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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Strange Discovery, by Charles Romyn Dake
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+Title: A Strange Discovery
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+Author: Charles Romyn Dake
+
+Release Date: August, 2005  [EBook #8665]
+[This file was first posted on July 30, 2003]
+[Date last updated: May 14, 2005]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, A STRANGE DISCOVERY ***
+
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+E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Colin Cameron, Mary Meehan, Charles
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+
+
+A Strange DISCOVERY
+
+By
+
+Charles Romyn Dake
+
+(1889)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+HOW WE FOUND DIRK PETERS
+
+
+
+
+The FIRST Chapter
+
+
+It was once my good fortune to assist in a discovery of some importance
+to lovers of literature, and to searchers after the new and wonderful.
+As nearly a quarter of a century has since elapsed, and as two others
+shared in the discovery, it may seem to the reader strange that the
+general public has been kept in ignorance of an event apparently so full
+of interest. Yet this silence is quite explicable; for of the three
+participants none has heretofore written for publication; and of my two
+associates, one is a quiet, retiring man, the other is erratic and
+forgetful.
+
+It is also possible that the discovery did not at the time impress
+either my companions or myself as having that importance and widespread
+interest which I have at last come to believe it really possesses. In
+any view of the case, there are reasons, personal to myself, why it was
+less my duty than that of either of the others to place on record the
+facts of the discovery. Had either of them, in all these years, in ever
+so brief a manner, done so, I should have remained forever silent.
+
+The narrative which it is my purpose now to put in written form, I have
+at various times briefly or in part related to one and another of my
+intimate friends; but they all mistook my facts for fancies, and
+good-naturedly complimented me on my story-telling powers--which was
+certainty not flattering to my qualifications as an historian.
+
+With this explanation, and this extenuation of what some persons may
+think an inexcusable and almost criminal delay, I shall proceed.
+
+In the year 1877 I was compelled by circumstances to visit the States.
+At that time, as at the present, my home was near Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
+My father, then recently deceased, had left, in course of settlement in
+America, business interests involving a considerable pecuniary
+investment, of which I hoped a large part might be recovered. My lawyer,
+for reasons which seemed to me sufficient, advised that the act of
+settlement should not be delegated; and I decided to leave at once for
+the United States. Ten days later I reached New York, where I remained
+for a day or two and then proceeded westward. In St. Louis I met some of
+the persons interested in my business. There the whole transaction took
+such form that a final settlement depended wholly upon the agreement
+between a certain man and myself; but, fortunately for the fate of this
+narrative, the man was not in St. Louis. He was one of those wealthy
+so-called "kings" which abound in America--in this case a "coal king." I
+was told that he possessed a really palatial residence in St.
+Louis--where he _did not_ dwell; and a less pretentious dwelling
+directly in the coal-fields, where, for the most of his time, he _did_
+reside. I crossed the Mississippi River into Southern Illinois, and very
+soon found him. He was a plain, honest business man; we did not split
+hairs, and within a week I had in my pocket London exchange for
+something like £20,000, he had in his pocket a transfer of my interest
+in certain coal-fields and a certain railroad, and we were both
+satisfied.
+
+And now, having explained how I came to be in surroundings to me so
+strange, any further mention of business, or of money interests, shall
+not, in the course of this narrative, again appear.
+
+I had arrived at the town of Bellevue, in Southern Illinois, on a bright
+June morning, and housed myself in an old-fashioned, four-story brick
+hotel, the Loomis House, in which the proprietor, a portly, ruddy-faced,
+trumpet-voiced man, assigned to me an apartment--a spacious corner
+room, with three windows looking upon the main thoroughfare and two upon
+a side street, and a smaller room adjoining.
+
+[Illustration: _The_ LOOMIS HOUSE.]
+
+Here, even before the time came when I might have returned to England
+had I so desired, I acquired quite a home-like feeling. The first two
+days of my stay, as I had travelled rapidly and was somewhat wearied, I
+allotted to rest, and left my room for little else than the customary
+tri-daily visits to the _table d'hôte_.
+
+During these first two days I made many observations from my windows,
+and asked numberless questions of the bell-boy. I learned that a certain
+old, rambling, two-story building directly across the side street was
+the hotel mentioned by Dickens in his "American Notes," and in the lower
+passage-way of which he met the Scotch phrenologist, "Doctor Crocus."
+The bell-boy whom I have mentioned was the factotum of the Loomis House,
+being, in an emergency, hack-driver, porter, runner--all by turns, and
+nothing long at a time. He was a quaint genius, named Arthur; and his
+position, on the whole, was somewhat more elevated than that of our
+English "Boots." During these two days I became quite an expert in the
+invention of immediate personal wants; for, as I continued my studies of
+local life from the windows of my apartment, I frequently desired
+information, and would then ring my bell, hoping that Arthur would be
+the person to respond, as he usually was. He was an extremely profane
+youth, but profane in a quiet, drawling, matter-of-fact manner. He was
+frequently semi-intoxicated by noon, and sometimes quite inarticulate by
+9 P.M.; but I never saw him with his bodily equilibrium seriously
+impaired--in plainer words, I never saw him stagger. He openly confessed
+to a weakness for an occasional glass, but would have repelled with
+scorn, perhaps with blows, an insinuation attributing to him excess in
+that direction. True, he referred to times in his life when he had been
+"caught"--meaning that the circumstances were on those occasions such as
+to preclude any successful denial of intoxication; but these occasions,
+it was implied, dated back to the period of his giddy youth.
+
+With little to occupy my mind (I had the St. Louis dailies, one of which
+was the best newspaper--excepting, of course, our _Times_--that I have
+ever read; but my trunks did not arrive until a day or two later, and I
+was without my favorite books), I became really interested in studying
+the persons whom I saw passing and repassing the hotel, or stopping to
+converse on the opposite street-corners; and after forming surmises
+concerning those of them who most interested me, I would ask Arthur who
+they were, and then compare with my own opinions the truth as furnished
+by him.
+
+There was a quiet, well-dressed young man, who three or four times each
+day passed along the side street. Regarding him, I had formed and
+altered my opinion several times; but I finally determined that he was a
+clergyman in recent orders and just come to town. When I asked Arthur
+whether I was correct in my surmise, he answered:
+
+"Wrong again--that is, on the fellow's business"--I had not before made
+an erroneous surmise; but on the contrary, had shown great penetration
+in determining, at a single glance for each of them, two lawyers and a
+banker--"Yes, sir, wrong again; and right again, too. His name's Doctor
+Bainbridge, and he's fool enough to come here with the town just alive
+with other sawbones. He's some kind of a 'pathy doctor, come here to
+learn us how to get well on sugar and wind--or pretty near that bad. He
+don't give no medicine worth mentionin', he keeps his hoss so fat he
+can't trot, and he ain't got no wife to mend his clothes. They say he's
+gettin' along, though; and old farmer Vagary's boy that had 'em, told me
+he was good on fits--but I don't believe _that_, for the boy had the
+worst fit in his life after he told me. The doctor said--so they
+tell--as that was jest what he expected, and that he was glad the fit
+came so hard, for it show'd the medicine was workin'."
+
+My attention was particularly attracted to a man who daily, in fact
+almost hourly, stood at an opposite corner, and who frequently arrived,
+or drove away, in a buggy drawn by two rather small, black, spirited
+horses. He was a tall, lithe, dark-complexioned man, with black eyes,
+rather long black hair, and a full beard; extremely restless, and
+constantly moving back and forth. He addressed many passers-by, a fair
+proportion of whom stopped to exchange a word with him. In the latter
+instance, however, the exchange was scarcely equitable, as he did the
+talking, and his remarks, judging by his gestures of head and hand, were
+generally emphatic.
+
+One of the apparently favorite positions which he assumed was to throw
+an arm around the corner gas-post, and swing his body back and forth,
+occasionally, when alone, taking a swing entirely around the post.
+Another favorite position was to stand with his fists each boring into
+the hollow of his back over the corresponding hip, with his chest and
+shoulders thrown well back, and his head erect, looking steadily off
+into the distance. With regard to this man's station in life, I took
+little credit to myself for a correct guess; for, in addition to other
+aids to correct guessing, the store-room on that corner was occupied by
+an apothecary. When I asked Arthur whether the man was not a physician,
+"Yes, sir," he replied; "physician, surgeon, and obstetrician; George F.
+Castleton, A.M., M.D. _He_ ought to get a dry-goods box and a
+torch-light, and sell 'Hindoo Bitters' in the Public-square. If you
+jest want to die quick, you know where to go to get it. That fellow
+salivated me till my teeth can't keep quiet. Oh, he knows it all!
+Medicine ain't enough to fill his intellecty. _He_ runs the Government
+and declares war to suit himself. 'Moves around a great deal,' you say?
+Well, I believe you; but when you see his idees move around you'll quit
+sighing about his body. Why, sir, that man in a campaign changes his
+politics every day; nobody ever yet caught up with his religion; and
+besides, he's a prophet. You jest get back home without touchin' _him_,
+if you love me, now, please do."
+
+All of this was said in a quiet, instructive tone, without much show of
+feeling even when the teeth were mentioned, and only such emphasis as
+has been indicated by my italics. Arthur's advice for me to get home
+without "touching" the doctor, I had no intention of following. My
+curiosity regarding the man was aroused, and I had determined, if
+possible, to know him. So far as one could be influenced from a
+third-story window, I was favorably impressed with him. I judged him to
+be superlatively erratic, but without an atom of real evil in his being.
+I had observed from my window an incident that gave me a glance into the
+man's heart. A poor, dilapidated, distressed negro, evidently seeking
+help, had come running up to him as he stood near his buggy, at the
+corner; and the manner in which he pushed the negro into the buggy,
+himself followed, and then started off at a break-neck speed, left no
+doubt in my mind that the doctor had a heart as large as the whole
+world. Once or twice during the long, warm afternoons, his words came to
+me through the open windows. I was aware that his almost preternaturally
+bright, quick eyes flashed a glance or two at me as I once or twice
+stepped rather close to an open window looking out over the lower
+roof-tops beyond; and I felt that he had given me a niche in his mind,
+as I had him in mine. I wondered if he had formed mental estimates of my
+status, and if so whether he had attempted to corroborate them as did I
+mine, through Arthur. Once I heard him say to a small, craven-looking
+man, apparently feeble in mind and in body, with red, contracted,
+watering eyes, "Yes, sir, if I had been Sam Tilden, the blood in these
+streets would have touched your stirrups"--the little man had no
+stirrups--"This country is trembling over an abyss deeper'n the infernal
+regions. Ha, ha! What a ghastly burlesque on human freedom! Now, hark
+you, Pickles"--the small man was not only listening, but, I could
+imagine, trembling. He would now and then look furtively around, as if
+fearing that somebody else might hear the doctor, and that war would
+begin--"listen to me: 'Hell has no fury like a nation scorned.'" Here
+Doctor Castleton shot a glance at the little man, to see whether or not
+so fine a stroke was appreciated, and whether his quotation was or was
+not passing as original. "I repeat, 'Hell has no fury like a nation
+scorned'--_Nation_, you hear, Pickles--_nation_, not woman. There is
+just one thing to save this crumbling Republic; give us more paper
+money--greenbacks on greenbacks, mountain high. Let the Government rent
+by the month or lease by the year every printing-press in the
+country--let the machinery sweetly hum as the sheets of treasury-notes
+fall in cascades to the floor, to be cut apart, packed in bundles, and
+sent to any citizen who wants them on his own unendorsed
+note--_un_endorsed, Pickles, and at two per cent.! Ever study logic,
+Pickles? No! Well, no matter; my brain's full enough of the stuff for
+both of us. If the American citizen is honest--which I opine that he
+is--the scheme will work like a charm; if he is _dis_honest--which God
+forbid, and let no man assert--then let the country sink--and the sooner
+the better. I pity the imbecile that can't see this point. The
+people--and _is_ this country for the _people_, or is it not?--follow
+me, Pickles: the people obtain plenty of money, the stores get it, the
+factories and importers get it, and commerce hums." Here the doctor was
+for a moment diverted by some objective impression; and without a word
+of excuse to the little man, he swung himself into his buggy, which
+stood waiting, and drove rapidly away; whilst the diminutive man, after
+a moment of weak indecision, shuffled off down the street. I later
+learned that these talks of Doctor Castleton's were, as regards the
+element of verity, thrown off as writers of fiction throw off fancies.
