror, I stood by a
circular clean-cut lake.

One minute only, swaying and nodding there, I stood: and then I dropped
down flat in swoon.

       *       *       *       *       *

In a hundred years, I suppose, I should never succeed in analysing
_why_ I swooned: but my consciousness still retains the impression of
that horrid thrill. I saw nothing distinctly, for my whole being reeled
and toppled drunken, like a spinning-top in desperate death-struggle at
the moment when it flags, and wobbles dissolutely to fall; but the very
instant that my eyes met what was before me, I knew, I knew, that here
was the Sanctity of Sanctities, the old eternal inner secret of the Life
of this Earth, which it was a most burning shame for a man to see. The
lake, I fancy, must be a mile across, and in its middle is a pillar of
ice, very low and broad; and I had the clear impression, or dream, or
notion, that there was a name, or word, graven all round in the ice of
the pillar in characters which I could never read; and under the name a
long date; and the fluid of the lake seemed to me to be wheeling with a
shivering ecstasy, splashing and fluttering, round the pillar, always
from west to east, in the direction of the spinning of the earth; and it
was borne in upon me--I can't at all say how--that this fluid was the
substance of a living creature; and I had the distinct fancy, as my
senses failed, that it was a creature with many dull and anguished eyes,
and that, as it wheeled for ever round in fluttering lust, it kept its
eyes always turned upon the name and the date graven in the pillar. But
this must be my madness....

       *       *       *       *       *

It must have been not less than an hour before a sense of life returned
to me; and when the thought stabbed my brain that a long, long time I
had lain there in the presence of those gloomy orbs, my spirit seemed to
groan and die within me.

In some minutes, however, I had scrambled to my feet, clutched at a
dog's harness, and without one backward glance, was flying from that
place.

Half-way to the halting-place, I waited Clark and Mew, being very sick
and doddering, and unable to advance. But they did not come.

Later on, when I gathered force to go further, I found that they had
perished in the upheaval of the ice. One only of the sledges, half
buried, I saw near the spot of our bivouac.

       *       *       *       *       *

Alone that same day I began my way southward, and for five days made
good progress. On the eighth day I noticed, stretched right across the
south-eastern horizon, a region of purple vapour which luridly obscured
the face of the sun: and day after day I saw it steadily brooding
there. But what it could be I did not understand.

       *       *       *       *       *

Well, onward through the desert ice I continued my lonely way, with a
baleful shrinking terror in my heart; for very stupendous, alas! is the
burden of that Arctic solitude upon one poor human soul.

Sometimes on a halt I have lain and listened long to the hollow silence,
recoiling, crushed by it, hoping that at least one of the dogs might
whine. I have even crept shivering from the thawed sleeping-bag to flog
a dog, so that I might hear a sound.

I had started from the Pole with a well-filled sledge, and the sixteen
dogs left alive from the ice-packing which buried my comrades. This was
on the evening of the 13th April. I had saved from the wreck of our
things most of the whey-powder, pemmican, &c., as well as the
theodolite, compass, chronometer, train-oil lamp for cooking, and other
implements: I was therefore in no doubt as to my course, and I had
provisions for ninety days. But ten days from the start my supply of
dog-food failed, and I had to begin to slaughter my only companions, one
by one.

Well, in the third week the ice became horribly rough, and with moil
and toil enough to wear a bear to death, I did only five miles a day.
After the day's work I would crawl with a dying sigh into the
sleeping-bag, clad still in the load of skins which stuck to me a mere
filth of grease, to sleep the sleep of a swine, indifferent if I never
woke.

Always--day after day--on the south-eastern horizon, brooded sullenly
that curious stretched-out region of purple vapour, like the smoke of
the conflagration of the world. And I noticed that its length constantly
reached out and out, and silently grew.

       *       *       *       *       *

Once I had a very pleasant dream. I dreamed that I was in a garden--an
Arabian paradise--so sweet was the perfume. All the time, however, I had
a sub-consciousness of the gale which was actually blowing from the S.E.
over the ice, and, at the moment when I awoke, was half-wittedly droning
to myself; 'It is a Garden of Peaches; but I am not really in the
garden: I am really on the ice; only, the S.E. storm is wafting to me
the aroma of this Garden of Peaches.'

I opened my eyes--I started--I sprang to my feet! For, of all the
miracles!--I could not doubt--an actual aroma like peach-blossom was in
the algid air about me!

Before I could collect my astonished senses, I began to vomit pretty
violently, and at the same time saw some of the dogs, mere skeletons as
they were, vomiting, too. For a long time I lay very sick in a kind of
daze, and, on rising, found two of the dogs dead, and all very queer.
The wind had now changed to the north.

Well, on I staggered, fighting every inch of my deplorably weary way.
This odour of peach-blossom, my sickness, and the death of the two dogs,
remained a wonder to me.

Two days later, to my extreme mystification (and joy), I came across a
bear and its cub lying dead at the foot of a hummock. I could not
believe my eyes. There she lay on her right side, a spot of dirty-white
in a disordered patch of snow, with one little eye open, and her
fierce-looking mouth also; and the cub lay across her haunch, biting
into her rough fur. I set to work upon her, and allowed the dogs a
glorious feed on the blubber, while I myself had a great banquet on the
fresh meat. I had to leave the greater part of the two carcasses, and I
can feel again now the hankering reluctance--quite unnecessary, as it
turned out--with which I trudged onwards. Again and again I found
myself asking: 'Now, what could have killed those two bears?'

With brutish stolidness I plodded ever on, almost like a walking
machine, sometimes nodding in sleep while I helped the dogs, or
manouvred the sledge over an ice-ridge, pushing or pulling. On the 3rd
June, a month and a half from my start, I took an observation with the
theodolite, and found that I was not yet 400 miles from the Pole, in
latitude 84° 50'. It was just as though some Will, some Will, was
obstructing and retarding me.

However, the intolerable cold was over, and soon my clothes no longer
hung stark on me like armour. Pools began to appear in the ice, and
presently, what was worse, my God, long lanes, across which, somehow, I
had to get the sledge. But about the same time all fear of starvation
passed away: for on the 6th June I came across another dead bear, on the
7th three, and thenceforth, in rapidly growing numbers, I met not bears
only, but fulmars, guillemots, snipes, Ross's gulls, little awks--all,
all, lying dead on the ice. And never anywhere a living thing, save me,
and the two remaining dogs.

If ever a poor man stood shocked before a mystery, it was I now. I had a
big fear on my heart.

On the 2nd July the ice began packing dangerously, and soon another
storm broke loose upon me from the S.W. I left off my trek, and put up
the silk tent on a five-acre square of ice surrounded by lanes: and
_again_--for the second time--as I lay down, I smelled that delightful
strange odour of peach-blossom, a mere whiff of it, and presently
afterwards was taken sick. However, it passed off this time in a couple
of hours.

Now it was all lanes, lanes, alas! yet no open water, and such was the
difficulty and woe of my life, that sometimes I would drop flat on the
ice, and sob: 'Oh, no more, no more, my God: here let me die.' The
crossing of a lane might occupy ten or twelve entire hours, and then, on
the other side I might find another one opening right before me.
Moreover, on the 8th July, one of the dogs, after a feed on blubber,
suddenly died; and there was left me only 'Reinhardt,' a white-haired
Siberian dog, with little pert up-sticking ears, like a cat's. Him, too,
I had to kill on coming to open water.

This did not happen till the 3rd August, nearly four months from the
Pole.

I can't think, my God, that any heart of man ever tholed the appalling
nightmare and black abysm of sensations in which, during those four
long desert months, I weltered: for though I was as a brute, I had a
man's heart to feel. What I had seen, or dreamed, at the Pole followed
and followed me; and if I shut my poor weary eyes to sleep, those others
yonder seemed to watch me still with their distraught and gloomy gaze,
and in my spinning dark dreams spun that eternal ecstasy of the lake.

However, by the 28th July I knew from the look of the sky, and the
absence of fresh-water ice, that the sea could not be far; so I set to
work, and spent two days in putting to rights the now battered kayak.
This done, I had no sooner resumed my way than I sighted far off a
streaky haze, which I knew to be the basalt cliffs of Franz Josef Land;
and in a craziness of joy I stood there, waving my ski-staff about my
head, with the senile cheers of a very old man.

In four days this land was visibly nearer, sheer basaltic cliffs mixed
with glacier, forming apparently a great bay, with two small islands in
the mid-distance; and at fore-day of the 3rd August I arrived at the
definite edge of the pack-ice in moderate weather at about the
freezing-point.

I at once, but with great reluctance, shot Reinhardt, and set to work to
get the last of the provisions, and the most necessary of the
implements, into the kayak, making haste to put out to the toilless
luxury of being borne on the water, after all the weary trudge. Within
fourteen hours I was coasting, with my little lug-sail spread, along the
shore-ice of that land. It was midnight of a calm Sabbath, and low on
the horizon smoked the drowsing red sun-ball, as my canvas skiff lightly
chopped her little way through this silent sea. Silent, silent: for
neither snort of walrus, nor yelp of fox, nor cry of startled kittiwake,
did I hear: but all was still as the jet-black shadow of the cliffs and
glacier on the tranquil sea: and many bodies of dead things strewed the
surface of the water.

       *       *       *       *       *

When I found a little fjord, I went up it to the end where stood a
stretch of basalt columns, looking like a shattered temple of
Antediluvians; and when my foot at last touched land, I sat down there a
long, long time in the rubbly snow, and silently wept. My eyes that
night were like a fountain of tears. For the firm land is health and
sanity, and dear to the life of man; but I say that the great ungenial
ice is a nightmare, and a blasphemy, and a madness, and the realm of the
Power of Darkness.

       *       *       *       *       *

I knew that I was at Franz Josef Land, somewhere or other in the
neighbourhood of C. Fligely (about 82° N.), and though it was so late,
and getting cold, I still had the hope of reaching Spitzbergen that
year, by alternately sailing all open water, and dragging the kayak over
the slack drift-ice. All the ice which I saw was good flat fjord-ice,
and the plan seemed feasible enough; so after coasting about a little,
and then three days' good rest in the tent at the bottom of a ravine of
columnar basalt opening upon the shore, I packed some bear and walrus
flesh, with what artificial food was left, into the kayak, and I set out
early in the morning, coasting the shore-ice with sail and paddle. In
the afternoon I managed to climb a little way up an iceberg, and made
out that I was in a bay whose terminating headlands were invisible. I
accordingly decided to make S.W. by W. to cross it, but, in doing so, I
was hardly out of sight of land, when a northern storm overtook me
toward midnight; before I could think, the little sail was all but
whiffed away, and the kayak upset. I only saved it by the happy chance
of being near a floe with an ice-foot, which, projecting under the
water, gave me foot-hold; and I lay on the floe in a mooning state the
whole night under the storm, for I was half drowned.

And at once, on recovering myself, I abandoned all thought of whalers
and of Europe for that year. Happily, my instruments, &c., had been
saved by the kayak-deck when she capsized.

       *       *       *       *       *

A hundred yards inland from the shore-rim, in a circular place where
there was some moss and soil, I built myself a semi-subterranean Eskimo
den for the long Polar night. The spot was quite surrounded by high
sloping walls of basalt, except to the west, where they opened in a
three-foot cleft to the shore, and the ground was strewn with slabs and
boulders of granite and basalt. I found there a dead she-bear, two
well-grown cubs, and a fox, the latter having evidently fallen from the
cliffs; in three places the snow was quite red, overgrown with a red
lichen, which at first I took for blood. I did not even yet feel secure
from possible bears, and took care to make my den fairly tight, a work
which occupied me nearly four weeks, for I had no tools, save a hatchet,
knife, and metal-shod ski-staff. I dug a passage in the ground two feet
wide, two deep, and ten long, with perpendicular sides, and at its north
end a circular space, twelve feet across, also with perpendicular sides,
which I lined with stones; the whole excavation I covered with
inch-thick walrus-hide, skinned during a whole bitter week from four of
a number that lay about the shore-ice; for ridge-pole I used a thin
pointed rock which I found near, though, even so, the roof remained
nearly flat. This, when it was finished, I stocked well, putting in
everything, except the kayak, blubber to serve both for fuel and
occasional light, and foods of several sorts, which I procured by merely
stretching out the hand. The roof of both circular part and passage was
soon buried under snow and ice, and hardly distinguishable from the
general level of the white-clad ground. Through the passage, if I passed
in or out, I crawled flat, on hands and knees: but that was rare: and in
the little round interior, mostly sitting in a cowering attitude, I
wintered, harkening to the large and windy ravings of darkling December
storms above me.