+Sometimes he defended opinions that were in fierce conflict with the
+ideas of his auditors; but he generally talked to please them,
+frequently assuming as his own, and in exaggerated form, the hobbies,
+notions, or desires of his auditors. In the incident just recorded, the
+doctor probably had not, as a matter of fact, been stating his real
+opinions, though for the moment he may have imagined that he was an
+uncompromising "Paper-money man" or "Greenbacker," as a member of one of
+the minor political parties of the day was termed: the little man was
+poor, and Doctor Castleton had simply been drawing for him a picture of
+delights--at least, so I conjectured. This propensity of the doctor
+sometimes led to startling surprises and results, and, once at least, to
+a discovery of weighty consequence--as we shall soon perceive.
+
+It was novelty for me, and under the circumstances often quite
+refreshing, to witness the manner in which Americans treated the mighty
+subjects of life, and spoke of the great and powerful persons of the
+earth. It was an abundant source of entertainment for me to ask almost
+anybody with whom I happened to be conversing, for his opinion on some
+great subject or of some noted personage; for the reply was always to me
+unique, sometimes very amusing, and not infrequently instructive. On the
+way for the second time from our evening meal to my room, I stopped for
+a moment in the "Gentlemen's sitting-room," where I in part overheard a
+conversation between an elderly and a middle-aged man. I afterward
+learned that the younger man was a lawyer, by name Lill; that he was
+well known throughout the State, a man of cultivation, very conventional
+in his private life, but an unequivocal dissenter on almost every great
+social question; a man of high honor, and unquestionable personal
+habits, for whom exalted public office had often waited if only he could
+have modified his expressed opinions to less inharmony with those of men
+who held the reins of power. It seemed that these two men had not met
+for a year or more; and as I entered the room they were comparing
+experiences, in a leisurely, confidential, sympathetic way. As I came
+within hearing, the lawyer had just started in afresh, after a laugh and
+a pause. Settling-down his features, and assuming a more-news-to-
+be-told manner, with a pinch of fine-cut tobacco between finger and
+thumb ready to go into his mouth, and leaning slightly forward to keep
+the tobacco-dust from his shirt-front, he said, "Well, David, I read the
+Bible through again last winter, and I must continue to think it a very
+immoral book. Its teaching is really bad. Why, sir, what would you think
+of such d---d outrageous teaching if anybody were at this time to
+promulgate it with an implication of any practical relation to present
+events?" And so he continued, somewhat, though not greatly, to the
+horror of his companion, who seemed to be a Christian--at least by
+descent. On another day, after the mid-day meal, as I again entered this
+room, I observed a new-comer in conversation with what I took to be a
+small delegation of Bellevue business men. I was afterward presented to
+this new arrival, when I learned that his name was Rowell--General
+Rowell; a name which I thought I had seen in the newspapers at home. He
+was a large man of prepossessing appearance, and gave me the impression
+of considerable mental force and activity. I heard him say to his
+visitors--the words apparently closing a conference: "Yes, gentlemen, if
+I come to Bellevue, and we build a nail mill in your city, I ask only
+five years time in which to make our mill the largest nail-works in the
+world." For a moment, as I heard this remark, it passed through my mind
+that I was in the presence of an excellent example of an amusing type of
+American life; but the momentary thought was erroneous. This man was one
+of a type of American--well, of American promoters, I will say--the
+business plans of whom, though mammoth and audacious, rarely fail--the
+genuine article of which the Colonel Sellerses are but pitiful
+imitators. In this instance, the promise was fulfilled, with a year or
+two to spare. The right to express personal opinion was looked upon as
+one of the fruits of '76, and the value of such opinion seemed to be
+measured almost wholly on its merits--even to a laughable extent. For
+instance, this lawyer, or Doctor Castleton, or any other American whom I
+met, whatever he might privately have thought on the subject, would not
+for a moment have claimed that his opinion was innately superior to that
+of, for instance, the factotum, Arthur. A man seemed to have, also, an
+inalienable right to be a snob; but I saw in America only one man who
+utilized that privilege. I heard an Ex-Governor of the State express
+himself on this subject by the concise remark, "We have no law _here_
+against a man making a d----d fool of himself." It's "Abe" for the
+President of the Republic, "Dick" for the Governor of the State, and so
+on, all the way through. But no one should imagine that admiration as
+well as respect for the truly great of the land is less than it is where
+a man with four names and two inherited titles receives greater homage
+than does one with only three names and one title. Customs differ in
+different lands--a trite remark; but it is about all that can be said on
+the subject: after all, human feeling is not extremely different in
+different lands, when we once get back of mere form.
+
+I might illustrate a part of my statement by relating an incident which
+occurred on my third day in the hotel, and just prior to my emergence
+from seclusion into the midst of the busy little city. I was in my
+sitting-room, and Arthur had brought in a pitcher of ice-water, placing
+it on a table. Then he paused and looked toward me, as if expecting the
+usual question on some subject connected with my surroundings. But at
+the time I had nothing to ask. After a moment of quiet, Arthur spoke:
+
+"Did you see the Prince lately?" he inquired. I had by this time grown
+so accustomed to Arthur's mode of thought and lingual expression, that
+even this question did not greatly surprise me. I supposed that the
+query was made on the first suggestion of an alert mind desirous of
+starting a little agreeable conversation, and wishing to be sociable
+with a "two-room" guest. He immediately continued:
+
+"I hope he's well. I met him, you know, when he was over here, sev'ral
+years ago, gettin' idees for his kingdom."
+
+I began to feel amused. Arthur was not a liar, and anything but a bore:
+he struck me as being truthful on all subjects except that of his
+bibulous weakness--a subject on which he was, perhaps naturally, not
+able to form accurate notions.
+
+"Where did you meet His Highness, Arthur?" I asked.
+
+"Oh, in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. I was only eight then. They wouldn't
+let boys in the hotel to see him, and there was so many big-wigs around
+the young man, I couldn't get to see him at first. But after a while
+they all got out in front of the hotel, to get into their carriages.
+They had to wait a few minutes, but I couldn't get in front to see him.
+The hotel hall was empty by that time, and everybody was looking at the
+Prince; so I hurried through the barber-shop into the side hall; slipped
+along into the main hall, to the main entrance. I was not more than ten
+or twelve feet from the Prince, but I was at the back of the crowd; so I
+jest got down on all-fours, and crawled in between their legs. I got
+clear up to the Prince, but a big man stood on each side of him, right
+close up. For a minute I thought I was worse off than ever. Then I
+noticed that the Prince had his legs a little separate--his knees were
+maybe six inches apart, with one leg standin' ahead of the other. I was
+a little fellow, even for eight; and I saw my chance. I ran my head in
+between his knees and twisted my body and neck so as to look right up
+into his face, as he looked down to see what rubbed against him. He
+looked kind of funny when he saw my face down there, but not a bit mad;
+and he could easy have hurt me, but he didn't. I drew back my head so
+quick that nobody else saw me. I often wonder if the Prince remembers
+me; and I wish you'd ask him when you go home. Since I grew up, I've
+often felt ashamed to think I did it. If you think of it, and it ain't
+too much trouble, please tell him that we know better in the United
+States than to do such things, but that I was little then, and I must
+have been ignorant of ettiket, my father bein' dead, and I havin' to
+stay out of school to help make money. If you will, say I hope there's
+no feelin'; and when you think of it, drop me a line, please."
+
+
+
+
+The SECOND Chapter
+
+
+A week had elapsed since my arrival in Bellevue. I had been introduced
+to Doctor Castleton, and had exchanged a few words with him. I had also
+listened to several of his street-corner talks, and my interest in him
+from day to day had increased. This interest must have been reciprocal,
+for he seemed to look for my coming; but then, in whom was he not
+interested? I liked him for his real goodness, was entertained by his
+erratic ways, and admired his intellectual brightness. Never before had
+I come in contact with a mind at once so spontaneous and so versatile.
+It was perhaps his most striking peculiarity, that he seemed always to
+be looking for something startling to occur; and in a dearth of the new
+and sensational from without, he produced excitement for the community
+from within. The weather, for instance, was growing warmer, and the
+summer was apparently to be a sultry one: hence, before the season was
+ended we were to look for the most sweeping epidemics of disease; a
+comet had been sighted by one of our comet-hunters, and we were all to
+say later whether or not it would have been better if we'd never been
+born, and so on, and so on. His mind teemed with a prescience of the
+plans and plots of statesmen, of bureaucrats, and of "plutocrats":
+Germany was going to overshadow Europe, and "grind all beneath it like a
+glacier"; "France was about to strike back at Prussia, and the blow
+would be felt in the trembling of the earth from Pole to Pole." Yet
+this, I thought, was to the man himself all fiction--the froth on the
+limpid and sparkling depths beneath--the overflow of a bright,
+undisciplined mind amid the stagnation of a country town. This strange
+man would not intentionally have brought actual injury upon even an
+enemy--if he ever had a real enemy; he was at heart, and generally in
+practice, as kind as a gentle woman. But he seemed unable to exist
+without mental super-activity; and the sympathy of his fellows in his
+mental gyrations was to him a constant necessity. Few of the persons
+whom he habitually met and who had leisure were able to discuss with him
+the books he read, and not many of them cared even to hear him talk of
+his fresh literary accessions. He had, long ago, and many times,
+described for the benefit of the habitués of the corners, the career of
+Alexander and of Napoleon, explaining what they had done, and how they
+had done it, and _why_; with instances in which the execution of their
+plans had met with failure, the reasons for that failure, and the
+methods by which, if _he_ had been them, success might easily have been
+attained. An ancient-looking apothecary, with an old "Rebel bushwhacker"
+and a painter out of work who "loafed" of evenings in, or in front of,
+the corner apothecary shop, had stood gap-mouthed at these recitations
+until the mine of wonders had been to the last grain exhausted. Still,
+excitement must be procured for them. The doctor could better have
+dispensed for a day with food for the body, than to have foregone
+excitement for the mind; and if a majority of his auditors were also to
+be gratified, the subject-matter must be strong and novel, must be
+boldly produced, and, by preference, should be of local interest. As the
+doctor himself delighted in surprises of a terrifying or horrifying
+nature, it was unlikely that his inventions in that direction would be
+characterized by tameness. He would not, when hard pressed on a dull
+day, allow a fastidious care of even his own reputation to impede the
+development of one of his surprises. If the town of Bellevue was to
+stagnate mentally, it would not be the fault of George F. Castleton,
+A.M., M.D.
+
+It was on the eighth day of my stay in Bellevue, that, on starting forth
+from the hotel one morning, I saw Doctor Castleton standing before the
+Loomis House, in one of his favorite attitudes--that is, with his head
+and shoulders thrown back and his hands upon his hips--looking intently
+at a young man who stood speaking with an aged farmer across the way,
+near the street curbing--a harmless-looking youth, with dark blue eyes,
+and straight, very dark hair--in fact, the clerical-looking young man
+whom I had seen from my windows. Something in the man's make-up--perhaps
+something in his attire--suggested the stranger in town. Doctor
+Castleton's large black eyes flashed irefully, and he was evidently
+gratified at my approach. A complete stranger in my place might have
+thought his arrival opportune, and have looked upon himself as a
+diverting instrument in higher hands employed to prevent bloodshed. As I
+stopped by the doctor's side, he said, with ill-suppressed agitation,
+
+"That d----d villain over there has got to leave town. He calls himself
+a doctor, but I have set in motion the wheels of the law of this great
+State of Illinois, and I'll expose the infernal rascal." Then, with a
+dark, knowing look at me, he hissed (though none of his preceding words
+had been audible across the street), "An 'Irregular,' sir--cursed
+sugar-and-water quack--a figure 9 with the tail rubbed off. Why, sir"
+(in a more conversational but still emphatic tone), "_I_ have given
+sixty grains of calomel at a dose, and I have given a tenth of a grain
+of calomel at a dose; I would give a man a hundred grains of quinine,
+and I have done it; I have" (and here he took from his pocket a small
+round lozenge or button of bone) "--I have bored into the brains of
+man--into the Corinthian Capital of Mortality, so to speak. When that
+man" (pointing with his right forefinger to the circle of bone in his
+left palm) "was kicked in the head by his mule, three of my colleagues
+were on the scene before me--standing around like old women, doing
+nothing. _I_ have elaborate instruments, sir--I don't read any more
+books--the world's literature is here" (tapping his forehead). "I've
+thought too much to care for other men's ideas. Like old women, I was
+saying, sir. 'Give me a poker,' I yelled--' give me anything.' I sent
+for my trephine. Great God, how the blood flew, and the bone creaked! I
+raised the depressed bone. The man lives. I've done everything, in my
+life. And now a cursed quack comes to town--. Where's his wife? I
+say--where's his suffering children?--Don't tell me, anybody, that the
+man's not married, and run away from his suffering wife. Take his trail;
+glide like the wily savage back over his course, and mark me, sir,
+you'll trace the pathway of a besom of destruction: weeping mothers,
+broken-hearted fathers, daughters bowed in the dust. What's he here for?
+Why didn't he stay where he was? But I'll drive him out of town--you
+will see--bag and baggage: the wires are set--the avalanche
+approaches--he is doomed."
+
+Two days later, at the same spot, I came upon Doctor Castleton in
+conversation with the harmless-looking young man, to whom the doctor
+formally presented me. The name of the young man, as stated by
+Castleton, and as I already knew, was "Doctor Bainbridge." We exchanged
+a few words, he extended to me an invitation to call upon him, and he
+accepted an urgent request from me to visit me at the hotel. As my stay
+in America would probably last but a few days longer, I proposed that
+the evening of that same day be selected as the time for his visit, and
+to this proposal he readily assented. Then, with a quiet smile, he bowed
+and left us. As he walked away Doctor Castleton remarked,
+
+"That young man is a genius, sir. Belongs to the Corinthian Capital of
+Mortality. Trust me, sir, he's the coming man in this town. He will be a
+power here, in the years to come. I read a man, sir, as you would read a
+book."
+
+I then invited Doctor Castleton to come to my rooms that evening, even
+if he could spare no more than a few moments; and he promised to come,
+"Though," he said, "I may not be able more than to run in, and run out
+again." Bainbridge, the new Bellevue candidate for medical practice,
+could devote his hours as he should elect; but Castleton, "for twenty
+years the guardian of the lives of thousands," must abstract, as best he
+might, a few minutes from the onerous duties entailed by the exacting
+wishes of his many invalid patrons.
+
+Later in the day, I made arrangements for a little luncheon to be served
+that evening in my rooms. There was something about this Bainbridge that
+impelled me to know him better. I had already made up my mind that I
+should like him: his were those clear blue eyes that calmly seemed to
+understand the world around--truth-loving eyes. He had to my mind the
+appearance of a person with large capacity for physical pleasure, yet
+that of one who possessed complete control over every like and dislike
+of his being. I at first took him to be extremely reticent; but later I
+learned, that, when the proper chord of sympathy was touched, he
+responded in perfect torrents of spoken confidence. So I that evening
+sat in the larger of my rooms--my "sitting-room"--in momentary
+expectation of the arrival of one or both of my invited guests.
+
+
+
+
+The THIRD Chapter
+
+
+The hour was about eight. I had written a letter or two after our six
+o'clock supper, and was now idle. By my side, in the centre of the room,
+stood a table on which lay several periodicals--monthly and weekly,
+English and American--a newspaper or two, and a few books. A rap came at
+my door, and on opening it I found Doctor Bainbridge standing in the
+hallway. He wore a black "Prince Albert" coat, a high silk hat, and, the
+evening having blown-up chilly, a summer overcoat. I received him
+perhaps a little more warmly than was in the best of taste, considering
+that we had not before exchanged more than a dozen words. But I had, as
+I have said, frequently seen him from my window; he was almost as much
+of a stranger in the town as was I, and I received him cordially because
+my feelings were really cordial. I assisted him to remove his coat, and
+in other ways did all in my power to make him comfortable. He was of
+slightly more than medium height, of rather delicate build, with a fair,
+almost colorless complexion. His movements, his language, his attire,
+indicated the gentleman--this I should have conceded him in my club at
+home, or in my own drawing-room, quite as readily as here, alone, in an
+obscure hotel in the State of Illinois. As we sat conversing, I was much
+surprised to find in him a considerable degree of culture. He seemed to
+possess that particular air which we are accustomed to think, and
+generally with reason, is not to be found apart from a familiarity with
+metropolitan life on its highest plane. I did not on that evening, nor
+did I later, think him thoroughly schooled, except in his profession. He
+was, however, fairly well educated, and his opinions seemed to me from
+my own stand-point to be sound. I had observed, in a history of the
+county just from the press, which lay on a table in the office of the
+hotel, that in 1869 he had been graduated from an educational
+institution somewhere in Pennsylvania; and, in 1873, from the Medical
+Department of Columbia University. Later, I learned from himself, that,
+from the age of seven to the age of eleven, he had been instructed at
+home by a sister who was some nine or ten years his senior.
+
+I seated him with the large centre-table between us, and immediately
+opened the conversation on some topic of local interest. It is probable
+that of the many persons whom I know and continue to like, that I liked
+nine out of ten of them from our first meeting. Doctor Bainbridge had
+not been long in my presence before I knew that my first impressions of
+him were not deceptive; and I felt that his impression of myself was
+certainly not unfavorable.
+
+It appeared to me as we talked through the evening, that he had read
+about all that I had read, and much besides. He talked of English and
+French history with minute familiarity. Not only had he read English,
+French, and German literature, with such Spanish, Russian, and Italian
+works as had been translated into English; but he shamed me with the
+thoroughness of his knowledge of Scott, Dickens, Bulwer, Thackeray, and
+others of our best writers of fiction. Goethe he particularly admired.
+Of Cervantes he thought with the rest of us: He had read "Don Quixote,"
+for the first time, when he was eighteen, and during a severe illness
+accompanied with intense melancholia; and he had laughed himself out of
+bed, and out of his melancholy. "Don Quixote" was, he said, the only
+book which he had ever read in solitude--that is, read to himself--which
+had compelled him to laugh aloud. Works of science, particularly
+scientific works in the domain of physics, he delighted in. His
+imagination was of a most charming character. It was at that time in my
+life almost a passion with me to analyze human nature--to theorize over
+the motives and the results of human action; over the probable causes of
+known or assumed effects, and the reverse--in short, I thought myself a
+philosopher. I have never met another person whom it so much interested
+me to study as it did this young American. But after ample opportunity
+to know him, even now as I sit writing more than twenty years later, and
+I think of the pleasure of that temporary friendship in far-away
+Illinois, I am puzzled about many things concerning Doctor Bainbridge.
+He certainly possessed a scientific mind. He himself said that he had no
+very great love for written poetry: had he a poetic mind? He loved the
+beautiful in life: he loved symmetry in form, he loved harmony in color,
+he loved good music. And yet, though he had read the English-writing
+poets, he seemed to care less for their work than for anything else in
+literature. The thought of this inconsistency has perplexed me whenever
+I have thought of it through all these years. As I have intimated, he
+was charmed by the beautiful, and by every known expression of beauty;
+but for the strictly metrical in language-expression, he evinced almost
+a distaste. I have often thought that he had, through some peculiar
+circumstance in his earlier life, acquired a suggestive dislike to the
+very form of verse. To this peculiarity there was, however, exception,
+to which I am about to allude.
+
+By the time we had smoked out a cigar apiece, we were exchanging views
+and comments on such writers, English and American, as came to mind. One
+of the books that lay on my table was a copy of Byron; though most of
+the others were the works of American authors--Hawthorne, Irving,
+Longfellow, Poe, and one or two others. He had picked up my Byron, and
+glancing at it had remarked that if all the poets were like Byron he
+would devote more time than he did to the reading of verse. I recall a
+remark that, with Byron's personality in mind, he made as he returned
+the book to the table. "Poor fellow!" he said. "But what are we to
+expect of a man who had a volcano for a mother, and an iceberg for a
+wife? A woman's character is largely formed by the quality of men that
+enter into her life; a man's, even more so by the quality of women that
+enter into his. I wonder if Byron ever intimately knew a true woman?--a
+woman at once intellectually and morally normal, in a good wholesome
+way--a woman with a good brain and a warm heart? No man, in my opinion,
+is a really good man save through the influence of good women."
+
+It is impossible for me to recall much of what he said of the American
+authors of whom we talked, with the exception of Poe; and there are
+reasons why I should clearly remember in substance, and almost in words,
+everything that was said of him. Of all writers, with one exception, Poe
+interests me the most; and I judge that in interest, both as a
+personality and as a literary artist, Doctor Bainbridge placed Edgar
+Allan Poe first and uppermost among those who have left to the world a
+legacy of English verse or prose. And this feeling was, I truly believe,
+in no measure influenced by Poe's nationality. If Bainbridge possessed
+any narrow national prejudices I never learned of them.
+
+He spoke rapturously of Poe as a poet--"The Raven," as a matter of
+course, receiving high praise: Of that unique and really grand poem, he
+said that he thought it the best in the English language.
+
+It was at this point in our conversation that he told me he rarely read
+verse; that he had, with certain exceptions, never done so with much
+pleasure, but that in some way he had managed to read nearly all the
+noted poetry published in our language. Still, he said, there were poems
+which absorbed and almost fascinated him. Of the English poets of the
+present century, Byron alone had written enough poetry to prove himself
+a poet; and he explained that in his opinion the writing of an
+occasional or chance poem, though the poem were true poetry, did not
+make of the author a poet. Then he mentioned a poem which for more than
+a century has been by the critical world accepted as of the highest
+order of true poetry. Gradually warming to the subject, he said:
+
+"A poem like this is not to my mind poetry. Byron wrote true poetry, and
+sufficient of it in his short life to prove himself ten times over a
+poet. To compare this poem with Byron's poetry--say with parts of
+'Childe Harold,' or 'The Prisoner of Chillon,' or with some of his
+shorter poems--would be like comparing the most perfect mechanical
+device with a graceful animal--say the mechanical imitation of a tiger
+or a gazelle with the living original; the first a wonderfully moving
+piece of machinery, illustrating the limit of human constructive power;
+perfectly under control, the movements smooth, unvarying, rhythmical,
+charming, excelling in agility and power its living prototype--but
+still, scientific--to the discerning eye, artful. The other, something
+more than rhythmical, more than smooth, beyond the control of human
+agency, beyond the power of man to analyze as to synthetize--more than
+science can explain, more than even art dare claim. The one explicable,
+the other inexplicable; the one from the hand of patient skill--of
+talent; the other a result of force mysterious, divine. The lions of
+Alexius Comnenus, it is said, could roar louder than the lions of the
+desert."
+
+"But what of Poe, and 'The Raven?'" I asked.
+
+"The surprising thing about 'The Raven' is," he said, "and I assert only
+what I believe to be from internal evidence demonstrable--first, that
+the poem arose out of a true poetic impulse of the soul; and, second,
+that it discloses the very highest art possible to a writer. Now I truly
+believe that the first writing of 'The Raven'--and, too, the stanzas
+were probably not first written in their present published
+order--conveyed Poe's poetic sense just as completely as the published
+poem now does. But this was not sufficient for Edgar Allan Poe--for the
+scientific man, the artful man, the poetic genius with a genius for
+concentrated mental toil in the effort to attain literary perfection.
+This makes 'The Raven' a curiosity in true poetic expression."
+
+"Then you believe," I said, "that both the state of feeling from which
+true poetry arises, and the particular words by which the feeling is
+conveyed, are inspired."