       *       *       *       *       *

All those months the burden of a thought bowed me; and an unanswered
question, like the slow turning of a mechanism, revolved in my gloomy
spirit: for everywhere around me lay bears, walruses, foxes, thousands
upon thousands of little awks, kittiwakes, snow-owls, eider-ducks,
gulls-dead, dead. Almost the only living things which I saw were some
walruses on the drift-floes: but very few compared with the number
which I expected. It was clear to me that some inconceivable catastrophe
had overtaken the island during the summer, destroying all life about
it, except some few of the amphibia, cetacea, and crustacea.

On the 5th December, having crept out from the den during a southern
storm, I had, for the third time, a distant whiff of that self-same
odour of peach-blossom: but now without any after-effects.

       *       *       *       *       *

Well, again came Christmas, the New Year--Spring: and on the 22nd May I
set out with a well-stocked kayak. The water was fairly open, and the
ice so good, that at one place I could sail the kayak over it, the wind
sending me sliding at a fine pace. Being on the west coast of Franz
Josef Land, I was in as favourable a situation as possible, and I turned
my bow southward with much hope, keeping a good many days just in sight
of land. Toward the evening of my third day out I noticed a large flat
floe, presenting far-off a singular and lovely sight, for it seemed
freighted thick with a profusion of pink and white roses, showing in its
clear crystal the empurpled reflection. On getting near I saw that it
was covered with millions of Ross's gulls, all dead, whose pretty rosy
bosoms had given it that appearance.

Up to the 29th June I made good progress southward and westward (the
weather being mostly excellent), sometimes meeting dead bears, floating
away on floes, sometimes dead or living walrus-herds, with troop after
troop of dead kittiwakes, glaucus and ivory gulls, skuas, and every kind
of Arctic fowl. On that last day--the 29th June--I was about to encamp
on a floe soon after midnight, when, happening to look toward the sun,
my eye fell, far away south across the ocean of floes, upon
something--_the masts of a ship_.

A phantom ship, or a real ship: it was all one; real, I must have
instantly felt, it could not be: but at a sight so incredible my heart
set to beating in my bosom as though I must surely die, and feebly
waving the cane oar about my head, I staggered to my knees, and thence
with wry mouth toppled flat.

So overpoweringly sweet was the thought of springing once more, like the
beasts of Circe, from a walrus into a man. At this time I was tearing my
bear's-meat just like a bear; I was washing my hands in walrus-blood to
produce a glairy sort of pink cleanliness, in place of the black grease
which chronically coated them.

Worn as I was, I made little delay to set out for that ship; and I had
not travelled over water and ice four hours when, to my in-describable
joy, I made out from the top of a steep floe that she was the _Boreal_.
It seemed most strange that she should be anywhere hereabouts: I could
only conclude that she must have forced and drifted her way thus far
westward out of the ice-block in which our party had left her, and
perhaps now was loitering here in the hope of picking us up on our way
to Spitzbergen.

In any case, wild was the haste with which I fought my way to be at her,
my gasping mouth all the time drawn back in a _rictus_ of laughter at
the anticipation of their gladness to see me, their excitement to hear
the grand tidings of the Pole attained. Anon I waved the paddle, though
I knew that they could not yet see me, and then I dug deep at the
whitish water. What astonished me was her main-sail and fore-mast
square-sail--set that calm morning; and her screws were still, for she
moved not at all. The sun was abroad like a cold spirit of light,
touching the great ocean-room of floes with dazzling spots, and a tint
almost of rose was on the world, as it were of a just-dead bride in her
spangles and white array. The _Boreal_ was the one little distant
jet-black spot in all this purity: and upon her, as though she were
Heaven, I paddled, I panted. But she was in a queerish state: by 9 A.M.
I could see that. Two of the windmill arms were not there, and half
lowered down her starboard beam a boat hung askew; moreover, soon after
10 I could clearly see that her main-sail had a long rent down the
middle.

I could not at all make her out. She was not anchored, though a
sheet-anchor hung over at the starboard cathead; she was not moored; and
two small ice-floes, one on each side, were sluggishly bombarding her
bows.

I began now to wave the paddle, battling for my breath, ecstatic, crazy
with excitement, each second like a year to me. Very soon I could make
out someone at the bows, leaning well over, looking my way. Something
put it into my head that it was Sallitt, and I began an impassioned
shouting. 'Hi! Sallitt! Hallo! Hi!' I called.

I did not see him move: I was still a good way off: but there he stood,
leaning steadily over, looking my way. Between me and the ship now was
all navigable water among the floes, and the sight of him so visibly
near put into me such a shivering eagerness, that I was nothing else but
a madman for the time, sending the kayak flying with venomous digs in
quick-repeated spurts, and mixing with the diggings my crazy wavings,
and with both the daft shoutings of 'Hallo! Hi! Bravo! I have _been to
the Pole!_'

Well, vanity, vanity. Nearer still I drew: it was broad morning, going
on toward noon: I was half a mile away, I was fifty yards. But on board
the _Boreal_, though now they _must_ have heard me, seen me, I observed
no movement of welcome, but all, all was still as death that still
Arctic morning, my God. Only, the ragged sail flapped a little, and--one
on each side--two ice-floes sluggishly bombarded the bows, with hollow
sounds.

I was certain now that Sallitt it was who looked across the ice: but
when the ship swung a little round, I noticed that the direction of his
gaze was carried with her movement, he no longer looking my way.

'Why, Sallitt!' I shouted reproachfully: 'why, Sallitt, man...!' I
whined.

But even as I shouted and whined, a perfect wild certainty was in my
heart: for an aroma like peach, my God, had been suddenly wafted from
the ship upon me, and I must have very well known then that that
watchful outlook of Sallitt saw nothing, and on the _Boreal_ were dead
men all; indeed, very soon I saw one of his eyes looking like a glass
eye which has slid askew, and glares distraught. And now again my
wretched body failed, and my head dropped forward, where I sat, upon
the kayak-deck.

       *       *       *       *       *

Well, after a long time, I lifted myself to look again at that forlorn
and wandering craft. There she lay, quiet, tragic, as it were culpable
of the dark secret she bore; and Sallitt, who had been such good friends
with me, would not cease his stare. I knew quite well why he was there:
he had leant over to vomit, and had leant ever since, his forearms
pressed on the bulwark-beam, his left knee against the boards, and his
left shoulder propped on the cathead. When I came quite near, I saw that
with every bump of the two floes against the bows, his face shook in
response, and nodded a little; strange to say, he had no covering on his
head, and I noted the play of the faint breezes in his uncut hair. After
a time I would approach no more, for I was afraid; I did not dare, the
silence of the ship seemed so sacred and awful; and till late afternoon
I sat there, watching the black and massive hull. Above her water-line
emerged all round a half-floating fringe of fresh-green sea-weed,
proving old neglect; an abortive attempt had apparently been made to
lower, or take in, the larch-wood pram, for there she hung by a jammed
davit-rope, stern up, bow in the water; the only two arms of the
windmill moved this way and that, through some three degrees, with an
_andante_ creaking sing-song; some washed clothes, tied on the bow-sprit
rigging to dry, were still there; the iron casing all round the bluff
bows was red and rough with rust; at several points the rigging was in
considerable tangle; occasionally the boom moved a little with a
tortured skirling cadence; and the sail, rotten, I presume, from
exposure--for she had certainly encountered no bad weather--gave out
anon a heavy languid flap at a rent down the middle. Besides Sallitt,
looking out there where he had jammed himself, I saw no one.

By a paddle-stroke now, and another presently, I had closely approached
her about four in the afternoon, though my awe of the ship was
complicated by that perfume of hers, whose fearful effects I knew. My
tentative approach, however, proved to me, when I remained unaffected,
that, here and now, whatever danger there had been was past; and
finally, by a hanging rope, with a thumping desperation of heart, I
clambered up her beam.

       *       *       *       *       *

They had died, it seemed, very suddenly, for nearly all the twelve were
in poses of activity. Egan was in the very act of ascending the
companion-way; Lamburn was sitting against the chart-room door,
apparently cleaning two carbines; Odling at the bottom of the
engine-room stair seemed to be drawing on a pair of reindeer komagar;
and Cartwright, who was often in liquor, had his arms frozen tight round
the neck of Martin, whom he seemed to be kissing, they two lying stark
at the foot of the mizzen-mast.

Over all--over men, decks, rope-coils--in the cabin, in the
engine-room--between skylight leaves--on every shelf, in every
cranny--lay a purplish ash or dust, very impalpably fine. And steadily
reigning throughout the ship, like the very spirit of death, was that
aroma of peach-blossom.

       *       *       *       *       *

Here it had reigned, as I could see from the log-dates, from the rust on
the machinery, from the look of the bodies, from a hundred indications,
during something over a year. It was, therefore, mainly by the random
workings of winds and currents that this fragrant ship of death had been
brought hither to me.

And this was the first direct intimation which I had that the Unseen
Powers (whoever and whatever they may be), who through the history of
the world had been so very, very careful to conceal their Hand from the
eyes of men, hardly any longer intended to be at the pains to conceal
their Hand from me. It was just as though the Boreal had been openly
presented to me by a spiritual agency, which, though I could not see it,
I could readily apprehend.

       *       *       *       *       *

The dust, though very thin and flighty above-decks, lay thickly
deposited below, and after having made a tour of investigation
throughout the ship, the first thing which I did was to examine
that--though I had tasted nothing all day, and was exhausted to death. I
found my own microscope where I had left it in the box in my berth to
starboard, though I had to lift up Egan to get at it, and to step over
Lamburn to enter the chart-room; but there, toward evening, I sat at the
table and bent to see if I could make anything of the dust, while it
seemed to me as if all the myriad spirits of men that have sojourned on
the earth, and angel and devil, and all Time and all Eternity, hung
silent round for my decision; and such an ague had me, that for a long
time my wandering finger-tips, all ataxic with agitation, eluded every
delicate effort which I made, and I could nothing do. Of course, I know
that an odour of peach-blossom in the air, resulting in death, could
only be associated with some vaporous effluvium of cyanogen, or of
hydrocyanic ('prussic') acid, or of both; and when I at last managed to
examine some of the dust under the microscope, I was not therefore
surprised to find, among the general mass of purplish ash, a number of
bright-yellow particles, which could only be minute crystals of potassic
ferrocyanide. What potassic ferrocyanide was doing on board the _Boreal_
I did not know, and I had neither the means, nor the force of mind,
alas! to dive then further into the mystery; I understood only that by
some extraordinary means the air of the region just south of the Polar
environ had been impregnated with a vapour which was either cyanogen, or
some product of cyanogen; also, that this deadly vapour, which is very
soluble, had by now either been dissolved by the sea, or else dispersed
into space (probably the latter), leaving only its faint after-perfume;
and seeing this, I let my poor abandoned head drop again on the table,
and long hours I sat there staring mad, for I had a suspicion, my God,
and a fear, in my breast.

       *       *       *       *       *

The _Boreal,_ I found, contained sufficient provisions, untouched by
the dust, in cases, casks, &c., to last me, probably, fifty years. After
two days, when I had partially scrubbed and boiled the filth of fifteen
months from my skin, and solaced myself with better food, I overhauled
her thoroughly, and spent three more days in oiling and cleaning the
engine. Then, all being ready, I dragged my twelve dead and laid them
together in two rows on the chart-room floor; and I hoisted for love the
poor little kayak which had served me through so many tribulations. At
nine in the morning of the 6th July, a week from my first sighting of
the _Boreal_, I descended to the engine-room to set out.

The screws, like those of most quite modern ships, were driven by the
simple contrivance of a constant stream of liquid air, contained in very
powerful tanks, exploding through capillary tubes into non-expansion
slide-valve chests, much as in the ordinary way with steam: a motor
which gave her, in spite of her bluff hulk, a speed of sixteen knots. It
is, therefore, the simplest thing for one man to take these ships round
the world, since their movement, or stopping, depend upon nothing but
the depressing or raising of a steel handle, provided that one does not
get blown to the sky meantime, as liquid air, in spite of its thousand
advantages, occasionally blows people. At any rate, I had tanks of air
sufficient to last me through twelve years' voyaging; and there was the
ordinary machine on board for making it, with forty tons of coal, in
case of need, in the bunkers, and two excellent Belleville boilers: so I
was well supplied with motors at least.

The ice here was quite slack, and I do not think I ever saw Arctic
weather so bright and gay, the temperature at 41°. I found that I was
midway between Franz Josef and Spitzbergen, in latitude 79° 23' N. and
longitude 39° E.; my way was perfectly clear; and something almost like
a mournful hopefulness was in me as the engines slid into their clanking
turmoil, and those long-silent screws began to churn the Arctic sea. I
ran up with alacrity and took my stand at the wheel; and the bows of my
eventful Argo turned southward and westward.

       *       *       *       *       *

When I needed food or sleep, the ship slept, too: when I awoke, she
continued her way.

Sixteen hours a day sometimes I stood sentinel at that wheel,
overlooking the varied monotony of the ice-sea, till my knees would
give, and I wondered why a wheel at which one might sit was not
contrived, rather delicate steering being often required among the floes
and bergs. By now, however, I was less weighted with my ball of Polar
clothes, and stood almost slim in a Lap great-coat, a round Siberian fur
cap on my head.

At midnight when I threw myself into my old berth, it was just as though
the engines, subsided now into silence, were a dead thing, and had a
ghost which haunted me; for I heard them still, and yet not them, but
the silence of their ghost.

Sometimes I would startle from sleep, horrified to the heart at some
sound of exploding iceberg, or bumping floe, noising far through that
white mystery of quietude, where the floes and bergs were as floating
tombs, and the world a liquid cemetery. Never could I describe the
strange Doom's-day shock with which such a sound would recall me from
far depths of chaos to recollection of myself: for often-times, both
waking and in nightmare, I did not know on which planet I was, nor in
which Age, but felt myself adrift in the great gulf of time and space
and circumstance, without bottom for my consciousness to stand upon; and
the world was all mirage and a new show to me; and the boundaries of
dream and waking lost.

Well, the weather was most fair all the time, and the sea like a pond.
During the morning of the fifth day, the 11th July, I entered, and went
moving down, an extraordinary long avenue of snow-bergs and floes, most
regularly placed, half a mile across and miles long, like a Titanic
double-procession of statues, or the Ming Tombs, but rising and sinking
on the cadenced swell; many towering high, throwing placid shadows on
the aisle between; some being of a lucid emerald tint; and three or four
pouring down cascades that gave a far and chaunting sound. The sea
between was of a strange thick bluishness, almost like raw egg-white;
while, as always here, some snow-clouds, white and woolly, floated in
the pale sky. Down this avenue, which produced a mysterious impression
of Cyclopean cathedrals and odd sequesteredness, I had not passed a
mile, when I sighted a black object at the end.

I rushed to the shrouds, and very soon made out a whaler.

Again the same panting agitations, mad rage to be at her, at once
possessed me; I flew to the indicator, turned the lever to full, then
back to give the wheel a spin, then up the main-mast ratlins, waving a
long foot-bandage of vadmel tweed picked up at random, and by the time I
was within five hundred yards of her, had worked myself to such a pitch,
that I was again shouting that futile madness: 'Hullo! Hi! Bravo! _I
have been to the Pole!_'

And those twelve dead that I had in the chart-room there must have heard
me, and the men on the whaler must have heard me, and smiled their
smile.

For, as to that whaler, I should have known better at once, if I had not
been crazy, since she _looked_ like a ship of death, her boom slamming
to port and starboard on the gentle heave of the sea, and her fore-sail
reefed that serene morning. Only when I was quite near her, and hurrying
down to stop the engines, did the real truth, with perfect suddenness,
drench my heated brain; and I almost ran into her, I was so stunned.

However, I stopped the _Boreal_ in time, and later on lowered the kayak,
and boarded the other.

This ship had evidently been stricken silent in the midst of a perfect
drama of activity, for I saw not one of her crew of sixty-two who was
not busy, except one boy. I found her a good-sized thing of 500 odd
tons, ship-rigged, with auxiliary engine of seventy horse-power, and
pretty heavily armour-plated round the bows. There was no part of her
which I did not over-haul, and I could see that they had had a great
time with whales, for a mighty carcass, attached to the outside of the
ship by the powerful cant-purchase tackle, had been in process of
flensing and cutting-in, and on the deck two great blankets of blubber,
looking each a ton-weight, surrounded by twenty-seven men in many
attitudes, some terrifying to see, some disgusting, several grotesque,
all so unhuman, the whale dead, and the men dead, too, and death was
there, and the rank-flourishing germs of Inanity, and a mesmerism, and a
silence, whose dominion was established, and its reign was growing old.
Four of them, who had been removing the gums from a mass of stratified
whalebone at the mizzen-mast foot, were quite imbedded in whale-flesh;
also, in a barrel lashed to the top of the main top-gallant masthead was
visible the head of a man with a long pointed beard, looking steadily
out over the sea to the S.W., which made me notice that five only of the
probable eight or nine boats were on board; and after visiting the
'tween-decks, where I saw considerable quantities of stowed whalebone
plates, and about fifty or sixty iron oil-tanks, and cut-up blubber; and
after visiting cabin, engine-room, fo'cas'le, where I saw a lonely boy
of fourteen with his hand grasping a bottle of rum under all the
turned-up clothes in a chest, he, at the moment of death, being
evidently intent upon hiding it; and after two hours' search of the
ship, I got back to my own, and half an hour later came upon all the
three missing whale-boats about a mile apart, and steered zig-zag near
to each. They contained five men each and a steerer, and one had the
harpoon-gun fired, with the loose line coiled round and round the head
and upper part of the stroke line-manager; and in the others hundreds of
fathoms of coiled rope, with toggle-irons, whale-lances, hand-harpoons,
and dropped heads, and grins, and lazy _abandon_, and eyes that stared,
and eyes that dozed, and eyes that winked.

After this I began to sight ships not infrequently, and used regularly
to have the three lights burning all night. On the 12th July I met one,
on the 15th two, on the 16th one, on the 17th three, on the 18th
two--all Greenlanders, I think: but, of the nine, I boarded only three,
the glass quite clearly showing me, when yet far off, that on the others
was no life; and on the three which I boarded were dead men; so that
that suspicion which I had, and that fear, grew very heavy upon me.

I went on southward, day after day southward, sentinel there at my
wheel; clear sunshine by day, when the calm pale sea sometimes seemed
mixed with regions of milk, and at night the immense desolation of a
world lit by a sun that was long dead, and by a light that was gloom. It
was like Night blanched in death then; and wan as the very kingdom of
death and Hades I have seen it, most terrifying, that neuter state and
limbo of nothingness, when unreal sea and spectral sky, all boundaries
lost, mingled in a vast shadowy void of ghastly phantasmagoria, pale to
utter huelessness, at whose centre I, as if annihilated, seemed to swoon
in immensity of space. Into this disembodied world would come anon
waftures of that peachy scent which I knew: and their frequency rapidly
grew. But still the _Boreal_ moved, traversing, as it were, bottomless
Eternity: and I reached latitude 72°, not far now from Northern Europe.

And now, as to that blossomy peach-scent--even while some floes were yet
around me--I was just like some fantastic mariner, who, having set out
to search for Eden and the Blessed Islands, finds them, and balmy gales
from their gardens come out, while he is yet afar, to meet him with
their perfumes of almond and champac, cornel and jasmin and lotus. For I
had now reached a zone where the peach-aroma was constant; all the world
seemed embalmed in its spicy fragrance; and I could easily imagine
myself voyaging beyond the world toward some clime of perpetual and
enchanting Spring.

       *       *       *       *       *

Well, I saw at last what whalers used to call 'the blink of the ice';
that is to say, its bright apparition or reflection in the sky when it
is left behind, or not yet come-to. By this time I was in a region where
a good many craft of various sorts were to be seen; I was continually
meeting them; and not one did I omit to investigate, while many I
boarded in the kayak or the larch-wood pram. Just below latitude 70° I
came upon a good large fleet of what I supposed to be Lafoden cod and
herring fishers, which must have drifted somewhat on a northward
current. They had had a great season, for the boats were well laden with
curing fish. I went from one to the other on a zig-zag course, they
being widely scattered, some mere dots to the glass on the horizon. The
evening was still and clear with that astral Arctic clearness, the sun
just beginning his low-couched nightly drowse. These sturdy-looking
brown boats stood rocking gently there with slow-creaking noises, as of
things whining in slumber, without the least damage, awaiting the
appalling storms of the winter months on that tenebrous sea, when a
dark doom, and a deep grave, would not fail them. The fishers were braw
carles, wearing, many of them, fringes of beard well back from the
chin-point, with hanging woollen caps. In every case I found below-decks
a number of cruses of corn-brandy, marked _aquavit_, two of which I took
into the pram. In one of the smacks an elderly fisher was kneeling in a
forward sprawling pose, clasping the lug-mast with his arms, the two
knees wide apart, head thrown back, and the yellow eye-balls with their
islands of grey iris staring straight up the mast-pole. At another of
them, instead of boarding in the pram, I shut off the _Boreal's_ liquid
air at such a point that, by delicate steering, she slackened down to a
stoppage just a-beam of the smack, upon whose deck I was thus able to
jump down. After looking around I descended the three steps aft into the
dark and garrety below-decks, and with stooping back went calling in an
awful whisper: '_Anyone? Anyone?_' Nothing answered me: and when I went
up again, the _Boreal_ had drifted three yards beyond my reach. There
being a dead calm, I had to plunge into the water, and in that
half-minute there a sudden cold throng of unaccountable terrors beset
me, and I can feel again now that abysmal desolation of loneliness, and
sense of a hostile and malign universe bent upon eating me up: for the
ocean seemed to me nothing but a great ghost.

Two mornings later I came upon another school, rather larger boats
these, which I found to be Brittany cod-fishers. Most of these, too, I
boarded. In every below-decks was a wooden or earthenware image of the
Virgin, painted in gaudy faded colours; and in one case I found a boy
who had been kneeling before the statue, but was toppled sideways now,
his knees still bent, and the cross of Christ in his hand. These
stalwart blue woollen blouses and tarpaulin sou'-westers lay in every
pose of death, every detail of feature and expression still perfectly
preserved. The sloops were all the same, all, all: with sing-song creaks
they rocked a little, nonchalantly: each, as it were, with a certain
sub-consciousness of its own personality, and callous unconsciousness of
all the others round it: yet each a copy of the others: the same hooks
and lines, disembowelling-knives, barrels of salt and pickle, piles and
casks of opened cod, kegs of biscuit, and low-creaking rockings, and a
bilgy smell, and dead men. The next day, about eighty miles south of the
latitude of Mount Hekla, I sighted a big ship, which turned out to be
the French cruiser _Lazare Tréport_. I boarded and overhauled her
during three hours, her upper, main, and armoured deck, deck by deck, to
her lowest black depths, even childishly spying up the tubes of her two
big, rusted turret-guns. Three men in the engine-room had been much
mangled, after death, I presume, by a burst boiler; floating about 800
yards to the north-east lay a long-boat of hers, low in the water,
crammed with marines, one oar still there, jammed between the row-lock
and the rower's forced-back chin; on the ship's starboard deck, in the
long stretch of space between the two masts, the blue-jackets had
evidently been piped up, for they lay there in a sort of serried
disorder, to the number of two hundred and seventy-five. Nothing could
be of suggestion more tragic than the wasted and helpless power of this
poor wandering vessel, around whose stolid mass myriads of wavelets,
busy as aspen-leaves, bickered with a continual weltering splash that
was quite loud to hear. I sat a good time that afternoon in one of her
steely port main-deck casemates on a gun-carriage, my head sunken on my
breast, furtively eyeing the bluish turned-up feet, all shrunk,
exsanguined, of a sailor who lay on his back before me; his soles were
all that I could see, the rest of him lying head-downwards beyond the
steel door-sill.

Drenched in seas of lugubrious reverie I sat, till, with a shuddering
start, I awoke, paddled back to the _Boreal_, and, till sleep conquered
me, went on my way. At ten the next morning, coming on deck, I spied to
the west a group of craft, and turned my course upon them. They turned
out to be eight Shetland sixerns, which must have drifted north-eastward
hither. I examined them well, but they were as the long list of the
others: for all the men, and all the boys, and all the dogs on them were
dead.

       *       *       *       *       *

I could have come to land a long time before I did: but I would not: I
was so afraid. For I was used to the silence of the ice: and I was used
to the silence of the sea: but, God knows it, I was afraid of the
silence of the land.

       *       *       *       *       *

Once, on the 15th July, I had seen a whale, or thought I did, spouting
very remotely afar on the S.E. horizon; and on the 19th I distinctly saw
a shoal of porpoises vaulting the sea-surface, in their swift-successive
manner, northward: and seeing them, I had said pitifully to myself:
'Well, I am not quite alone in the world, then, my good God--not quite
alone.'

Moreover, some days later, the _Boreal_ had found herself in a bank of
cod making away northward, millions of fish, for I saw them, and one
afternoon caught three, hand-running, with the hook.

So the sea, at least, had its tribes to be my mates.

But if I should find the land as still as the sea, without even the
spouting whale, or school of tumbling sea-hogs--_if Paris were dumber
than the eternal ice_--what then, I asked myself, should I do?