+
+"I do. But Poe was able actually to improve the language of inspiration,
+whilst transmitting uninjured the poetic conception. Those stanzas in
+Grey's 'Elegy' which convey from him to us the psychic wave of poetic
+impulse, may have been hundreds of times altered in their wording,
+through seven years of tentative effort; and it is possible that he
+succeeded in retaining the original feeling--the poem is certainly
+artistic. But the feeling conveyed by Grey is commonplace enough,
+anyway; whilst that transmitted by Poe is wholly unique, and intensely
+absorbing--indeed, a startling revelation. I have always felt that
+Byron, Milton, Shakespeare, found within their souls their poetry, and
+that the linguistic expression of it came to them as naturally as did
+the feeling."
+
+"Such minds," I said, "will always be a mystery to common mortals."
+
+"I take it," replied Bainbridge, "that waves and wavelets of poetic
+feeling are common enough among men--quite as common as mental pictures
+of beautiful material images; but the rarity is in the word-conception,
+which I hold must as a rule be spontaneous if it is to convey
+unblemished the original feeling. The musical genius is able to convey
+his psychic impression in harmonious sounds; the true poet, in words. To
+the rest of us the process is, as you say, a mystery--we call it
+inspiration.
+
+"Take an isolated poem, such as under, say patriotic feeling, springs
+from the mind of one who never again writes poetry; does this not help
+to prove my theory that all true poetry is a result of inspiration--is
+in its inception and in its word-expression quite extraneous to its
+apparent author?
+
+"To both my intellect and my feeling, 'The Raven' stands a beautiful
+masterpiece, which, because it is both the product of a strange psychic
+state and the work of intellect will probably be the last poem, of those
+now extant, to be admired by the human race when intellectual
+development and growth shall finally have driven from the lives and the
+minds of men all romance, all sentiment, all poetry, leaving to the race
+only intellect and will."
+
+After some further talk, and in reply to a statement of my own,
+Bainbridge said,
+
+"Of course I can speak only for myself; and for me there is music in the
+poetry of Byron and of Poe, and there is the psychic effect of color.
+The rhythm in certain of their poems, with the arrangement of
+word-sound, produces the saddest music possible, I think, to the soul of
+man--a prevailing monotone so measured as to result in an effect
+decidedly strange and quite indescribable. But the real peculiarity of
+their poetry--and in this Poe excels Byron--is a psychic effect the same
+as that which remains after viewing certain pictures in black and white,
+the shade gradations of which are so artistic as to create an illusion
+of color--sombre, highly shaded, yet color. This color effect of Poe's
+poetry I have felt very slightly, if at all, immediately on a first
+reading, as I feel the music of his verse--a rereading, or the lapse of
+time, being required for its full development. I have not read a line of
+Poe in the last two or three years, and at the present moment I feel
+_Ulalume_ as I would some weird scene or picture viewed long ago."
+
+I asked him what particular color effects Poe's poetry produced in his
+mind, and he replied,
+
+"The impression of red I do not at all retain. That of black, more or
+less intense, is predominant; but the color effects of almost any
+variegated landscape--red being excluded, and the scene having been
+viewed by moonlight, or in the dusk of evening, or possibly on a densely
+clouded day--is at this moment alive within me. And yet, with a single
+exception, I have never received from musical or other sounds a psychic
+color effect--the exception being that certain tones of a violin leave
+the same mental impression as does the sight of purple. As I am not
+acquainted with the technical language of either painter or musician, I
+can attempt to describe these effects only in common language. I speak
+for myself only, and am anything but dogmatic on the subject of poetry.
+The symbolism of Poe's verse we must solve, each for himself. To me, for
+myself, the solution seems not difficult--and so no doubt says another;
+but on comparison these solutions would no doubt be very different."
+
+But highly as Bainbridge estimated Poe's verse, he placed Poe even
+higher among writers of prose fiction than among poets. As I have said,
+I am myself an admirer of Poe. His prose I have always thought the work
+of a true genius--something, as Doctor Bainbridge said, "more than art,
+aided by the most perfect art." But when we came to speak of his prose
+writings, Bainbridge was able to express in language all that I had felt
+of Poe, and to disclose and explain components of his genius that I had
+never before fully recognized.
+
+I then asked Bainbridge what it was in Poe's prose that he so much
+admired.
+
+"Poe's strong element of power as a writer of short stories," said
+Bainbridge, "is, I think, his scientific imagination--the same capacity,
+strange as the statement may appear, that, when directed into another
+channel, makes a great physicist. It strikes me as inaccurate to say
+that Newton discovered the law of gravitation. Newton imagined the fact
+of a law of physical gravitation; and then he proceeded to prove _the_
+law of gravitation, accomplishing the discovery by means of a second
+attribute of genius--viz., tireless mental energy--the possession of a
+talent for rigorous mental application and severe nervous strain. In the
+sense that Columbus discovered America--in that sense, Newton discovered
+the law of gravitation: Columbus imagined an America, and then proceeded
+to make a physical demonstration of his belief by discovering the
+Bahamas. The same faculty--scientific imagination--in Poe gave us 'A
+Descent into the Maelstrom, The Murders in the Rue Morgue,' and other of
+his tales. And not alone in physics, but in metaphysics, did his
+imagination open up to him just conceptions; so that in the field of
+both healthy and morbid mental action his 'intuitive' knowledge was
+unerring. 'The Fall of the House of Usher' is so true to the real in
+conception, and so consummate in portrayal, that the more one knows
+about the mind, the more he inclines to wonder whether these
+compositions might not have been aided by actual personal experience.
+Yet these delineations are purely imaginative. Take 'The Imp of the
+Perverse, The Tell-Tale Heart,' and similar of his stories, not all of
+which could in reason have come within the experience of one man, and
+which are undoubtedly grounded upon intuitive suggestion."
+
+I asked him which of Poe's tales he thought the best.
+
+"That would indeed be difficult to determine," he replied. "If the
+criterion is to be my own intellectual enjoyment, I should mention one;
+if my feelings, then another. It is possible that I might select one in
+which my intellectual enjoyment, and my feelings pure and simple, were
+about equally engaged. We shall probably agree that the most important
+object of fiction is to produce in the reader a state of feeling, just
+as musical composition is intended to produce a state of feeling--the
+short story being comparable with a brief musical production intended to
+produce a single variety of emotion; the novel, to the music of an opera
+with its many parts, intended each to excite a particular state of
+feeling. Naturally prose fiction may, and almost necessarily does, have
+other objects. Now the reading of 'The Fall of the House of Usher'
+produces a certain state of emotion, and that wholly apart from any
+appeal to intellect; no endeavor to do more than produce that state of
+feeling is made, nothing more than that is effected, and that much is
+attained in a manner which no pen that has traced short-story fiction,
+save that of Poe, has ever accomplished. Hence, if the production of
+feeling--an appeal to the purely moral side of the triangle of mind--be
+the paramount essential in fiction, 'The Fall of the House of Usher' is
+the best short story in the English language."
+
+Here Doctor Bainbridge rose from his chair, and taking a turn or two
+across the floor, continued, in tones indicating vexation,
+
+"Why has not somebody with a ray of the imagination necessary to a
+comprehension of Poe's genius given us at least a decent sketch of his
+brief life! Was Poe in a state of mental aberration when he made
+Griswold his literary executor? Is the world forever to hear of him only
+from those who see the dark side of his life and know nothing of his
+life's work?--from those who look at his life and his life's work
+through the smoked glass of their dull provincial minds? Let us hope for
+an assay of what is left to us of Poe--an assay which, not wholly
+ignoring the little dross, will still lose no grain of the pure, virgin
+gold, and give to the world something approaching what is due to the
+genius himself, and what, with such a subject, is due to the world."
+
+"Let me alter my question--or, I should say, ask a different one," I
+said, when he had again seated himself: "Which of Poe's stories most
+interested you? From which did you receive the most satisfaction?"
+
+"I have been more occupied and interested by 'The Narrative of A. Gordon
+Pym' than by any two or three of his other stories."
+
+I expressed surprise at this avowal; and my comments on what appeared to
+me to show a peculiar taste implied a desire for explanation. He
+continued:
+
+"Although 'The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym' has served as a suggestion,
+or even a pattern, for some of our best recent stories of adventure, and
+although it has many points of excellence in itself, it is not the story
+alone, but the opportunity which the story affords of an analysis of
+Poe's mind, that creates the greater interest for me. I have always been
+puzzled to find a reasonably adequate cause for the incomplete state of
+that narrative. The supposition that Poe had not at his disposal, at the
+moment he required it, the necessary time for its completion is an
+hypothesis which I only mention to dispose of. At its close he wrote and
+added to the narrative a 'Note' of nearly a thousand words; and in the
+time required for the penning of that addition, he could have brought
+the story to--perhaps an abrupt, but still, an artistic close. No. Then
+did Poe not complete 'The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym' because his
+imagination failed him--failed to supply material of such a quality as
+his refined and faultless taste demanded? If so, then why did he begin
+it? Why write more than sixty thousand words in his usual careful and
+precise style, on a subject to him little known, in to him a new field
+of literary effort? He could in the time required to write 'The
+Narrative of A. Gordon Pym' have written from five to ten short stories
+along familiar lines. No: none of these hypotheses explains the
+unfinished state of that narrative. My explanation is that the story has
+a foundation in fact, and that Poe himself never learned more than a
+foundation for the portion which he wrote. Its leading character next to
+Pym is one Dirk Peters, a sailor, mutineer, etc. It is my theory that
+Pym and Peters existed in fact, but that Poe never met either of them,
+though he did meet sailors who had known Dirk Peters, and that he heard
+from them the first part of the story, in the form in which it grew to
+be repeated by seafaring men along the New England coast in the '30s and
+'40s. Having heard what he supposed to be sufficient, with the aid of
+his own imagination, to make an interesting story for publication, Poe
+began and continued to write. Then, as he progressed, he found that his
+imagination was embarrassed--frustrated by the known facts already
+employed--whilst it was not assisted by new facts which he was positive
+existed, but which he could not procure. As he attempted to close the
+narrative, the cold, written page was a very different thing from what
+he had conceived it would be as he sat in the tap-room of some New
+England old 'Sailor's Home,' with a couple of glasses of Burton ale on
+the table, listening through the drowsy afternoon to the fact and
+fiction of some old 'tar,' as the two looked across the white-sanded
+floor at the old moss-grown dock without, and listened to the salt
+wavelets splashing against its rotting timbers, and watched the far-
+distant sails on the outer sea. It is not very difficult to picture to
+one's self Poe searching among these sailors' lodging-houses for Dirk
+Peters; nor is it unreasonable to assume that he did so search for him.
+If Dirk Peters was twenty-seven years old in 1827, when the mutiny
+occurred, he was only forty-nine at the time of Poe's death--in fact,
+would be only seventy-seven if now alive. Poe says in his 'Note,' that
+'Peters, from whom some information might be expected, is still alive,
+and a resident of Illinois, but cannot be met with at present. He may
+hereafter be found, and will, no doubt, afford material for a conclusion
+of Mr. Pym's account.' I have no doubt that Poe eventually learned
+exactly where Peters resided; but no matter how much Poe may have
+desired to meet with Peters, he could not have done so. In the '40s it
+was a long, tedious, expensive journey from New York to Illinois. Still,
+Poe hoped some day to meet Peters, and did not care to say to the public
+exactly where he could be met with. Then came Poe's unutterably sad
+death, leaving the narrative incomplete."
+
+As Bainbridge neared the close of his remarks, we heard a heavy and
+rapid step approach along the hall. It stopped before my door; and just
+as Bainbridge ceased to speak, a loud rap, evidently made with the head
+of a heavy cane, sounded on the panel. The door flew open, and Doctor
+Castleton rushed into the middle of the room--or, rather, bounded across
+the room. Bainbridge and I instantly arose, and I stepped forward to
+take Doctor Castleton's hand in mine, and to care for his hat and cane;
+but he waved me off. "No, no: no time--not a minute to spare--three
+patients waiting"--here he glanced at Bainbridge, as if to observe the
+effect of his speech on a beginner, who was fortunate if he yet
+possessed a single patient--"like to keep my word--fine evening." He
+seated himself on the edge of a chair, and projected his glance around
+the room. No better subject immediately presenting itself to mind, I
+remarked that we had just been talking of Edgar Allan Poe, and his
+unfinished story, "The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym"; and I spoke of Dirk
+Peters.