       *       *       *       *       *

I could have made short work, and landed at Shetland, for I found myself
as far westward as longitude 11° 23' W.: but I would not: I was so
afraid. The shrinking within me to face that vague suspicion which I
had, turned me first to a foreign land.

I made for Norway, and on the first night of this definite intention, at
about nine o'clock, the weather being gusty, the sky lowering, the air
sombrous, and the sea hard-looking, dark, and ridged, I was steaming
along at a good rate, holding the wheel, my poor port and starboard
lights still burning there, when, without the least notice, I received
the roughest physical shock of my life, being shot bodily right over
the wheel, thence, as from a cannon, twenty feet to the cabin-door,
through it head-foremost down the companion-way, and still beyond some
six yards along the passage. I had crashed into some dark and dead ship,
probably of large size, though I never saw her, nor any sign of her; and
all that night, and the next day till four in the afternoon, the
_Boreal_ went driving alone over the sea, whither she would: for I lay
unconscious. When I woke, I found that I had received really very small
injuries, considering: but I sat there on the floor a long time in a
sulky, morose, disgusted, and bitter mood; and when I rose, pettishly
stopped the ship's engines, seeing my twelve dead all huddled and
disfigured. Now I was afraid to steam by night, and even in the daytime
I would not go on for three days: for I was childishly angry with I know
not what, and inclined to quarrel with Those whom I could not see.

However, on the fourth day, a rough swell which knocked the ship about,
and made me very uncomfortable, coaxed me into moving; and I did so with
bows turned eastward and southward.

I sighted the Norway coast four days later, in latitude 63° 19', at noon
of the 11th August, and pricked off my course to follow it; but it was
with a slow and dawdling reluctance that I went, at much less than
half-speed. In some eight hours, as I knew from the chart, I ought to
sight the lighthouse light on Smoelen Island; and when quiet night came,
the black water being branded with trails of still moonlight, I passed
quite close to it, between ten and twelve, almost under the shadow of
the mighty hills: but, oh my God, no light was there. And all the way
down I marked the rugged sea-board slumber darkling, afar or near, with
never, alas! one friendly light.

       *       *       *       *       *

Well, on the 15th August I had another of those maniac raptures, whose
passing away would have left an elephant racked and prostrate. During
four days I had seen not one sign of present life on the Norway coast,
only hills, hills, dead and dark, and floating craft, all dead and dark;
and my eyes now, I found, had acquired a crazy fixity of stare into the
very bottom of the vacant abyss of nothingness, while I remained
unconscious of being, save of one point, rainbow-blue, far down in the
infinite, which passed slowly from left to right before my consciousness
a little way, then vanished, came back, and passed slowly again, from
left to right continually; till some prick, or voice, in my brain would
startle me into the consciousness that I was staring, whispering the
profound confidential warning: _You must not stare so, or it is over
with you!_' Well, lost in a blank trance of this sort, I was leaning
over the wheel during the afternoon of the 15th, when it was as if some
instinct or premonition in my soul leapt up, and said aloud: 'If you
look just yonder, _you will see...!_' I started, and in one instant had
surged up from all that depth of reverie to reality: I glanced to the
right: and there, at last, my God, I saw something human which moved,
rapidly moved: at last!--and it came to me.

That sense of recovery, of waking, of new solidity, of the comfortable
usual, a million-fold too intense for words--how sweetly consoling it
was! Again now, as I write, I can fancy and feel it--the rocky solidity,
the adamant ordinary, on which to base the feet, and live. From the day
when I stood at the Pole, and saw there the dizzy thing that made me
swoon, there had come into my way not one sign or trace that other
beings like myself were alive on the earth with me: till now, suddenly,
I had the sweet indubitable proof: for on the south-western sea, not
four knots away, I saw a large, swift ship: and her bows, which were
sharp as a hatchet, were steadily chipping through the smooth sea at a
pretty high pace, throwing out profuse ribbony foams that went
wide-vawering, with outward undulations, far behind her length, as she
ran the sea in haste, straight northward.

At the moment, I was steering about S.E. by S., fifteen miles out from a
shadowy-blue series of Norway mountains; and just giving the wheel one
frantic spin to starboard to bring me down upon her, I flew to the
bridge, leant my back on the main-mast, which passed through it, put a
foot on the white iron rail before me, and there at once felt all the
mocking devils of distracted revelry possess me, as I caught the cap
from my long hairs, and commenced to wave and wave and wave, red-faced
maniac that I was: for at the second nearer glance, I saw that she was
flying an ensign at the main, and a long pennant at the main-top, and I
did not know what she was flying those flags there for: and I was
embittered and driven mad.

With distinct minuteness did she print herself upon my consciousness in
that five minutes' interval: she was painted a dull and cholera yellow,
like many Russian ships, and there was a faded pink space at her bows
under the line where the yellow ceased: the ensign at her main I made
out to be the blue-and-white saltire, and she was clearly a Russian
passenger-liner, two-masted, two-funnelled, though from her funnels came
no trace of smoke, and the position of her steam-cones was anywhere. All
about her course the sea was spotted with wobbling splendours of the low
sun, large coarse blots of glory near the eye, but lessening to a
smaller pattern in the distance, and at the horizon refined to a
homogeneous band of livid silver.

The double speed of the _Boreal_ and the other, hastening opposite ways,
must have been thirty-eight or forty knots, and the meeting was
accomplished in certainly less than five minutes: yet into that time I
crowded years of life. I was shouting passionately at her, my eyes
starting from my head, my face all inflamed with rage the most prone,
loud and urgent. For she did not stop, nor signal, nor make sign of
seeing me, but came furrowing down upon me like Juggernaut, with
steadfast run. I lost reason, thought, memory, purpose, sense of
relation, in that access of delirium which transported me, and can only
remember now that in the midst of my shouting, a word, uttered by the
fiends who used my throat to express their frenzy, set me laughing high
and madly: for I was crying: 'Hi! Bravo! Why don't you stop? _Madmen! I
have been to the Pole!'_

That instant an odour arose, and came, and struck upon my brain, most
detestable, most execrable; and while one might count ten, I was aware
of her near-sounding engines, and that cursed charnel went tearing past
me on her maenad way, not fifteen yards from my eyes and nostrils. She
was a thing, my God, from which the vulture and the jackal, prowling for
offal, would fly with shrieks of loathing. I had a glimpse of decks
piled thick with her festered dead.

In big black letters on the round retreating yellow stern my eye-corner
caught the word _Yaroslav_, as I bent over the rail to retch and cough
and vomit at her. She was a horrid thing.

This ship had certainly been pretty far south in tropical or
sub-tropical latitudes with her great crowd of dead: for all the bodies
which I had seen till then, so far from smelling ill, seemed to give out
a certain perfume of the peach. She was evidently one of those many
ships of late years which have substituted liquid air for steam, yet
retained their old steam-funnels, &c., in case of emergency: for air, I
believe, was still looked at askance by several builders, on account of
the terrible accidents which it sometimes caused. The _Boreal_ herself
is a similar instance of both motors. This vessel, the _Yaroslav_, must
have been left with working engines when her crew were overtaken by
death, and, her air-tanks being still unexhausted, must have been
ranging the ocean with impunity ever since, during I knew not how many
months, or, it might be, years.

Well, I coasted Norway for nearly a hundred and sixty miles without once
going nearer land than two or three miles: for something held me back.
But passing the fjord-mouth where I knew that Aadheim was, I suddenly
turned the helm to port, almost before I knew that I was doing it, and
made for land.

In half an hour I was moving up an opening in the land with mountains on
either hand, streaky crags at their summit, umbrageous boscage below;
and the whole softened, as it were, by veils woven of the rainbow.

This arm of water lies curved about like a thread which one drops, only
the curves are much more pointed, so that every few minutes the scene
was changed, though the vessel just crawled her way up, and I could see
behind me nothing of what was passed, or only a land-locked gleam like a
lake.

I never saw water so polished and glassy, like clarid polished marble,
reflecting everything quite clean-cut in its lucid abysm, over which
hardly the faintest zephyr breathed that still sun-down; it wimpled
about the bluff _Boreal_, which seemed to move as if careful not to
bruise it, in rich wrinkles and creases, like glycerine, or
dewy-trickling lotus-oil; yet it was only the sea: and the spectacle
yonder was only crags, and autumn-foliage and mountain-slope: yet all
seemed caught-up and chaste, rapt in a trance of rose and purple, and
made of the stuff of dreams and bubbles, of pollen-of-flowers, and rinds
of the peach.

I saw it not only with delight, but with complete astonishment: having
forgotten, as was too natural in all that long barrenness of ice and
sea, that anything could be so ethereally fair: yet homely, too, human,
familiar, and consoling. The air here was richly spiced with that peachy
scent, and there was a Sabbath and a nepenthe and a charm in that place
at that hour, as it were of those gardens of Hesperus, and fields of
asphodel, reserved for the spirits of the just.

Alas! but I had the glass at my side, and for me nepenthe was mixed with
a despair immense as the vault of heaven, my good God: for anon I would
take it up to spy some perched hut of the peasant, or burg of the
'bonder,' on the peaks: and I saw no one there; and to the left, at the
third marked bend of the fjord, where there is one of those watch-towers
that these people used for watching in-coming fish, I spied, lying on a
craggy slope just before the tower, a body which looked as if it must
surely tumble head-long, but did not. And when I saw that, I felt
definitely, for the first time, that shoreless despair which I alone of
men have felt, high beyond the stars, and deep as hell; and I fell to
staring again that blank stare of Nirvana and the lunacy of Nothingness,
wherein Time merges in Eternity, and all being, like one drop of water,
flies scattered to fill the bottomless void of space, and is lost.

The _Boreal's_ bow walking over a little empty fishing-boat roused me,
and a minute later, just before I came to a new promontory and bend, I
saw two people. The shore there is some three feet above the water, and
edged with boulders of rock, about which grows a fringe of shrubs and
small trees: behind this fringe is a path, curving upward through a
sombre wooded little gorge; and on the path, near the water, I saw a
driver of one of those Norwegian sulkies that were called karjolers: he,
on the high front seat, was dead, lying sideways and backwards, with low
head resting on the wheel; and on a trunk strapped to a frame on the
axle behind was a boy, his head, too, resting sideways on the wheel,
near the other's; and the little pony was dead, pitched forward on its
head and fore-knees, tilting the shafts downward; and some distance from
them on the water floated an empty skiff.

       *       *       *       *       *

When I turned the next fore-land, I all at once began to see a number of
craft, which increased as I advanced, most of them small boats, with
some schooners, sloops, and larger craft, the majority a-ground: and
suddenly now I was conscious that, mingling with that delicious odour of
spring-blossoms--profoundly modifying, yet not destroying it--was
another odour, wafted to me on the wings of the very faint land-breeze:
and 'Man,' I said, 'is decomposing': for I knew it well: it was the
odour of human corruption.

       *       *       *       *       *

The fjord opened finally in a somewhat wider basin, shut-in by quite
steep, high-towering mountains, which reflected themselves in the water
to their last cloudy crag: and, at the end of this I saw ships, a quay,
and a modest, homely old town.

Not a sound, not one: only the languidly-working engines of the
_Boreal_. Here, it was clear, the Angel of Silence had passed, and his
scythe mown.

I ran and stopped the engines, and, without anchoring, got down into an
empty boat that lay at the ship's side when she stopped; and I paddled
twenty yards toward the little quay. There was a brigantine with all her
courses set, three jibs, stay-sails, square-sails, main and fore-sails,
and gaff-top-sail, looking hanging and listless in that calm place, and
wedded to a still copy of herself, mast-downward, in the water; there
were three lumber-schooners, a forty-ton steam-boat, a tiny barque, five
Norway herring-fishers, and ten or twelve shallops: and the
sailing-craft had all fore-and-aft sails set, and about each, as I
passed among them, brooded an odour that was both sweet and abhorrent,
an odour more suggestive of the very genius of mortality--the inner mind
and meaning of Azrael--than aught that I could have conceived: for all,
as I soon saw, were crowded with dead.

Well, I went up the old mossed steps, in that strange dazed state in
which one notices frivolous things: I remember, for instance, feeling
the lightness of my new clothes: for the weather was quite mild, and the
day before I had changed to Summer things, having on now only a common
undyed woollen shirt, the sleeves rolled up, and cord trousers, with a
belt, and a cloth cap over my long hair, and an old pair of yellow
shoes, without laces, and without socks. And I stood on the unhewn
stones of the edge of the quay, and looked abroad over a largish piece
of unpaved ground, which lay between the first house-row and the quay.

What I saw was not only most woeful, but wildly startling: woeful,
because a great crowd of people had assembled, and lay dead, there; and
wildly startling, because something in their _tout ensemble_ told me in
one minute why they were there in such number.

They were there in the hope, and with the thought, to fly westward by
boat.