+
+"I know old man Peters--know him well, sir," said Doctor Castleton,
+without a moment's hesitation; "short old fellow--seafaring man--about
+four feet six, or seven--must have been a devil in his day--old man,
+now--seventy or eighty; no hair, no beard; farms a few acres on the
+Bluff; very sick man, right now."
+
+Bainbridge and I had cast at each other a glance, which plainly said,
+"Isn't that Castleton for you?" But as he continued, and we had time to
+consider, the probability that Dirk Peters was alive, and the bare
+possibility that he was in the neighborhood, and that, if he did reside
+near Bellevue, Doctor Castleton would be very likely to have met him,
+gradually dawned on our minds. Quick as was the glance we exchanged,
+Castleton saw it--yes, and understood it.
+
+"Gentlemen," he continued, "I know whereof I speak. It is true, I never
+before thought of Peters in this connection. In the cases of my library,
+the books stand two rows deep. Thousands of books have been carried into
+my attic, to make room for newer books--I never need to glance twice at
+a book. Of course I have Poe's works, and bound in morocco, too--the
+grandest genius ever bestowed upon humanity by the prolific and liberal
+hand of our Creator. Still, I never happened to read the grand and
+mighty effort of that colossal intellect to which you refer--'The
+Narrative of a Snorting Thing,' though I recall 'The Literary Life of
+Thingum Bob.' But I am certain--certain as the unerring fiat of
+Omnipotent Power--that this man Peters is within ten miles of us, and is
+at this moment a mighty ill man--almost ready, in fact, to visit a land
+from which he will be little likely to return. I refer to 'The
+undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns.' By
+superhuman efforts I have kept this man Peters alive now long past the
+time-limit set by his Creator for him to go--I mean, three score and ten
+years; but even I and science have our limitations, and the beginning of
+the end is at hand."
+
+By this time Doctor Castleton was pacing up and down the room, stopping
+now and then to look at an engraving on the wall, taking up and
+replacing books, seeing everything. I could not but feel that already
+the curiosity which had impelled him to "run in" was satisfied, and that
+he would soon be going. A minute after his last recorded words, Dirk
+Peters seemed to have dropped completely from his mind. I was wholly
+absorbed with the thought that Dirk Peters might be within our reach;
+and that if he really was, it was possible that we might learn whether
+Pym and he had reached the South Pole, and if so, what they had there
+discovered. It was plainly evident that the mind of Doctor Bainbridge
+was deeply engaged with the same subject. I was anxious to know what he
+thought of Castleton's statement; for the more I discussed the matter
+within myself, the more I felt inclined to believe that Castleton was
+not making a mistake. But Castleton was certainly now not thinking of
+Peters. I could, amid my thoughts, hear him declaiming,
+
+"Yes, sir; England is a mighty power. Her navy, sir, can--and mark me,
+it will--sweep France and Russia and Prussia and Austria and Italy from
+the ocean as--as a shar--a wha--a huge and voracious swordfish sweeps
+before its imperious onslaught, with unerring certainty and cyclonic
+power, a whole school of sneaking mackerel or codfish from the pathway
+fixed for it by Eternal Destiny."
+
+His prognostication was intended to be a graceful compliment paid to the
+country of a visiting stranger, and, in the absence of other foreigners,
+not discourteous to anybody. I never before or since knew his natural
+flow of eloquence to waver as in this instance--a rarity that of itself
+makes the remark worthy of record. Doctor Castleton soon, against all
+protests, bounded out of the door, as he had bounded in; and then
+Bainbridge and I discussed the astonishing possibilities should it prove
+true that Dirk Peters was within our reach. We concluded that
+Castleton's statement was one of great importance, and we agreed upon a
+course of procedure. We spent the remainder of the evening in a manner
+very enjoyable to myself, and evidently gratifying to Doctor Bainbridge;
+and it was past midnight when we separated.
+
+The following morning I looked up Doctor Castleton; and he, ever
+courteous and obliging, did more than consent to permit me to drive out
+to the home of his patient, Peters. He proposed that I wait a day, as he
+knew that Peters would within that time, and might any hour, send for
+him; and as soon as he was summoned he would notify me, and together we
+would drive out to the old sailor's residence--which, the doctor said,
+was a small, two-roomed log structure, where the old man dwelt entirely
+alone.
+
+
+
+
+The FOURTH Chapter
+
+
+The summons from Doctor Castleton to accompany him came sooner than he
+had led me to expect; and at a little past noon of the same day on which
+he had made his promise to take me with him to see Dirk Peters, I
+received a message, saying that if agreeable to me he would at two
+o'clock be in front of my hotel, prepared to start for the home of the
+old sailor.
+
+At a minute or two before the time fixed, I was standing at the main
+entrance to the Loomis House, and at precisely two o'clock Doctor
+Castleton drove up in a two-horse, four-wheeled, top-buggy. He made room
+for me on his left, and off we started.
+
+We drove in a westerly direction for a full mile along the main street
+before leaving the town behind us. Then we struck a level turf road; and
+away trotted the superb team of rather small, wiry, black horses. Doctor
+Castleton said that we should reach our destination--which was rather
+more than ten miles from the city limits--within forty minutes; and we
+did. Over a part of the level turf road I should estimate that we drove
+at about a three-minute gait; but after traversing some four or five
+miles, we turned south into a narrow road, which soon became hilly and
+tortuous; yet even here it was only on particularly rough or uneven
+portions of the way that the doctor moderated our speed to less than a
+four-minute gait.
+
+As we rode along at this exhilarating pace, the buggy whirling around
+acute curves among the mighty oaks and maples, now and then dashing down
+a forty-five-degree descent of fifty or sixty feet, again thundering
+over a dilapidated bridge of resonant planks, the doctor remarked to me
+that Peters was certain to die, it being only a question of days, or
+perhaps of hours. "Old Peters," he said, "has been without visible means
+of support for the past two or three years. The Lord only knows how he
+has lived since the period when he became unable to work. Even his small
+farm is mortgaged for all it is worth." I expressed to the doctor some
+surprise that he should be making twenty-mile drives to see a lonely old
+man whose illness he was unable to relieve, and from whom he could
+expect no fee. I had grown to take an interest in hearing Castleton
+express his opinions. Many of his conceptions of life were so unique;
+his mental vision, always intensely acute, was often so oblique; his
+station of mental observation so alterable, and so quickly altered; his
+sentiments often so earthy, again so exalted--that I believe the man
+would have interested me even under circumstances less quiet and
+monotonous than were those of my stay, up to this time, in Bellevue. To
+my expression of mild wonderment that he should tax his time and
+energies to such an extent without pecuniary gain, he replied:
+
+"My dear sir, you are a traveller. You have sailed the seas and crossed
+the mighty main; you have dashed over mountains, and sweltered 'mid
+tropical suns on sandy desert-wastes. To you our Rockies are
+mole-hills--our great lakes mere ponds. You are not a child to cry out
+in the darkness. Granted. Yet, sir, let us by a stretch of fancy imagine
+ourselves in the place of Columbus, on the third day of August, 1492. We
+are about to leave the Known, in search of the Unknown--about to
+penetrate for the first time that vast expanse of water which for
+uncounted ages has stretched away before the wondering vision and
+baffled research of Europe. We are not leaving the world--we are not
+alone. Yet is it not a solace that a few friends gather on the shore to
+say good-by? The sympathy of the kind, the well-wishes of the brave--are
+they not always a comfort? This poor fellow Peters, whose lowly home we
+are now approaching, is alone--he is about to start on his last journey,
+alone. The land to which he perhaps this day begins that journey is not
+only unknown, but unknowable to us in our present state. And therefore
+is it, sir, that the learned professions live. Even the worldly man,
+when he comes to start upon this last journey, does not disdain the
+sympathy and kindness of the loving, and the expressions of hopefulness
+that come from the good and pure. True, you may say that the learned
+professions are for the man who is about to die but frail supports on
+which to lean. The wise man as well as the ignorant man, when he fears
+that death is near, reaches out for help or at least some knowledge of
+his future. He sends for his physician, who cannot promise him
+anything--cannot number the days or hours of his remaining life; for his
+lawyer, who cannot assure him beyond all doubt that his will can be made
+to endure for a single day beyond his death. At last, he sends for a
+minister of God--and what says the spiritual expert? Perhaps he
+represents that old, old organization, whose history stretches back for
+centuries through the dark ages to the borders of the brilliancy beyond;
+that old hierarchy that claims to hold all spiritual power to which man
+may appeal with reasonable hope. What says to the dying man this
+representative and heir of the accumulated spiritual research and
+culture of the past? He may with honesty say, 'Hope;' but if he says
+more than Hope, he does it as the blind might sit and guide by signs
+through unknown labyrinths the blind. All this is true; but the fact
+that the learned professions have come into existence, and continue to
+live and draw from the masses their material support--a tax greater in
+amount than the income of the nations--shows that they meet, and
+genuinely meet, a demand. I say genuinely, for 'You cannot fool all the
+people all the time.' And so, my young friend, this poor man Peters
+wants me. Later, if there is time, he will want the representative of
+the religion which he professes, or which he remembers that his mother
+or his father professed. I shall stand by his side and place my hand
+upon his throbbing brow--and he will hope, and not despair. Who knows
+whether or not our hope and our faith have power in some strange way to
+link the present to the future, carrying forward the spirit-seed to
+soil in which it blooms in splendor through eternity? As Byron says,
+
+  'How little do we know that which we are,
+   How less what we may be.'
+
+But here we are; and I know by the face of that old neighbor-woman
+looking from the doorway there that our man still lives."
+
+We drew up in front of a small building some sixteen feet square, the
+walls of which consisted of huge logs piled one upon another and
+mortised at the corners. The doctor entered, leaving me seated in the
+buggy. But soon he came to the door, and signalled for me. As I entered
+the house I heard a voice say, "Yes, doctor, the old hulk's still
+afloat--water-logged, but still afloat." Looking in the direction of the
+voice, I saw on a bed in one corner of the room an old beardless man. I
+had not a second's doubt that Dirk Peters of the 'Grampus,' sailor,
+mutineer, explorer of the Antarctic Sea, patron and friend of A. Gordon
+Pym, was before me. His body up to the waist was covered with an old
+blanket; but I felt certain that he was less than five feet in height,
+and felt quite positive that he would not then measure more than four
+and a half feet. His height in 1827 was, Poe states, four feet and eight
+inches. One of the old man's arms lay exposed by his side, and the
+finger-ends reached below the knee; while his hand, spread out on the
+blanket, would have covered the area of a small ham. His shoulders and
+neck, and the one bare arm visible, were indicative of vast muscular
+strength. There was the enormous head mentioned by Poe; and there was
+the completely bald scalp, exposed, as by a semi-automatic movement of
+respect he raised his hand to his head and removed a section of woolly
+sheepskin; and there, too, was the indenture in the crown; there the
+enormous mouth, spreading from ear to ear, with the lips which, as he
+gave a chuckle, and the wrinkles about his eyes evinced a passing facial
+contortion, I saw to be wholly wanting in pliancy. There was the
+expression, fixed at least as far as the mouth and lower face was
+concerned, the protruding teeth, and the grotesque appearance of a smile
+such as a demon might have smiled over ruined innocence. Oh, there was
+no possibility of a mistake. Doctor Castleton glanced at me
+questioningly, but confidently; and I lowered my head in assent. But if
+I expected to have an opportunity of learning much of anything from
+Peters, I was mistaken. Doctor Castleton was almost ready to depart
+before I had finished my visual examination of the old man. I heard the
+aged neighbor-woman, a coal miner's wife, who had as an act of kindness
+come in to assist the invalid, say, looking at the poor old fellow:
+
+"My mon stayed wi' he the night, dochter. The poor mon, he had delerion
+bad. He thot hesel' on a mountain o' ice, wi' tha mountain o' ice on
+other like mountain o' salt, a lookin' at devils i' hell. But sin' tha
+light o' day. Tha good mon's hesel' agin."
+
+Doctor Castleton had produced from the recesses of a large medicine case
+certain pills and powders, had given his directions, and was actually
+about to leave without giving me an opportunity, or seeming to think
+that I desired an opportunity, of speaking with Peters. I then appealed
+for a moment more of time, and for consent to ask the patient a question
+or two; and my appeal was granted. I stepped close to the bedside, and
+looking down into the eyes that looked up into mine, asked the old man
+if his name was Dirk Peters; to which he answered affirmatively. I then
+asked him if he had in the year 1827 sailed from the port of Nantucket,
+on the brig 'Grampus,' under Captain Bernard, in company, among others,
+with a youth named A. Gordon Pym? And a moment later I wished that I had
+been less abrupt in my questioning. Peters did manage quite coolly and
+rationally to answer "Yes" to all my questions. But at the words "Pym,"
+"Bernard," "Grampus," his eyes began, in appearance, to start from their
+sockets; those awful teeth gleamed from that cavernous mouth, as he
+uttered demoniac yell on yell, and raised himself to a sitting posture
+in the bed. I thought his eyeballs must certainly burst, as he looked
+off into nothingness wildly, as if a troop of fiends were rushing upon
+him.
+
+"Great God!" he screamed, "there, there--she's gone. Ah," quieting a
+little; "ah; the old man with the eyes of a god, and the cubes of
+crystal with the limpid liquid of heaven. Oh," his voice again raised to
+piercing screams, "Oh, she's gone, and he loves her--and I love him. Now
+man, they called you the human baboon--be more than man!--I loved the
+boy--I tell you, I loved him from the first. I saved him once--aye, a
+dozen times--but not like this--not from hell. Scale the chasms of salt,
+and climb the lava cliffs, and--but the lake of fire at the bottom--the
+old man--and the abyss, my God, the abyss! The snow-drift beard--the
+godlike eyes"--his voice then quieting for a few words. "Ah, mother,
+mother, mother." Then in a deep, earnest tone, "I'll be a human baboon,
+and I'll do what man never yet did, nor beast--yes, and what never in
+time will man do again."
+
+Then he completely lost control of himself. He jumped from the bed.
+Doctor Castleton stood near the doorway, and I quickly moved to his
+side. The old woman had vanished. Peters poured forth yell on yell, such
+as I had never conceived it possible for a human throat to utter. He
+grasped a strong oak-pole, and broke it as I might have broken a dry
+twig. I afterward placed the longer fragment of this pole with each of
+its extremities on a large stone, the two about four feet apart; and
+lifting into the air a rock weighing a hundred or more pounds, dropped
+it on the middle of the fragment; and it did not even bend what this man
+of awful strength had severed with his two hands as one would break a
+wooden toothpick between the fingers. Then Peters picked up a stove
+which stood, fireless, in the room; and he cast it through an open
+window, seven or eight feet away, into the yard beyond, where it fell,
+breaking into a hundred pieces. I need scarcely say that Doctor
+Castleton and myself had left the room with decided alacrity. Well, to
+terminate a description none too agreeable, Peters' wild delirium
+continued until, out in the door-yard, forty or fifty feet from the
+house, he fell, exhausted. Then we carried him back to his bed. Doctor
+Castleton gave some directions to the old woman, and soon we left for
+town, Peters being asleep.
+
+"Strange," said Doctor Castleton, after we had driven for perhaps a
+mile, "strange that a thought can do such things! A word is said, the
+thread of memory is touched by suggestion, and it vibrates back through
+half a century to some scene of terror stamped ineradicably upon the
+brain--or if not upon the brain, then where?--and, lo! the reflexes
+spring into action, and a maniac with Samson's strength takes the place
+of a docile invalid. Ah, who can answer the mystery of mysteries, and
+tell us what this consciousness is! Behind that gift of God rests the
+secret of life, and of death, and probably of Eternity itself."
+
+We rode along, returning a little more leisurely than we had come. I sat
+wondering how we were to learn from such a man as Peters his secrets--if
+secrets he possessed. Even if his past held only important facts not of
+secret import, I had received striking evidence that the subject of that
+wonderful sea-voyage was not to be carelessly broached to Dirk Peters. I
+concluded to say nothing more of the matter until I should meet
+Bainbridge, whom I knew would be anxiously awaiting my return, hardly
+daring to hope that Poe's Dirk Peters was really in existence and
+discovered.
+
+As we neared town, my mind turned to the strange being at my side. Here
+was a man who could think, and think both learnedly and poetically of
+the wonders of heaven and earth; and yet who could talk of driving from
+town a business competitor! Surely that part of his talk which seemed so
+laughable was in spirit wholly dramatic--intended rather to fill the
+assumed expectations of his hearers, than truly representing the
+speaker's feeling. Then my thoughts reverted to the talk I had
+overheard, when "Pickles" was made to see veritable showers of
+"greenbacks" raining into his vacuous pocket. I smiled to myself; and
+then a spirit of audacity coming over me, I determined to ascertain what
+Castleton would say to me on the currency question. I concluded to admit
+that I had overheard through my open window the conversation on monetary
+matters alluded to. There would then be no opportunity for him to evade
+the responsibility of assuming as his own the peculiar opinions
+expressed by him on that occasion. Now, when he could not consistently
+deny the advocacy of views to me so apparently untenable, and could not
+seriously adopt them without lowering himself intellectually in the
+estimation of a stranger--and I did not for an instant think that he
+believed the nonsense which he had so glowingly represented and
+demonstrated to poor old "Pickles"--then by what possible means would he
+extricate himself from the dilemma?
+
+When I broached the money question, he seemed to warm to the subject at
+once; but as I led around to the fact of my overhearing the "Pickles"
+incident, he seemed slightly disconcerted--but only momentarily. He was
+himself again so quickly that I should not have noticed his
+embarrassment had I not been closely observing him for that very
+purpose.
+
+"Well, now," he said, blithely, "as you are a stranger, a man of high
+and irreproachable honor, _sans peur et sans reproche_--and one, I know,
+who will not place me in an equivocal position here in my home by
+divulging my true position--I don't mind telling you, in all confidence,
+the truth. I am not, my dear sir, an ass. (What I say, remember, goes no
+farther.) I am, sir, a theoretical and practical politician of great--I
+only repeat what many of my friends (men of supreme mental attainments,
+and the best of judges) herald forth as undeniable truth--a politician,
+sir, of great depth and exceeding cunning--a rare combination,
+philosophers tell us. What a humbug this whole greenback question is!
+Why, sir, it is to that very element of scarcity over which they howl,
+that money, or anything else, owes its commercial value. Diminish the
+general scarcity of anything on earth to the point of a full supply for
+everybody and the commercial value at once becomes _nil_. There is
+nothing of more real value than atmospheric air; yet the supply is so
+great that all demands are filled, leaving an enormous surplus; and
+hence atmospheric air has no commercial value. There is nothing on earth
+of much less service to humanity than are diamonds; yet the possession
+of a pound of fair-sized diamonds would make a Croesus of a beggar. The
+dreams of the Greenbacker are but new phases of our childhood fancies of
+finding a mountain of pure gold, with which we are to make the whole
+world happy; it is conceivable to find the mountain of gold--but, alas!
+what will be its value when we have found it? Take actual money, for
+instance. Any metal might be used as money which the world should agree
+to call money, provided only that the metal is not so plentiful as to
+make it impossible to handle because of bulk, or so scarce as to make
+the unit of value impalpable. The standard may even from time to time be
+changed, if we do not object to the enormous trouble of making the
+change----"
+
+"And," I remarked, as he paused for a moment, "if we do not object to
+the robbery of either the debtor or the creditor, one or the other."
+
+"Not at all," he replied. "I assume that the change shall be fairly
+made. I have said that it would be a very great inconvenience to the
+world, and without any benefit; it would in fact be so great a task to
+make the change in our money standard that it would be practically
+impossible to make it. But we are off the track--we were not to talk of
+primary money; it was of currency, or greenbacks, that you spoke. Now it
+puzzles you as a man of sense to conceive by what process of thought
+another man of sense can bring himself to advocate unlimited inflation
+of our currency; and yet there is a very good reason why the most
+sensible man may do that very thing. Of course, my dear sir, I am aware
+that the only honest way for a government to issue unlimited currency is
+to give the stuff away, and later to repudiate it. Now, sir, I need not
+tell one like yourself, who has studied the lives of such English
+statesmen as the puissant Burke, the sagacious Pitt, the astute
+Palmerston, that ninety per cent, of the people--and it is so even in
+this glorious land of free schools and liberty--are relatively to the
+remaining ten per cent, either poor and dishonest, or poor and ignorant;
+and that none of the hundred per cent, goes into sackcloth and ashes
+when he gets something for nothing. I, sir, am--or I was until
+recently--a Jeffersonian Democrat. But our party made a great mistake a
+few years ago by sticking to the slave interest too long. I finally
+became hopeless of success at the polls. Now, when I whisper in your
+all-comprehending ear that the leaders of this Greenback Party are
+anything but Republicans, you will grasp the point. I repeat, sir, I am
+not an ass--if I do bray sometimes. All's fair in love and politics. But
+let me say to you, that the printing presses of the United States will
+never be leased by the United States Treasury, whatever party wins at
+the polls."
+
+As he closed, we entered the town. It may not be wholly lacking in
+interest to the reader when I say that, some years later, as I one
+morning sat in my library looking through the window at the far-distant
+smoke of Newcastle, I had just laid aside a copy of the _Times_, in
+which paper I had read of the results of a political contest in the
+State of Illinois. The Republicans had won. The Greenbackers and the
+Democrats had lost. Then my eye caught the name of Castleton! The doctor
+had made the race for Governor--not on the Greenback ticket, however;
+not on the Democratic ticket; but--of all things!--on the _anti-liquor
+or Prohibition ticket!_
+
+As we drew up in front of the Loomis House, Doctor Bainbridge stood on
+the sidewalk as if awaiting our return. I smiled, then nodded an
+affirmative to the question in his eyes; and stepping out of the buggy,
+I linked his arm within my own, and, thanking Doctor Castleton for his
+kindness, piloted the way to my room.
+
+
+
+
+The FIFTH Chapter
+
+
+On opening the door of my sitting-room, I found Arthur, the factotum,
+sitting in my large easy-chair, with one of my volumes of Poe in his
+hand. He had overheard part of the conversation of the preceding
+evening, and was evidently interested in "The Narrative of A. Gordon
+Pym." I observed also that a bottle of cognac which sat upon my table,
+and which I could have sworn was not more than one-fourth emptied when I
+left the hotel directly after dinner, was now quite empty. The
+atmosphere of the room was pervaded with the odor of "dead" brandy; and
+Arthur's eyes were unusually glassy and staring--for so early an hour as
+5 P.M. Then he settled the matter, beyond the shadow of a doubt, with a
+hiccough.
+
+"Well, Arthur," I said, pleasantly, as he clumsily rose in part from his
+seat--into which he dropped back, however, as he heard my kindly tone of
+address, and knew there was to be no severity of reckoning--"well, my
+boy; been enjoying yourself?"
+
+"Yes, sir," he replied, in a fairly steady voice--the words that
+followed, however, being rhythmically interrupted by an aldermanic and
+most vociferous hiccough, which shall be omitted from this record--"been
+reading about Pym and Barnard. Wasn't that awful when they saw the
+shipful of dead corpses? Just think of that ship, full of dead men--not
+one of them alive, and all dead--and the sails set, and the old ship
+wabbling around the ocean just as things might please to happen! When
+the ship got close up to their brig, and that scream came from among the
+corpses, I just jumped, myself! But wasn't it terrible when that gull
+pulled its bloody old beak out of the dead man's back, and then flew
+over the brig and dropped the piece of human flesh at poor hungry
+Parker's feet? Gee-whillikens, now! Why, it just made my blood sink in
+my heart and lungs."