And the something which told me this was a certain _foreign_ air about
that field of the dead as the eye rested on it, something un-northern,
southern, and Oriental.

Two yards from my feet, as I stepped to the top, lay a group of three:
one a Norway peasant-girl in skirt of olive-green, scarlet stomacher,
embroidered bodice, Scotch bonnet trimmed with silver lace, and big
silver shoe-buckles; the second was an old Norway man in knee-breeches,
and eighteenth-century small-clothes, and red worsted cap; and the third
was, I decided, an old Jew of the Polish Pale, in gaberdine and
skull-cap, with ear-locks.

I went nearer to where they lay thick as reaped stubble between the
quay and a little stone fountain in the middle of the space, and I saw
among those northern dead two dark-skinned women in costly dress, either
Spanish or Italian, and the yellower mortality of a Mongolian, probably
a Magyar, and a big negro in zouave dress, and some twenty-five obvious
French, and two Morocco fezes, and the green turban of a shereef, and
the white of an Ulema.

And I asked myself this question: 'How came these foreign stragglers
here in this obscure northern town?'

And my wild heart answered: 'There has been an impassioned stampede,
northward and westward, of all the tribes of Man. And this that I, Adam
Jeffson, here see is but the far-tossed spray of that monstrous,
infuriate flood.'

       *       *       *       *       *

Well, I passed up a street before me, careful, careful where I trod. It
was not utterly silent, nor was the quay-square, but haunted by a pretty
dense cloud of mosquitoes, and dreamy twinges of music, like the drawing
of the violin-bow in elf-land. The street was narrow, pavered, steep,
and dark; and the sensations with which I, poor bent man, passed
through that dead town, only Atlas, fabled to bear the burden of this
Earth, could divine.

       *       *       *       *       *

I thought to myself: If now a wave from the Deep has washed over this
planetary ship of earth, and I, who alone happened to be in the extreme
bows, am the sole survivor of that crew?... What then, my God, shall I
do?

       *       *       *       *       *

I felt, I felt, that in this townlet, save the water-gnats of Norway,
was no living thing; that the hum and the savour of Eternity filled, and
wrapped, and embalmed it.

The houses are mostly of wood, some of them fairly large, with a
_porte-cochère_ leading into a semi-circular yard, around which the
building stands, very steep-roofed, and shingled, in view of the heavy
snow-masses of winter. Glancing into one open casement near the ground,
I saw an aged woman, stout and capped, lie on her face before a very
large porcelain stove; but I paced on without stoppage, traversed
several streets, and came out, as it became dark, upon a piece of
grass-land leading downward to a mountain-gorge. It was some distance
along this gorge that I found myself sitting the next morning: and how,
and in what trance, I passed that whole blank night is obliterated from
my consciousness. When I looked about with the return of light I saw
majestic fir-grown mountains on either hand, almost meeting overhead at
some points, deeply shading the mossy gorge. I rose, and careless of
direction, went still onward, and walked and walked for hours,
unconscious of hunger; there was a profusion of wild
mountain-strawberries, very tiny, which must grow almost into winter, a
few of which I ate; there were blue gentianellas, and
lilies-of-the-valley, and luxuriance of verdure, and a noise of waters.
Occasionally, I saw little cataracts on high, fluttering like white wild
rags, for they broke in the mid-fall, and were caught away, and
scattered; patches also of reaped hay and barley, hung up, in a singular
way, on stakes six feet high, I suppose to dry; there were perched huts,
and a seemingly inaccessible small castle or burg, but none of these did
I enter: and five bodies only I saw in the gorge, a woman with a babe,
and a man with two small oxen.

About three in the afternoon I was startled to find myself there, and
turned back. It was dark when I again passed through those gloomy
streets of Aadheim, making for the quay, and now I felt both my hunger
and a dropping weariness. I had no thought of entering any house, but
as I passed by one open _porte-cochère_, something, I know not what,
made me turn sharply in, for my mind had become as fluff on the winds,
not working of its own action, but the sport of impulses that seemed
external. I went across the yard, and ascended a wooden spiral stair by
a twilight which just enabled me to pick my way among five or six vague
forms fallen there. In that confined place fantastic qualms beset me; I
mounted to the first landing, and tried the door, but it was locked; I
mounted to the second: the door was open, and with a chill reluctance I
took a step inward where all was pitch darkness, the window-stores being
drawn. I hesitated: it was very dark. I tried to utter that word of
mine, but it came in a whisper inaudible to my ears: I tried again, and
this time heard myself say: '_anyone_?' At the same time I had made
another step forward, and trodden upon a soft abdomen; and at that
contact terrors the most cold and ghastly thrilled me through and
through, for it was as though I saw in that darkness the sudden eyeballs
of Hell and frenzy glare upon me, and with a low gurgle of affright I
was gone, helter-skelter down the stairs, treading upon flesh, across
the yard, and down the street, with pelting feet, and open arms, and
sobbing bosom, for I thought that all Aadheim was after me; nor was my
horrid haste appeased till I was on board the _Boreal_, and moving down
the fjord.

Out to sea, then, I went again; and within the next few days I visited
Bergen, and put in at Stavanger. And I saw that Bergen and Stavanger
were dead.

It was then, on the 19th August, that I turned my bow toward my native
land.

      *       *       *       *       *

From Stavanger I steered a straight course for the Humber.

I had no sooner left behind me the Norway coast than I began to meet the
ships, the ships--ship after ship; and by the time I entered the zone
of the ordinary alternation of sunny day and sunless night, I was moving
through the midst of an incredible number of craft, a mighty and
wide-spread fleet.

Over all that great expanse of the North Sea, where, in its most
populous days of trade, the sailor might perhaps sight a sail or two, I
had now at every moment at least ten or twelve within scope of the
glass, oftentimes as many as forty, forty-five.

And very still they lay on a still sea, itself a dead thing, livid as
the lips of death; and there was an intensity in the calm that was
appalling: for the ocean seemed weighted, and the air drugged.

Extremely slow was my advance, for at first I would not leave any ship,
however remotely small, without approaching sufficiently to investigate
her, at least with the spy-glass: and a strange multitudinous mixture of
species they were, trawlers in hosts, war-ships of every nation, used,
it seemed, as passenger-boats, smacks, feluccas, liners, steam-barges,
great four-masters with sails, Channel boats, luggers, a Venetian
_burchiello_, colliers, yachts, _remorqueurs_, training ships, dredgers,
two _dahabeeahs_ with curving gaffs, Marseilles fishers, a Maltese
_speronare_, American off-shore sail, Mississippi steam-boats, Sorrento
lug-schooners, Rhine punts, yawls, old frigates and three-deckers,
called to novel use, Stromboli caiques, Yarmouth tubs, xebecs, Rotterdam
flat-bottoms, floats, mere gunwaled rafts--anything from anywhere that
could bear a human freight on water had come, and was here: and all, I
knew, had been making westward, or northward, or both; and all, I knew,
were crowded; and all were tombs, listlessly wandering, my God, on the
wandering sea with their dead.

And so fair was the world about them, too: the brightest suavest autumn
weather; all the still air aromatic with that vernal perfume of peach:
yet not so utterly still, but if I passed close to the lee of any
floating thing, the spicy stirrings of morning or evening wafted me
faint puffs of the odour of mortality over-ripe for the grave.

So abominable and accursed did this become to me, such a plague and a
hissing, vague as was the offence, that I began to shun rather than seek
the ships, and also I now dropped my twelve, whom I had kept to be my
companions all the way from the Far North, one by one, into the sea: for
now I had definitely passed into a zone of settled warmth.

I was convinced, however, that the poison, whatever it might be, had
some embalming, or antiseptic, effect upon the bodies: at Aadheim,
Bergen and Stavanger, for instance, where the temperature permitted me
to go without a jacket, only the merest hints and whiffs of the
processes of dissolution had troubled me.

       *       *       *       *       *

Very benign, I say, and pleasant to see, was sky and sea during all that
voyage: but it was at sun-set that my sense of the wondrously beautiful
was roused and excited, in spite of that great burden which I carried.
Certainly, I never saw sun-sets resembling those, nor could have
conceived of aught so flamboyant, extravagant, and bewitched: for the
whole heaven seemed turned into an arena for warring Hierarchies,
warring for the universe, or it was like the wild countenance of God
defeated, and flying marred and bloody from His enemies. But many
evenings I watched with unintelligent awe, believing it but a portent of
the un-sheathed sword of the Almighty; till, one morning, a thought
pricked me like a sword, for I suddenly remembered the great sun-sets of
the later nineteenth century, witnessed in Europe, America, and, I
believe, over the world, after the eruption of the volcano of Krakatoa.

And whereas I had before said to myself: 'If now a wave from the Deep
has washed over this planetary ship of earth...,' I said now: 'A
wave--but not from the Deep: a wave rather which she had reserved, and
has spouted, from her own un-motherly entrails...'

       *       *       *       *       *

I had some knowledge of Morse telegraphy, and of the manipulation of
tape-machines, telegraphic typing-machines, and the ordinary wireless
transmitter and coherer, as of most little things of that sort which
came within the outskirts of the interest of a man of science; I had
collaborated with Professor Stanistreet in the production of a text-book
called 'Applications of Science to the Arts,' which had brought us some
notoriety; and, on the whole, the _minutiae_ of modern things were
still pretty fresh in my memory. I could therefore have wired from
Bergen or Stavanger, supposing the batteries not run down, to somewhere:
but I would not: I was so afraid; afraid lest for ever from nowhere
should come one answering click, or flash, or stirring....

       *       *       *       *       *

I could have made short work, and landed at Hull: but I would not: I was
so afraid. For I was used to the silence of the ice: and I was used to
the silence of the sea: but I was afraid of the silence of England.

       *       *       *       *       *

I came in sight of the coast on the morning of the 26th August,
somewhere about Hornsea, but did not see any town, for I put the helm to
port, and went on further south, no longer bothering with the
instruments, but coasting at hap-hazard, now in sight of land, and now
in the centre of a circle of sea; not admitting to myself the motive of
this loitering slowness, nor thinking at all, but ignoring the
deep-buried fear of the to-morrow which I shirked, and instinctively
hiding myself in to-day. I passed the Wash, I passed Yarmouth,
Felixstowe. By now the things that floated motionless on the sea were
beyond numbering, for I could hardly lower my eyes ten minutes and lift
them, without seeing yet another there: so that soon after dusk I, too,
had to lie still among them all, till morning: for they lay dark, and to
move at any pace would have been to drown the already dead.

Well, I came to the Thames-mouth, and lay pretty well in among the Flats
and Pan Sands towards eight one evening, not seven miles from Sheppey
and the North Kent coast: and I did not see any Nore Light, nor Girdler
Light: and all along the coast I had seen no light: but as to that I
said not one word to myself, not admitting it, nor letting my heart know
what my brain thought, nor my brain know what my heart surmised; but
with a daft and mock-mistrustful under-look I would regard the darkling
land, holding it a sentient thing that would be playing a prank upon a
poor man like me.

And the next morning, when I moved again, my furtive eye-corners were
very well aware of the Prince's Channel light-ship, and also the Tongue
ship, for there they were: but I would not look at them at all, nor go
near them: for I did not wish to have anything to do with whatever might
have happened beyond my own ken, and it was better to look straight
before, seeing nothing, and concerning one's-self with one's-self.

The next evening, after having gone out to sea again, I was in a little
to the E. by S. of the North Foreland: and I saw no light there, nor any
Sandhead light; but over the sea vast signs of wreckage, and the coasts
were strewn with old wrecked fleets. I turned about S.E., very slowly
moving--for anywhere hereabouts hundreds upon hundreds of craft lay dead
within a ten-mile circle of sea--and by two in the fore-day had wandered
up well in sight of the French cliffs: for I had said: 'I will go and
see the light-beam of the great revolving-drum on Calais pier that
nightly beams half-way over-sea to England.' And the moon shone clear in
the southern heaven that morning, like a great old dying queen whose
Court swarms distantly from around her, diffident, pale, and tremulous,
the paler the nearer; and I could see the mountain-shadows on her spotty
full-face, and her misty aureole, and her lights on the sea, as it were
kisses stolen in the kingdom of sleep; and all among the quiet ships
mysterious white trails and powderings of light, like palace-corridors
in some fairy-land forlorn, full of breathless wan whispers, scandals,
and runnings-to-and-fro, with leers, and agitated last embraces, and
flight of the princess, and death-bed of the king; and on the N.E.
horizon a bank of brown cloud that seemed to have no relation with the
world; and yonder, not far, the white coast-cliffs, not so low as at
Calais near, but arranged in masses separated by vales of sward, each
with its wreck: but no light of any revolving-drum I saw.