+
+"Yes," I thought, "and it just made my brandy sink pretty fast in my
+bottle and down your throat." I was amused at his comments, and at
+another time might have listened longer to his talk; but now I must be
+making some arrangement with Doctor Bainbridge regarding a possible
+interview with Peters; so I said to Arthur that he might take the volume
+of Poe and keep it for two or three days, which offer he gladly
+accepted; and with an involuntary wandering of the eye toward the brandy
+bottle, he left the room.
+
+Then Bainbridge and I seated ourselves, and I described the late scene
+in Dirk Peters' room, repeating almost word for word all that had been
+said. He pondered for a few minutes, during which I could see that his
+versatile imagination was in active play. Then he said,
+
+"Well, we have him! My, my, what a discovery! This will be like reaching
+across the decrees of death and taking by the hand dear Poe himself! But
+you were hasty--as I myself might have been. Well, we must see
+Castleton--that is, you must--and get his consent for us to go right out
+and stay with Peters, if necessary for a night and a day, or even
+longer. We can take care of the poor old fellow, and watch our
+opportunity to glean from him the facts of that strange voyage, onward
+from the moment when, borne on that swift ocean current, he and Pym were
+rushed into the mystery that opened to receive them, as the
+white-shrouded figure arose in their pathway. 'Fire'--'salt'--'ice,'
+said he? I begin almost--almost to understand! Did you ever, in England,
+hear of the Peruvian tradition of an antarctic country, warm and
+delightful, peopled by a civilized--or rather by a highly enlightened
+and very mysterious race of whites? Such a tradition exists. Now, one
+day in New York, about three years ago, I allowed myself a holiday, as
+was my custom from time to time after a period of severe study. On the
+day I speak of I entered the Astor Library, and was permitted to wander
+at my pleasure among the books. I carried in my hand one of the small
+camp-stools which stood around the room, and whenever I found a book
+that particularly interested me, I would sit down and look it over. You
+understand, I was dissipating in this great treasure-house of books.
+About the middle of the afternoon I found myself in one of the most
+unfrequented of the library alcoves. There, on a shelf so high that I
+could just see over its edge as I stood on one of the library
+step-ladders, I found a strange little book, purporting to have been
+written in 1594. It had fallen down behind the other books. It had a
+leather back, well-worn; I saw that it was a 1728 Leipsic publication;
+and possibly came to the Astor Library by presentation from its wise and
+liberal founder's private library--though this is pure surmise. The book
+read much like other tales of the time, so far as its form went. I sat
+down to look at it--and I did not arise until I had read it to its end,
+some three hours later. I had not read two pages before I became
+satisfied that the book had more truth than fiction in it. To have
+assumed it wholly the work of imagination, I should have had to admit
+that the author was an artist of artists, exceeding, through his
+artfulness, in naturalness, all other fiction-writers. No; there was
+truth behind the statements in the little book--truth at second or third
+hand, but truth. Now this little book pretended to tell, and I believe
+did tell, the story of a sailor under Sir Francis Drake, who accompanied
+this English navigator on his 1577-1580 voyage. You will recall, as a
+matter of history, that, in the voyage mentioned, Sir Francis crossed
+the Atlantic, passed the Strait of Magellan, crossed the Pacific, and
+returned to England by way of the Cape of Good Hope. Now during this
+three-year voyage, the story is that he once lost his 'bearings' for a
+month; in fact, it is intimated that a hiatus of two months in his 'log'
+really did exist. This hiatus, however, could easily have been covered
+in the ship's log-book. We may conceive of reasons for which he might
+have preferred to keep a temporary silence concerning the discovery of a
+strange people, in those early, savage times. The little book said,
+that, when in the Pacific, after passing the strait, Sir Francis was for
+two weeks driven in a southerly course--a severe, and in every way most
+unusual storm prevailing. When the winds and the waves subsided, he was
+surprised to find himself looking into the mouth of a harbor, on the
+shores of which stood a city, by no means so large as London or even as
+Paris; but exceeding in grandeur the London or the Paris of that day, as
+the Paris of to-day exceeds in elegance the comparative squalor of the
+Paris of three centuries ago. According to the leather-covered little
+German book, the city was beautiful beyond comparison with any of the
+European cities of that period. I should suppose that the author thought
+of it as we do of Athens in the days of Pericles. Not much is said of
+the inhabitants, who were probably infinitely superior, socially, to the
+rough voyagers of that date. And for once the 'natives' were neither
+bullied nor 'converted,' Sir Francis departing no richer than he
+arrived, save for a few commercially valueless gifts. One thing the
+natives, it seems, insisted on: Sir Francis arrived in the city without
+knowing his longitude; and they compelled him on leaving to accept
+conditions that prevented him from finding his bearings till he was more
+than a thousand miles away. What the nature of the climate was in this
+strange city may be judged by the expressions employed in the little
+book, which, translated, were equivalent to 'perfect,' 'Eden-like,'
+'balmy,' 'delicious.' Once the author compares this antarctic city to
+Venice--admittedly to the Venice of his imagination. No; Sir Francis had
+nothing to brag of in this adventure; and in those days when to be
+physically subdued, or in a contest to fail to subdue others, was a
+humiliation or even a disgrace, he would have kept very quiet about the
+whole affair; particularly as a future navigator could not have found
+the city, even had Sir Francis told all that he knew. Now I mention
+these reports only to show you that others have thought of warm
+antarctic lands; and I could refer you to many other old stories and
+traditions, highly suggestive of inhabited lands in the Antarctic Ocean,
+on which lands a refined people dwell. I certainly expect to learn from
+Peters facts of some importance to the world, if only he does not die,
+or is not so delirious as to throw a shadow on the verity of his story,
+even if he does disclose the wonders which I most assuredly believe that
+he will if he lives but another day. Really, I am, for the first time in
+years, excited. How Castleton keeps so cool and so apparently
+indifferent over this matter, when he is always excited over what seem
+to me to be comparative nothings, I cannot comprehend. Now, sir, you
+hunt him up again--he will no doubt be in his office across the street.
+Get his consent, as I before suggested--Castleton is always obliging
+when you appeal to him directly; then take your supper, and be ready. I
+will be here at eight o'clock with my horse and a piano-box buggy. It
+will be a beautiful moonlight night, and let us not risk waiting until
+to-morrow. We will take with us some ice; also wine, beef extract, and a
+few other things intended to sustain the poor old fellow's vitality--at
+least till his story is told. We must go prepared to remain for
+twenty-four hours, or even for thirty-six hours if necessary; so have
+your overcoat ready, and I will find a couple of blankets in case we
+have to lie down. Good-by till eight."
+
+And off he went, as excited as a schoolboy at the beginning of an
+adventure. I began to think he was allowing his imaginations to pray him
+tricks--purposely allowing himself to be deceived, as a child that is
+nearing the age of reason still delights in the old fairy tales and the
+Santa Claus myth, long after its mind has penetrated the deception.
+Still, in the end it proved we were very far--very far indeed from being
+upon an idle quest.
+
+By eight o'clock I had obtained Doctor Castleton's consent that
+Bainbridge and I might visit Peters, and remain as long as we should
+desire.
+
+"I will run out myself, early in the morning," said Castleton, "and do
+what I can to keep life in the old man. Don't let Bainbridge get into
+the old fellow any of his newfangled, highfalutin remedies--if you do, I
+will not answer for the consequences. I don't say that Bainbridge will
+not in time--in time, mark you--be a dazzling therapeutist; but not
+until experience has modified his views, and shown him that Rome was not
+built in a day, nor with a toothpick, either. Don't tell him what I say,
+please--I wouldn't like to hurt his young feelings, you know."
+
+When Doctor Bainbridge drove up in front of the hotel, I was waiting for
+him; and we were soon on our way toward the Peters domicile.
+
+
+
+
+The SIXTH Chapter
+
+
+The time required by Doctor Castleton to reach the home of Dirk Peters
+had been about forty minutes; the time required by Doctor Bainbridge was
+two and one-half times forty minutes, or only twenty minutes short of
+two hours. Bainbridge drove a single horse, a beautiful, large, dappled
+bay--an excellent animal, which, as most horses do, had learned those of
+his master's ways that bore relation to his own interests. Bainbridge
+was a lover of animals, as Castleton was not; Castleton was an admirer
+of horses for their action, whilst with Bainbridge the welfare of his
+horse was everything, and he never drove rapidly without a particular
+and pressing necessity.
+
+So we drove along in a leisurely way, conversing of Dirk Peters and the
+Pym story, until we had arranged a plan of action for drawing out of the
+old man an account of that voyage, the mere thought of which, coming
+suddenly upon him, had affected him in the terrible manner which I had
+that afternoon witnessed. Doctor Bainbridge explained to me that the
+wild demonstrations made by Peters and described by me were a result,
+not so much of any thought of those adventures on which he must have
+pondered thousands of times in the forty-eight or forty-nine intervening
+years, as it was of the manner in which the thoughts or mental pictures
+had been brought to his mind.
+
+"I need only remind you," he said, "of a single mental characteristic
+within the experience of almost every person, to make this matter clear,
+and to indicate what our course with the old man must be, and why I said
+to you to come prepared for a long stay. Suppose, for instance, a woman
+to have lost her husband through some extremely painful accident, his
+death being not only sudden but of a horrifying nature, and that several
+years have elapsed since she was widowed. Now, she has thought the
+matter over ten thousand times, as the suggestion to do so entered her
+mind by a hundred different routes, as, for instance, by the seeing of
+something that her husband in life possessed, or by the drift of her own
+thought bringing her to the subject by association or by indirect paths
+of suggestion. Every day her mind has many times pictured the horrible
+scene of death, until she is dry-eyed and passive amid a storm of sad
+ideas. But now, after all these years, bring to her mind, suddenly and
+by a strange route of suggestion, the same old horror--let a voice, and
+particularly the voice of a stranger, remind her of the terrible
+scene--and immediately the demonstration follows: the sobs of anguish,
+the tears, all, as on the day of the accident. It is the method of
+approach--the mode of suggestion when the fact is known but latent in
+consciousness, that is responsible for the nervous demonstration. In
+another instance, visual suggestion might have a similar result and
+audible suggestion be harmless. I anticipate no serious obstruction in
+the path to Peters' confidence. Patience, care, deliberate action--the
+fact ever in mind that 'The more haste the less speed,' and we shall win
+the prize for which we strive."
+
+As we drove along in the bright moonlight, after we had determined on
+our "method of approach" to Peters' mind, I felt confident that with the
+knowledge and tact of Bainbridge we should certainly succeed in our
+efforts; and I began to think along other lines. The friendly manner in
+which I had been treated by all whom I had met in America, from the
+millionaire coal operator down to the bell-boy, came into my thoughts. I
+had not been treated as a foreigner, except to my own advantage, the
+older residents of the town seeming to look upon me more as they might
+look upon a man from another State of the Union. In America, even the
+inland towns are cosmopolitan, while in England only the larger cities
+and seaport towns have that characteristic. I was therefore able to
+judge of certain questions not only from hearsay, but from actual
+observation. I noticed, for example, that among the American
+working-classes there existed a feeling of repugnance for the Chinaman.
+Of the lower-class Italian, everybody thought enough to keep out of his
+reach after dark. Germans and Irishmen were numerous, and each
+individual was taken on his own merits. The English were universally
+liked, wherever I went. True, there was a little tendency to allude to
+the glories of Bunker Hill and the like; but this tendency was evinced
+in a manner rather amusing than objectionable to an Englishman. If there
+exists in the American heart a drop of bitterness for the English, I
+never discovered it. I am writing now of the American-born American. I
+gathered the idea that Frenchmen, as seen in America, were scarcely
+taken seriously; though all Americans have been systematically educated
+to respect and admire the French Nation. Of Spaniards, the prevalent
+idea seemed to be that they were better at arm's length. (Anglo-Saxon
+literature has been very unkind to the Spaniard.) I did not meet an
+American that seemed to hate anybody--I do not conceive it possible for
+an American to harbor the feeling of hatred.
+
+As we jogged along, the idea entered my mind that I would, when I
+returned home, write a treatise on "American Manners and Customs." "No
+doubt," I said to myself, "I can in the next few minutes procure from
+Bainbridge enough facts to make quite a book." I afterward abandoned the
+intention; but at that moment my mind was filled with it. So I decided
+to ask my companion a few leading questions, noting well his replies.