       *       *       *       *       *

I could not sleep that night: for all the operations of my mind and body
seemed in abeyance. Mechanically I turned the ship westward again; and
when the sun came up, there, hardly two miles from me, were the cliffs
of Dover; and on the crenulated summit of the Castle I spied the Union
Jack hang motionless.

I heard eight, nine o'clock strike in the cabin, and I was still at sea.
But some mad, audacious whisper was at my brain: and at 10.30, the 2nd
September, immediately opposite the Cross Wall Custom House, the
_Boreal's_ anchor-chain, after a voyage of three years, two months, and
fourteen days, ran thundering, thundering, through the starboard
hawse-hole.

Ah heaven! but I must have been stark mad to let the anchor go! for the
effect upon me of that shocking obstreperous hubbub, breaking in upon
all that cemetery repose that blessed morning, and lasting it seemed a
year, was most appalling; and at the sudden racket I stood excruciated,
with shivering knees and flinching heart, God knows: for not less
terrifically uproarious than the clatter of the last Trump it raged and
raged, and I thought that all the billion dead could not fail to start,
and rise, at alarum so excessive, and question me with their eyes....

       *       *       *       *       *

On the top of the Cross Wall near I saw a grey crab fearlessly crawl; at
the end where the street begins, I saw a single gas-light palely burn
that broad day, and at its foot a black man lay on his face, clad only
in a shirt and one boot; the harbour was almost packed with every sort
of craft, and on a Calais-Dover boat, eight yards from my stern, which
must have left Calais crowded to suffocation, I saw the rotted dead lie
heaped, she being unmoored, and continually grinding against an anchored
green brig.

And when I saw that, I dropped down upon my knees at the capstan, and my
poor heart sobbed out the frail cry: 'Well, Lord God, Thou hast
destroyed the work of Thy hand...'

       *       *       *       *       *

After a time I got up, went below in a state of somnambulism, took a
packet of pemmican cakes, leapt to land, and went following the railway
that runs from the Admiralty Pier. In an enclosed passage ten yards
long, with railway masonry on one side, I saw five dead lie, and could
not believe that I was in England, for all were dark-skinned people,
three gaudily dressed, and two in flowing white robes. It was the same
when I turned into a long street, leading northward, for here were a
hundred, or more, and never saw I, except in Constantinople, where I
once lived eighteen months, so variegated a mixture of races, black,
brunette, brown, yellow, white, in all the shades, some emaciated like
people dead from hunger, and, overlooking them all, one English boy with
a clean Eton collar sitting on a bicycle, supported by a lamp-post which
his arms clasped, he proving clearly the extraordinary suddenness of the
death which had overtaken them all.

I did not know whither, nor why, I went, nor had I the least idea
whether all this was visually seen by me in the world which I had known,
or in some other, or was all phantasy of my disembodied spirit--for I
had the thought that I, too, might be dead since old ages, and my spirit
wandering now through the universe of space, in which there is neither
north nor south, nor up nor down, nor measure nor relation, nor aught
whatever, save an uneasy consciousness of a dream about bottomlessness.
Of grief or pain, I think, I felt nothing; though I have a sort of
memory now that some sound, resembling a sob or groan, though it was
neither, came at regular clockwork intervals from my bosom during three
or four days. Meantime, my brain registered like a tape-machine details
the most frivolous, the most ludicrous--the name of a street, Strond
Street, Snargate Street; the round fur cap--black fur for the side,
white ermine for the top--of a portly Karaite priest on his back, whose
robes had been blown to his spread knees, as if lifted and neatly folded
there; a violin-bow gripped between the thick, irregular teeth of a
little Spaniard with brushed-back hair and mad-looking eyes; odd shoes
on the foot of a French girl, one black, one brown. They lay in the
street about as numerous as gunners who fall round their carriage, at
intervals of five to ten feet, the majority--as was the case also in
Norway, and on the ships--in poses of distraction, with spread arms, or
wildly distorted limbs, like men who, the instant before death, called
upon the rocks and hills to cover them.

       *       *       *       *       *

On the left I came to an opening in the land, called, I believe, 'The
Shaft,' and into this I turned, climbing a very great number of steps,
almost covered at one point with dead: the steps I began to count, but
left off, then the dead, and left off. Finally, at the top, which must
be even higher than the Castle, I came to a great open space laid out
with gravel-walks, and saw fortifications, barracks, a citadel. I did
not know the town, except by passings-through, and was surprised at the
breadth of view. Between me and the Castle to the east lay the district
of crowding houses, brick and ragstone, mixed in the distance with vague
azure haze; and to the right the harbour, the sea, with their ships; and
visible around me on the heights seven or eight dead, biting the dust;
the sun now high and warm, with hardly a cloud in the sky; and yonder a
mist, which was the coast of France.

It seemed too big for one poor man.

My head nodded. I sat on a bench, black-painted and hard, the seat and
back of horizontal boards, with intervals; and as I looked, I nodded,
heavy-headed and weary: for it was too big for me. And as I nodded, with
forehead propped on my left hand, and the packet of pemmican cakes in my
right, there was in my head, somehow, an old street-song of my
childhood: and I groaned it sleepily, like coronachs and drear funereal
nenias, dirging; and the packet beat time in my right hand, falling and
raising, falling heavily and rising, in time.

    I'll buy the ring,
    You'll rear the kids:
    Servants to wait on our ting, ting, ting.
    .   .   .   .   .
    .   .   .   .   .
    Ting, ting,
    Won't we be happy?
    Ting, ting,
    That shall be it:
    I'll buy the ring,
    You'll rear the kids:
    Servants to wait on our ting, ting, ting.
    .   .   .   .   .
    .   .   .   .   .

So maundering, I fell forward upon my face, and for twenty-three hours,
the living undistinguished from the dead, I slept there.

       *       *       *       *       *

I was awakened by drizzle, leapt up, looked at a silver chronometer
which, attached by a leather to my belt, I carried in my
breeches-pocket, and saw that it was 10 A.M. The sky was dark, and a
moaning wind--almost a new thing now to me--had arisen.

I ate some pemmican, for I had a reluctance--needless as it turned
out--to touch any of the thousand luxuries here, sufficient no doubt,
in a town like Dover alone, to last me five or six hundred years, if I
could live so long; and, having eaten, I descended The Shaft, and spent
the whole day, though it rained and blustered continually, in wandering
about. Reasoning, in my numb way, from the number of ships on the sea, I
expected to find the town over-crowded with dead: but this was not so;
and I should say, at a venture, that not a thousand English, nor fifteen
thousand foreigners, were in it: for that westward rage and stampede
must have operated here also, leaving the town empty but for the ever
new-coming hosts.

The first thing which I did was to go into an open grocer's shop, which
was also a post and telegraph office, with the notion, I suppose, to get
a message through to London. In the shop a single gas-light was burning
its last, and this, with that near the pier, were the only two that I
saw: and ghastly enough they looked, transparently wannish, and as it
were ashamed, like blinking night-things overtaken by the glare of day.
I conjectured that they had so burned and watched during months, or
years: for they were now blazing diminished, with streaks and rays in
the flame, as if by effort, and if these were the only two, they must
have needed time to all-but exhaust the works. Before the counter lay a
fashionably-dressed negro with a number of tied parcels scattered about
him, and on the counter an empty till, and behind it a tall thin woman
with her face resting sideways in the till, fingers clutching the outer
counter-rim, and such an expression of frantic terror as I never saw. I
got over the counter to a table behind a wire-gauze, and, like a numb
fool, went over the Morse alphabet in my mind before touching the
transmitting key, though I knew no code-words, and there, big enough to
be seen, was the ABC dial, and who was to answer my message I did not
ask myself: for habit was still strong upon me, and my mind refused to
reason from what I saw to what I did not see; but the moment I touched
the key, and peered greedily at the galvanometer-needle at my right, I
saw that it did not move, for no current was passing; and with a kind of
fright, I was up, leapt, and got away from the place, though there was a
great number of telegrams about the receiver which, if I had been in my
senses, I would have stopped and read.

Turning the corner of the next street, I saw wide-open the door of a
substantial large house, and went in. From bottom to top there was no
one there, except one English girl, sitting back in an easy-chair in the
drawing-room, which was richly furnished with Valenciennes curtains and
azure-satin things. She was a girl of the lowest class, hardly clad in
black rags, and there she lay with hanging jaw, in a very crooked and
awkward pose, a jemmy at her feet, in her left hand a roll of
bank-notes, and in her lap three watches. In fact, the bodies which I
saw here were, in general, either those of new-come foreigners, or else
of the very poor, the very old, or the very young.

But what made me remember this house was that I found here on one of the
sofas a newspaper: _The Kent Express_; and sitting unconscious of my
dead neighbour, I pored a long while over what was written there.

It said in a passage which I tore out and kept:

'Telegraphic communication with Tilsit, Insterburg, Warsaw, Cracow,
Przemysl, Gross Wardein, Karlsburg, and many smaller towns lying
immediately eastward of the 21st parallel of longitude has ceased during
the night. In some at least of them there must have been operators still
at their duty, undrawn into the great westward-rushing torrent: but as
all messages from Western Europe have been answered only by that dread
mysterious silence which, just three months and two days since,
astounded the world in the case of Eastern New Zealand, we can only
assume that these towns, too, have been added to the long and mournful
list; indeed, after last evening's Paris telegrams we might have
prophesied with some certainty, not merely their overthrow, but even the
hour of it: for the rate-uniformity of the slow-riding vapour which is
touring our globe is no longer doubtful, and has even been definitely
fixed by Professor Craven at 100-1/2 miles per day, or 4 miles 330 yards
per hour. Its nature, its origin, remains, of course, nothing but matter
of conjecture: for it leaves no living thing behind it: nor, God knows,
is that of any moment now to us who remain. The rumour that it is
associated with an odour of almonds is declared, on high authority, to
be improbable; but the morose purple of its impending gloom has been
attested by tardy fugitives from the face of its rolling and smoky
march.

'Is this the end? We do not, and cannot, believe it. Will the pure sky
which we to-day see above us be invaded in nine days, or less, by this
smoke of the Pit of Darkness? In spite of the assurances of the
scientists, we still doubt. For, if so, to what purpose that long drama
of History, in which we seem to see the Hand of the Dramaturgist?
Surely, the end of a Fifth Act should be obvious, satisfying to one's
sense of the complete: but History, so far, long as it has been,
resembles rather a Prologue than a Fifth Act. Can it be that the
Manager, utterly dissatisfied, would sweep all off, and 'hang up' the
piece for ever? Certainly, the sins of mankind have been as scarlet: and
if the fair earth which he has turned into Hell, send forth now upon him
the smoke of Hell, little the wonder. But we cannot yet believe. There
is a sparing strain in nature, and through the world, as a thread, is
spun a silence which smiles, and on the end of events we find placarded
large the words: "Why were ye afraid?" A dignified Hope, therefore--even
now, when we cower beneath this worldwide shadow of the wings of the
Condor of Death--becomes us: and, indeed, we see such an attitude among
some of the humblest of our people, from whose heart ascends the cry:
"Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him." Here, therefore, O Lord! O
Lord, look down, and save!

'But even as we thus write of hope, Reason, if we would hear her,
whispers us "fool": and inclement is the sky of earth. No more ships can
New York Harbour contain, and whereas among us men die weekly of
privations by the hundred thousand, yonder across the sea they perish by
the million: for where the rich are pinched, how can the poor live?
Already 700 out of the 1000 millions of our race have perished, and the
empires of civilisation have crumbled like sand-castles in a horror of
anarchy. Thousands upon thousands of unburied dead, anticipating the
more deliberate doom that comes and smokes, and rides and comes and
comes, and does not fail, encumber the streets of London, Manchester,
Liverpool. The guides of the nation have fled; the father stabs his
child, and the wife her husband, for a morsel of food; the fields lie
waste; wanton crowds carouse in our churches, universities, palaces,
banks and hospitals; we understand that late last night three
territorial regiments, the Munster Fusiliers, and the Lotian and East
Lancashire Regiments, riotously disbanded themselves, shooting two
officers; infectious diseases, as we all know, have spread beyond limit;
in several towns the police seem to have disappeared, and, in nearly
all, every vestige of decency; the results following upon the sudden
release of the convicts appear to be monstrous in the respective
districts; and within three short months Hell seems to have acquired
this entire planet, sending forth Horror, like a rabid wolf, and
Despair, like a disastrous sky, to devour and confound her. Hear,
therefore, O Lord, and forgive our iniquities! O Lord, we beseech Thee!
Look down, O Lord, and spare!'

     *       *       *       *       *

When I had read this, and the rest of the paper, which had one whole
sheet-side blank, I sat a long hour there, eyeing a little patch of the
purple ash on a waxed board near the corner where the girl sat with her
time-pieces, so useless in her Eternity; and there was not a feeling in
me, except a pricking of curiosity, which afterwards became morbid and
ravenous, to know something more of that cloud, or smoke, of which this
man spoke, of its dates, its origin, its nature, its minute details.
Afterwards, I went down, and entered several houses, searching for more
papers, but did not find any; then I found a paper-shop which was open,
with boards outside, but either it had been deserted, or printing must
have stopped about the date of the paper which I had read, for the only
three news-papers there were dated long prior, and I did not read them.

Now it was raining, and a blustering autumn day it was, distributing the
odours of the world, and bringing me continual mixed whiffs of flowers
and the hateful stench of decay. But I would not mind it much.

I wandered and wandered, till I was tired of spahi and bashi-bazouk, of
Greek and Catalan, of Russian 'pope' and Coptic abuna, of dragoman and
Calmuck, of Egyptian maulawi and Afghan mullah, Neapolitan and sheik,
and the nightmare of wild poses, colours, stuffs and garbs, the
yellow-green kefie of the Bedouin, shawl-turbans of Baghdad, the
voluminous rose-silk tob of women, and face-veils, and stark distorted
nakedness, and sashes of figured muslin, and the workman's cords, and
the red tarboosh. About four, for very weariness, I was sitting on a
door-steep, bent beneath the rain; but soon was up again, fascinated no
doubt by this changing bazaar of sameness, its chance combinations and
permutations, and novelty in monotony. About five I was at a station,
marked Harbour Station, in and about which lay a considerable crowd, but
not one train. I sat again, and rested, rose and roamed again; soon
after six I found myself at another station, called 'Priory'; and here I
saw two long trains, both crowded, one on a siding, and one at the
up-platform.

I examined both engines, and found them of the old boiler steam-type
with manholes, heaters, autoclaves, feed-pump, &c., now rare in western
countries, except England. In one there was no water, but in that at the
platform, the float-lever, barely tilted toward the float, showed that
there was some in the boiler. Of this one I overhauled all the
machinery, and found it good, though rusted. There was plenty of fuel,
and oil, which I supplemented from a near shop: and during ninety
minutes my brain and hands worked with an intelligence as it were
automatic, of their own motion. After three journeys across the station
and street, I saw the fire blaze well, and the manometer move; when the
lever of the safety-valve, whose load I lightened by half an atmosphere,
lifted, I jumped down, and tried to disconnect the long string of
carriages from the engine: but failed, the coupling being an automatic
arrangement new to me; nor did I care. It was now very dark; but there
was still oil for bull's-eye and lantern, and I lit them. I forgot
nothing. I rolled driver and stoker--the guard was absent--one to the
platform, one upon the rails: and I took their place there. At about
8.30 I ran out from Dover, my throttle-valve pealing high a long
falsetto through the bleak and desolate night.

       *       *       *       *       *

My aim was London. But even as I set out, my heart smote me: I knew
nothing of the metals, their junctions, facing-points, sidings,
shuntings, and complexities. Even as to whether I was going toward, or
away from, London, I was not sure. But just in proportion as my first
timorousness of the engine hardened into familiarity and self-sureness,
I quickened speed, wilfully, with an obstinacy deaf and blind.

Finally, from a mere crawl at first, I was flying at a shocking
velocity, while something, tongue in cheek, seemed to whisper me: 'There
must be other trains blocking the lines, at stations, in yards, and
everywhere--it is a maniac's ride, a ride of death, and Flying
Dutchman's frenzy: remember your dark five-deep brigade of passengers,
who rock and bump together, and will suffer in a collision.' But with
mulish stubbornness I thought: 'They wished to go to London'; and on I
raged, not wildly exhilarated, so far as I can remember, nor lunatic,
but feeling the dull glow of a wicked and morose Unreason urge in my
bosom, while I stoked all blackened at the fire, or saw the vague mass
of dead horse or cow, running trees and fields, and dark homestead and
deep-slumbering farm, flit ghostly athwart the murky air, as the
half-blind saw 'men like trees walking.'

Long, however, it did not last: I could not have been twenty miles from
Dover when, on a long reach of straight lines, I made out before me a
tarpaulined mass opposite a signal-point: and at once callousness
changed to terror within me. But even as I plied the brake, I felt that
it was too late: I rushed to the gangway to make a wild leap down an
embankment to the right, but was thrown backward by a quick series of
rough bumps, caused by eight or ten cattle which lay there across the
lines: and when I picked myself up, and leapt, some seconds before the
impact, the speed must have considerably slackened, for I received no
fracture, but lay in semi-coma in a patch of yellow-flowered whin on
level ground, and was even conscious of a fire on the lines forty yards
away, and, all the night, of vague thunder sounding from somewhere.

       *       *       *       *       *

About five, or half-past, in the morning I was sitting up, rubbing my
eyes, in a dim light mixed with drizzle. I could see that the train of
my last night's debauch was a huddled-up chaos of fallen carriages and
disfigured bodies. A five-barred gate on my left opened into a hedge,
and swung with creaks: two yards from my feet lay a little shaggy pony
with swollen wan abdomen, the very picture of death, and also about me a
number of dead wet birds.

I picked myself up, passed through the gate, and walked up a row of
trees to a house at their end. I found it to be a little country-tavern
with a barn, forming one house, the barn part much larger than the
tavern part. I went into the tavern by a small side-door--behind the
bar--into a parlour--up a little stair--into two rooms: but no one was
there. I then went round into the barn, which was paved with
cobble-stones, and there lay a dead mare and foal, some fowls, with two
cows. A ladder-stair led to a closed trap-door in the floor above. I
went up, and in the middle of a wilderness of hay saw nine
people--labourers, no doubt--five men and four women, huddled together,
and with them a tin-pail containing the last of some spirit; so that
these had died merry.

I slept three hours among them, and afterwards went back to the tavern,
and had some biscuits of which I opened a new tin, with some ham, jam
and apples, of which I made a good meal, for my pemmican was gone.

Afterwards I went following the rail-track on foot, for the engines of
both the collided trains were smashed. I knew northward from southward
by the position of the sun: and after a good many stoppages at houses,
and by railway-banks, I came, at about eleven in the night, to a great
and populous town.

By the Dane John and the Cathedral, I immediately recognised it as
Canterbury, which I knew quite well. And I walked up Castle Street to
the High Street, conscious for the first time of that
regularly-repeated sound, like a sob or groan, which was proceeding from
my throat. As there was no visible moon, and these old streets very dim,
I had to pick my way, lest I should desecrate the dead with my foot, and
they all should rise with hue and cry to hunt me. However, the bodies
here were not numerous, most, as before, being foreigners: and these,
scattered about this strict old English burg that mourning dark night,
presented such a scene of the baneful wrath of God, and all abomination
of desolation, as broke me quite down at one place, where I stood in
travail with jeremiads and sore sobbings and lamentations, crying out
upon it all, God knows.

Only when I stood at the west entrance of the Cathedral I could discern,
spreading up the dark nave, to the lantern, to the choir, a
phantasmagorical mass of forms: I went a little inward, and striking
three matches, peered nearer: the two transepts, too, seemed
crowded--the cloister-doorway was blocked--the southwest porch thronged,
so that a great congregation must have flocked hither shortly before
their fate overtook them.

Here it was that I became definitely certain that the after-odour of the
poison was not simply lingering in the air, but was being more or less
given off by the bodies: for the blossomy odour of this church actually
overcame that other odour, the whole rather giving the scent of old
mouldy linens long embalmed in cedars.

Well, away with stealthy trot I ran from the abysmal silence of that
place, and in Palace Street near made one of those sudden immoderate
rackets that seemed to outrage the universe, and left me so woefully
faint, decrepit, and gasping for life (the noise of the train was
different, for there I was flying, but here a captive, and which way I
ran was capture). Passing in Palace Street, I saw a little lampshop, and
wanting a lantern, tried to get in, but the door was locked; so, after
going a few steps, and kicking against a policeman's truncheon, I
returned to break the window-glass. I knew that it would make a fearful
noise, and for some fifteen or twenty minutes stood hesitating: but
never could I have dreamed, my good God, of _such_ a noise, so
passionate, so dominant, so divulgent, and, O Heaven, so long-lasting:
for I seemed to have struck upon the weak spot of some planet, which
came suddenly tumbling, with protracted bellowing and _débâcle_, about
my ears. It was a good hour before I would climb in; but then quickly
found what I wanted, and some big oil-cans; and till one or two in the
morning, the innovating flicker of my lantern went peering at random
into the gloomy nooks of the town.

Under a deep old Gothic arch that spanned a pavered alley, I saw the
little window of a little house of rubble, and between the two
diamond-paned sashes rags tightly beaten in, the idea evidently being to
make the place air-tight against the poison. When I went in I found the
door of that room open, though it, too, apparently, had been stuffed at
the edges; and on the threshold an old man and woman lay low. I
conjectured that, thus protected, they had remained shut in, till either
hunger, or the lack of oxygen in the used-up air, drove them forth,
whereupon the poison, still active, must have instantly ended them. I
found afterwards that this expedient of making air-tight had been widely
resorted to; and it might well have proved successful, if both the
supply of inclosed air, and of food, had been anywhere commensurate with
the durability of the poisonous state.

Weary, weary as I grew, some morbid persistence sustained me, and I
would not rest. About four in the morning I was at a station again,
industriously bending, poor wretch, at the sooty task of getting another
engine ready for travel. This time, when steam was up, I succeeded in
uncoupling the carriages from the engine, and by the time morning
broke, I was lightly gliding away over the country, whither I did not
know, but making for London.

       *       *       *       *       *

Now I went with more intelligence and caution, and got on very well,
travelling seven days, never at night, except it was very clear, never
at more than twenty or twenty-five miles, and crawling through tunnels.
I do not know the maze into which the train took me, for very soon after
leaving Canterbury it must have gone down some branch-line, and though
the names were marked at stations, that hardly helped me, for of their
situation relatively to London I was seldom sure. Moreover, again and
again was my progress impeded by trains on the metals, when I would have
to run back to a shunting-point or a siding, and, in two instances,
these being far behind, changed from my own to the impeding engine. On
the first day I travelled unhindered till noon, when I stopped in open
country that seemed uninhabited for ages, only that half a mile to the
left, on a shaded sward, was a large stone house of artistic design,
coated with tinted harling, the roof of red Ruabon tiles, and timbered
gables. I walked to it after another row with putting out the fire and
arranging for a new one, the day being bright and mild, with great
masses of white cloud in the sky. The house had an outer and an inner
hall, three reception rooms, fine oil-paintings, a kind of museum, and a
large kitchen. In a bed-room above-stairs I found three women with
servants' caps, and a footman, arranged in a strange symmetrical way,
head to head, like rays of a star. As I stood looking at them, I could
have sworn, my good God, that I heard someone coming up the stairs. But
it was some slight creaking of the breeze in the house, augmented a
hundredfold to my inflamed and fevered hearing: for, used for years now
to this silence of Eternity, it is as though I hear all sounds through
an ear-trumpet. I went down, and after eating, and drinking some
clary-water, made of brandy, sugar, cinnamon, and rose water, which I
found in plenty, I lay down on a sofa in the inner hall, and slept a
quiet sleep until near midnight.

I went out then, still possessed with the foolish greed to reach London,
and after getting the engine to rights, went off under a clear black sky
thronged with worlds and far-sown spawn, some of them, I thought,
perhaps like this of mine, whelmed and drowned in oceans of silence,
with one only inhabitant to see it, and hear its silence. And all the
long night I travelled, stopping twice only, once to get the coal from
an engine which had impeded me, and once to drink some water, which I
took care, as always, should be running water. When I felt my head nod,
and my eyes close about 5 A.M., I threw myself, just outside the arch of
a tunnel upon a grassy bank, pretty thick with stalks and flowers, the
workings of early dawn being then in the east: and there, till near
eleven, slept.

On waking, I noticed that the country now seemed more like Surrey than
Kent: there was that regular swell and sinking of the land; but, in
fact, though it must have been either, it looked like neither, for
already all had an aspect of return to a state of wild nature, and I
could see that for a year at the least no hand had tended the soil. Near
before me was a stretch of lucerne of such extraordinary growth, that I
was led during that day and the succeeding one to examine the condition
of vegetation with some minuteness, and nearly everywhere I detected a
certain hypertrophie tendency in stamens, calycles, pericarps, and
pistils, in every sort of bulbiferous growth that I looked at, in the
rushes, above all, the fronds, mosses, lichens, and all cryptogamia, and
in the trefoils, clover especially, and some creepers. Many
crop-fields, it was clear, had been prepared, but not sown; some had
not been reaped: and in both cases I was struck with their appearance of
rankness, as I was also when in Norway, and was all the more surprised
that this should be the case at a time when a poison, whose action is
the arrest of oxidation, had traversed the earth; I could only conclude
that its presence in large volumes in the lower strata of the atmosphere
had been more or less temporary, and that the tendency to exuberance
which I observed was due to some principle by which Nature acts with
freer energy and larger scope in the absence of man.

Two yards from the rails I saw, when I got up, a little rill beside a
rotten piece of fence, barely oozing itself onward under masses of foul
and stagnant fungoids: and here there was a sudden splash, and life: and
I caught sight of the hind legs of a diving young frog. I went and lay
on my belly, poring over the clear dulcet little water, and presently
saw two tiny bleaks, or ablets, go gliding low among the swaying
moss-hair of the bottom-rocks, and thought how gladly would I be one of
them, with my home so thatched and shady, and my life drowned in their
wide-eyed reverie. At any rate, these little creatures are alive, the
batrachians also, and, as I found the next day, pupae and chrysales of
one sort or another, for, to my deep emotion, I saw a little white
butterfly staggering in the air over the flower-garden of a rustic
station named Butley.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was while I was lying there, poring upon that streamlet, that a
thought came into my head: for I said to myself: 'If now I be here
alone, alone, alone... alone, alone... one on the earth... and my girth
have a spread of 25,000 miles... what will happen to my mind? Into what
kind of creature shall I writhe and change? I may live two years so!
What will have happened then? I may live five years--ten! What will have
happened after the five? the ten? I may live twenty, thirty, forty...'

Already, already, there are things that peep and sprout within me...!

       *       *       *       *       *

I wanted food and fresh running water, and walked from the engine half a
mile through fields of lucerne whose luxuriance quite hid the
foot-paths, and reached my shoulder. After turning the brow of a hill, I
came to a park, passing through which I saw some dead deer and three
persons, and emerged upon a terraced lawn, at the end of which stood an
Early English house of pale brick with copings, plinths, stringcourses
of limestone, and spandrels of carved marble; and some distance from the
porch a long table, or series of tables, in the open air, still spread
with cloths that were like shrouds after a month of burial; and the
table had old foods on it, and some lamps; and all around it, and all on
the lawn, were dead peasants. I seemed to know the house, probably from
some print which I may have seen, but I could not make out the
escutcheon, though I saw from its simplicity that it must be very
ancient. Right across the façade spread still some of the letters in
evergreens of the motto: 'Many happy returns of the day,' so that
someone must have come of age, or something, for inside all was gala,
and it was clear that these people had defied a fate which they, of
course, foreknew. I went nearly throughout the whole spacious place of
thick-carpeted halls, marbles, and famous oils, antlers and arras, and
gilt saloons, and placid large bed-chambers: and it took me an hour.
There were here not less than a hundred and eighty people. In the first
of a vista of three large reception-rooms lay what could only have been
a number of quadrille parties, for to the _coup d'oeil_ they presented a
two-and-two appearance, made very repulsive by their jewels and
evening-dress. I had to steel my heart to go through this house, for I
did not know if these people were looking at me as soon as my back was
turned. Once I was on the very point of flying, for I was going up the
great central stairway, and there came a pelt of dead leaves against a
window-pane in a corridor just above on the first floor, which thrilled
me to the inmost soul. But I thought that if I once fled, they would all
be at me from behind, and I should be gibbering mad long, long before I
reached the outer hall, and so stood my ground, even defiantly
advancing. In a small dark bedroom in the north wing on the second
floor--that is to say, at the top of the house--I saw a tall young lady
and a groom, or wood-man, to judge by his clothes, horribly riveted in
an embrace on a settee, she with a light coronet on her head in
low-necked dress, and their lipless teeth still fiercely pressed
together. I collected in a bag a few delicacies from the under-regions
of this house, Lyons sausages, salami, mortadel, apples, roes, raisins,
artichokes, biscuits, a few wines, a ham, bottled fruit, pickles,
coffee, and so on, with a gold plate, tin-opener, cork-screw, fork, &c.,
and dragged them all the long way back to the engine before I could eat.

       *       *       *       *       *

My brain was in such a way, that it was several days before the
perfectly obvious means of finding my way to London, since I wished to
go there, at all occurred to me; and the engine went wandering the
intricate railway-system of the south country, I having twice to water
her with a coal-bucket from a pool, for the injector was giving no water
from the tank under the coals, and I did not know where to find any near
tank-sheds. On the fifth evening, instead of into London, I ran into
Guildford.

       *       *       *       *       *

That night, from eleven till the next day, there was a great storm over
England: let me note it down. And ten days later, on the 17th of the
month came another; and on the 23rd another; and I should be put to it
to count the great number since. And they do not resemble English
storms, but rather Arctic ones, in a certain very suggestive something
of personalness, and a carousing malice, and a Tartarus gloom, which I
cannot quite describe. That night at Guildford, after wandering about,
and becoming very weary, I threw myself upon a cushioned pew in an old
Norman church with two east apses, called St. Mary's, using a
Bible-cushion for pillow, and placing some distance away a little tin
lamp turned low, whose ray served me for _veilleuse_ through the night.
Happily I had taken care to close up everything, or, I feel sure, the
roof must have gone. Only one dead, an old lady in a chapel on the north
side of the chancel, whom I rather mistrusted, was there with me: and
there I lay listening: for, after all, I could not sleep a wink, while
outside vogued the immense tempest. And I communed with myself,
thinking: 'I, poor man, lost in this conflux of infinitudes and vortex
of the world, what can become of me, my God? For dark, ah dark, is the
waste void into which from solid ground I am now plunged a million
fathoms deep, the sport of all the whirlwinds: and it were better for me
to have died with the dead, and never to have seen the wrath and
turbulence of the Ineffable, nor to have heard the thrilling bleakness
of the winds of Eternity, when they pine, and long, and whimper, and
when they vociferate and blaspheme, and when they expostulate and
intrigue and implore, and when they despair and die, which ear of man
should never hear. For they mean to eat me up, I know, these Titanic
darknesses: and soon like a whiff I shall pass away, and leave the world
to them.' So till next morning I lay mumping, with shivers and
cowerings: for the shocks of the storm pervaded the locked church to my
very heart; and there were thunders that night, my God, like callings
and laughs and banterings, exchanged between distant hill-tops in Hell.

       *       *       *       *       *

Well, the next morning I went down the steep High Street, and found a
young nun at the bottom whom I had left the previous evening with a
number of girls in uniform opposite the Guildhall--half-way up the
street. She must have been spun down, arm over arm, for the wind was
westerly, and whereas I had left her completely dressed to her wimple
and beads, she was now nearly stripped, and her little flock scattered.
And branches of trees, and wrecked houses, and reeling clouds of dead
leaves were everywhere that wild morning.

This town of Guildford appeared to be the junction of an extraordinary
number of railway-lines, and before again setting out in the afternoon,
when the wind had lulled, having got an A B C guide, and a railway-map,
I decided upon my line, and upon a new engine, feeling pretty sure now
of making London, only thirty miles away. I then set out, and about five
o'clock was at Surbiton, near my aim; I kept on, expecting every few
minutes to see the great city, till darkness fell, and still, at
considerable risk, I went, as I thought, forward: but no London was
there. I had, in fact, been on a loop-line, and at Surbiton gone wrong
again; for the next evening I found myself at Wokingham, farther away
than ever.

I slept on a rug in the passage of an inn called The Rose, for there was
a wild, Russian-looking man, with projecting top-teeth, on a bed in the
house, whose appearance I did not like, and it was late, and I too tired
to walk further; and the next morning pretty early I set out again, and
at 10 A.M. was at Reading.

The notion of navigating the land by precisely the same means as the
sea, simple and natural as it was, had not at all occurred to me: but at
the first accidental sight of a compass in a little shop-window near the
river at Reading, my difficulties as to getting to any desired place in
the world vanished once and for all: for a good chart or map, the
compass, a pair of compasses, and, in the case of longer distances, a
quadrant, sextant or theodolite, with a piece of paper and pencil, were
all that were necessary to turn an engine into a land-ship, one choosing
the lines that ran nearest the direction of one's course, whenever they
did not run precisely.

Thus provided, I ran out from Reading about seven in the evening, while
there was still some light, having spent there some nine hours. This was
the town where I first observed that shocking crush of humanity, which
I afterwards met in every large town west of London. Here, I should say,
the English were quite equal in number to the foreigners: and there were
enough of both, God knows: for London must have poured many here. There
were houses, in every room of which, and on the stairs, the dead
actually overlay each other, and in the streets before them were points
where only on flesh, or under carriages, was it possible to walk. I went
into the great County Gaol, from which, as I had read, the prisoners had
been released two weeks before-hand, and there I found the same pressed
condition, cells occupied by ten or twelve, the galleries continuously
rough-paved with faces, heads, and old-clothes-shops of robes; and in
the parade-ground, against one wall, a mass of human stuff, like tough
grey clay mixed with rags and trickling black gore, where a crush as of
hydraulic power must have acted. At a corner between a gate and a wall
near the biscuit-factory of this town I saw a boy, whom I believe to
have been blind, standing jammed, at his wrist a chain-ring, and, at the
end of the chain, a dog; from his hap-hazard posture I conjectured that
he, and chain, and dog had been lifted from the street, and placed so,
by the storm of the 7th of the month; and what made it very curious was
that his right arm pointed a little outward just over the dog, so that,
at the moment when I first sighted him, he seemed a drunken fellow
setting his dog at me. In fact, all the dead I found much mauled and
stripped and huddled: and the earth seemed to be making an abortive
effort to sweep her streets.

Well, some little distance from Reading I saw a big flower-seed farm,
looking dead in some plots, and in others quite rank: and here again,
fluttering quite near the engine, two little winged aurelians in the
quiet evening air. I went on, passing a great number of crowded trains
on the down-line, two of them in collision, and very broken up, and one
exploded engine; even the fields and cuttings on either hand of the line
had a rather populous look, as if people, when trains and vehicles
failed, had set to trudging westward in caravans and streams. When I
came to a long tunnel near Slough, I saw round the foot of the arch an
extraordinary quantity of wooden _débris_, and as I went very slowly
through, was alarmed by the continuous bumping of the train, which, I
knew, was passing over bodies; at the other end were more _débris_; and
I easily guessed that a company of desperate people had made the tunnel
air-tight at the two arches, and provisioned themselves, with the hope
to live there till the day of destiny was passed; whereupon their
barricades must have been crashed through by some up-train and
themselves crushed, or else, other crowds, mad to share their cave of
refuge, had stormed the boardings. This latter, as I afterwards found,
was a very usual event.

I should very soon have got to London now, but, as my bad luck would
have it, I met a long up-train on the metals, with not one creature in
any part of it. There was nothing to do but to tranship, with all my
things, to its engine, which I found in good condition with plenty of
coal and water, and to set it going, a hateful labour: I being already
jet-black from hair to toes. However, by half-past ten I found myself
stopped by another train only a quarter of a mile from Paddington, and
walked the rest of the way among trains in which the standing dead still
stood, propped by their neighbours, and over metals where bodies were as
ordinary and cheap as waves on the sea, or twigs in a forest. I believe
that wild crowds had given chase on foot to moving trains, or fore-run
them in the frenzied hope of inducing them to stop.

I came to the great shed of glass and girders which is the station, the
night being perfectly soundless, moonless, starless, and the hour about
eleven.

I found later that all the electric generating-stations, or all that I
visited, were intact; that is to say, must have been shut down before
the arrival of the doom; also that the gas-works had almost certainly
been abandoned some time previously: so that this city of dreadful
night, in which, at the moment when Silence choked it, not less than
forty to sixty millions swarmed and droned, must have more resembled
Tartarus and the foul shades of Hell than aught to which my fancy can
liken it.

For, coming nearer the platforms, I saw that trains, in order to move at
all, must have moved through a slough of bodies pushed from behind, and
forming a packed homogeneous mass on the metals: and I knew that they
_had_ moved. Nor could _I_ now move, unless I decided to wade: for flesh
was everywhere, on the roofs of trains, cramming the interval between
them, on the platforms, splashing the pillars like spray, piled on
trucks and lorries, a carnal quagmire; and outside, it filled the space
between a great host of vehicles, carpeting all that region of London.
And all here that odour of blossoms, which nowhere yet, save on one vile
ship, had failed, was now wholly overcome by another: and the thought
was in my head, my God, that if the soul of man had sent up to Heaven
the odour which his body gave to me, then it was not so strange that
things were as they were.

I got out from the station, with ears, God knows, that still awaited the
accustomed noising of this accursed town, habituated as I now was to all
the dumb and absent void of Soundlessness; and 

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