+"And I will first," I determined within myself, "inquire into the mooted
+point concerning the existence of an aristocratic feeling in the United
+States. Some of our English writers on 'American Manners and Customs,'
+and our most acute analysts of American character, say that the
+Americans are great snobs, and are only too glad to claim the possession
+of even the most distant aristocratic connection;" so I broached the
+subject to Bainbridge.
+
+"It interests me to convince you," he began, in reply, "that in the
+United States there is scarcely a vestige of aristocratic feeling. In
+fact as in theory, there is in this country but one class of people.
+Such supposed barriers as wealth and political position are only
+partitions of paper--relative nothings. I do not mention heredity,
+because in the United States all attempts to establish a family line
+result in the family rotting before it gets ripe. The only pretence to
+hereditary pride which we have here, exists in two States; in one of
+them some four or five hundred persons cannot forget that their
+forefathers got to shore before somebody else; and in the other a few
+families still dispute over the threadbare question of whose
+great-great-grandmother cost the most pounds of tobacco. Now,
+candidly--is this sufficient to justify a reproach from Europe that we
+are striving to claim or to create an aristocracy?
+
+"And then there is that other reproach--we're such outrageous
+tuft-hunters. I shall not deny having seen an American run himself out
+of breath to get a peep at a duke, but I never knew an American spend
+money to see one, unless the American was too beastly rich to care for
+money at all. And then, hereditary nobles do not wear well here. Let a
+visiting duke be followed within a year by anything less than a king,
+and the visitor will fail to excite anybody out of a walk. You must not
+in England judge of this subject from the effect on our people of a
+certain not remote visit; for the people of the United States have a
+feeling of respect and affection for the present royal family of Great
+Britain which no other royal family or individual, past or present, has
+ever produced. Hum, hum! Our people mean well; but curiosity and
+imitation will not die out of the human race till an inch or two more of
+the spinal column drops off."
+
+Still with a view to the gathering of facts for my intended treatise, I
+asked Bainbridge to explain in what distinctive manner the people of the
+United States were benefited by a republican form of government. He
+replied that he knew nothing worth mentioning of the science of
+government, and had never been outside of the United States.
+
+"But," he continued, "I can tell you something of what the whole people
+of this country enjoy. And to begin with, there is, as I have intimated,
+in the United States but one class of people, aside from the criminal
+class common to all lands, and that vicious but not relatively numerous
+element which lives on the borderland between respectability and actual
+crime. This truth seems sometimes to be questioned in Europe--why, I can
+but guess. Who would attempt to enter the nurseries and schoolrooms of
+our land today, and, by inquiring as to the parentage of the children,
+select from among them any approximation to those from whom are to come,
+in twenty or thirty years, the men that shall then govern our States,
+sit in our National Congress, direct our army and navy, and control our
+commerce? I have heard that in Europe it is rather the exception for a
+son to reach exalted position when the father has earned a living by
+manual labor. In the United States this is not the exception, but the
+rule. At this moment the positions alluded to are here filled by the
+sons of poor fathers. With us, inherited wealth appears to be rather a
+detriment than an aid to political advancement of more than a petty
+kind. 'And yet,' you may say, 'your people are not always satisfied.' No
+advancing, upward-looking people is ever satisfied. With such a people,
+too, the demagogue is a natural product; and the demagogue period of
+this country is at hand. But there will never be a tom-fool revolution
+in this fair land. The people here know that when they have universal
+suffrage and majority rule they've pulled the last hair out of the end
+of the cat's tail for them."
+
+I made a remark, to which Bainbridge replied:
+
+"Yes, we managed to finish up a pretty fair revolution here some twelve
+years ago; but that revolution was caused by a disagreement about the R.
+of B. Now----"
+
+"Pardon me," I said "but what was the 'R. of B?'"
+
+"Oh, excuse me," he answered. "The R. of B. was the Relic of Barbarism,
+human slavery--the only relic the United States has ever had, too."
+
+I prided myself that the material for my book was piling up at a great
+rate; and I determined to persevere.
+
+"How about the feeling of dislike of Americans for the English, of which
+we have heard so much in England?" I asked. "Not that I have had any
+evidence of such a feeling."
+
+"That is a plant which has finally withered away in spite of some
+careful artificial cultivation. The politician who shall attempt to
+build on any such feeling against England (a statesman will never desire
+to make the attempt) will soon learn his mistake. Oh, I suppose it
+pleases some Americans to think we got the best of our mother in
+1783--such a big, strong, wealthy mother, too. A little bit of talk
+doesn't hurt her any, and it does some of us a heap of good. When a boy
+runs away from home, half the glory and fun is in being missed; and if
+the folks at home won't say they miss him, why, he must say all the
+louder that they are mourning over the loss. But I will say to you--and
+I say it with the fullest conviction of its truth--that the people of
+the United States could not in any way be induced to take up arms
+against Great Britain, save in their own undivided interest.
+Individually, as you already know, I love England--not England's fops,
+but her people; I love the literature of England, I love her memories, I
+esteem and admire her well-executed laws. The literature of England has
+been my mental food from boyhood--aye, almost from infancy; and her
+memories, her memories! I think of London as Macaulay must have thought
+of Athens. Decent Americans--that is, a majority--don't listen to jingo
+politicians; and new arrivals with a grievance against England are left
+to the _vis medicatrix naturæ_. There'll never be another war between
+England and the United States. Our Anglo-Saxon element think normally;
+and the vast majority of our German citizens have always been on the
+sensible and morally right side of national questions--there's nothing
+long-haired or cranky about them. I like the Germans because they don't
+hanker after the unknown. I believe that most reading Americans--that is
+to say three-fourths of all--feel toward England as Irving and Hawthorne
+did.--But, from your description, that must be the home of Peters, just
+ahead of us."
+
+He was right; and we stopped in front of the old sailor's house. An aged
+man, apparently a coal miner, came to the door as our buggy stopped. We
+called him to us and inquired concerning Peters, who he told us was
+quietly sleeping. Then we asked with regard to stabling accommodations,
+and learned that Peters had an old unused stable, the last old horse
+that he had owned having preceded its master into the beyond. The old
+miner offered to care for our horse; so we gathered up our supplies, and
+entered the little log house that contained so much of interest for us.
+We found Peters asleep.
+
+Making ourselves as comfortable as circumstances would permit, we
+awaited developments. At about midnight Peters awoke. He asked for a
+drink of water, which was given to him. His voice was feeble, and I saw
+that Bainbridge felt doubtful as to the length of time that Peters might
+remain alive and be able to talk intelligently. But after we had given
+him a little diluted port, and followed it with a cup of prepared beef
+extract, his actions betokened less weakness, his voice in particular
+gaining in strength. The poor old fellow had been of necessity much
+neglected, and our efforts to arouse him met with decidedly good
+results. All through the night we gratified every want which he
+expressed, and attended to every need of his that our own minds could
+suggest. No attempt was made to draw from him any information concerning
+his strange voyage; but, on the advice of Bainbridge, we occasionally
+spoke aloud to each other, and now and then to Peters himself--always on
+indifferent topics. This was done to familiarize the old sailor with our
+voices; and as far as we could do so without any possible injury to him,
+we kept a light in the room, that he should become accustomed to our
+appearance. From time to time Bainbridge would step to the bedside, and
+place his hand on the old man's forehead; and later he would every now
+and then put an arm about the invalid's body, and raise him up to take a
+swallow of nourishment or wine.
+
+Before morning, Bainbridge had reached a stage of familiarity that
+permitted him to sit on the edge of Peters' bed and talk to the old
+fellow briefly and quietly about his farm, and of Doctor Castleton's
+goodness and ability, and on other subjects presumably interesting to
+the invalid. Bainbridge would gently pat the poor old man on a shoulder,
+and smooth his head--somewhat as one does in making the acquaintance of
+a big dog. By morning Peters was thoroughly accustomed to our presence;
+and he seemed to take our watchfulness as a matter of course, and even
+to look for our attentions as a kind of right. He had slept several
+hours through the night, and at five o'clock was awake and seemingly
+much improved. Not the slightest delirium, even of the passive form--in
+fact, nothing of a nature that could alarm or disconcert us, had
+occurred. Bainbridge had mentioned eight o'clock as about the time he
+would broach the subject of subjects to Peters, intending, as a matter
+of course, to lead up to it by very tactful gradations, passing from
+journeys in the abstract to the journeys in the concrete, thence to sea
+voyages, and thence, perhaps, to some mention of recent arctic (not
+antarctic) explorations; and then, asking no questions yet, to proceed
+to a mention of Nantucket, from which vantage ground the propriety of
+risking a mention of the name Barnard would be considered. If up to this
+point all went well, a more pointed question or allusion might well be
+risked--the brig Grampus, for instance, might be named; and then,
+without more delay than should be necessary for Peters' rest, we might
+hope to elicit the whole story of that wonderful voyage of discovery,
+the evidence of the completion of which certainly appeared to be before
+our eyes in the form of Dirk Peters, the returned voyager to the South
+Pole, in person.
+
+At six o'clock we prepared our own breakfast, and enjoyed it, sweetened
+as it was by a night in the pure country air, and seasoned with the
+anticipation of marvellous discoveries, involving the mysteries of a
+strange land, no doubt teeming with amazing surprises, and, as we felt
+that we had reason to believe, peopled by a race of beings with customs
+and attributes extremely wonderful.
+
+We had just arisen from our breakfast when a buggy drove rapidly up to
+the house, and stopped; and we heard the voice of Doctor Castleton,
+shouting something to the old miner, who had gone forth a moment before
+to care for Bainbridge's horse.
+
+
+
+
+The SEVENTH Chapter
+
+
+Doctor Castleton entered the sick-room with his usual impetuosity,
+saluting us jointly in an off-hand but courteous manner as he crossed
+the floor to the bedside of Peters, and took one of the invalid's wrists
+in his hand.
+
+"Ah," he said; "better! The quinine of yesterday has done its work; the
+bed-time dose of calomel has gone through the liver and stirred up that
+enemy of human health and happiness, the bile; and the morning dose of
+salts will, beyond a peradventure, soon be heard from. Now we will throw
+the whiskey toddy into him, and plenty of it, too; and--yes, we'll go on
+with the quinine, repeat the calomel to-night, and have him ready for
+something else by to-morrow."
+
+Now I never like to mention doubtful incidents in such a manner as to
+suggest my own belief in them; but I then suspected, and I am now
+morally certain, that Doctor Bainbridge had, in assuming the care of
+Peters, failed to execute medical orders, and had administered only
+remedies or pretended remedies of his own, so as to prevent Peters,
+myself, and the attending physician from detecting any omissions. This,
+I am aware, is a terrible charge to make--still, I make it: Peters did
+not get a fourth, if any, of the medicines left for him by Doctor
+Castleton during the time that Bainbridge cared for the old man.
+
+But if Bainbridge had, with the intention of prolonging the life of
+Peters, and with greater confidence in his own professional judgment
+than in that of Castleton, omitted the remedies prescribed, it was soon
+apparent that the deception might prove in vain. I have already
+intimated that the older physician's perceptions and intuitions were so
+quick as sometimes to appear almost uncanny; and after asking a question
+or two, he began to pour upon a square of white paper, from a small vial
+which he took from one of his vest pockets, a very heavy white powder;
+and we soon perceived that the powder was to be poured from the paper to
+the invalid's tongue. Bainbridge was interested in Peters--not only
+selfishly and with a motive to learn the facts of the old sailor's
+strange voyage; but he was also interested in the poor old wreck for the
+sake of the man himself. I saw that in the opinion of Bainbridge, if
+that white powder were administered to the invalid it would injure
+him--probably weaken him, and cause a relapse, and perhaps even an
+earlier death than otherwise might occur; and I saw that Bainbridge was
+really apprehensive and annoyed. At last he suggested to Castleton to
+delay the administration of the intended remedy, if only for a few
+hours. And when Castleton called attention to his own view of the
+necessity for quick action, involving the instant administration of the
+dose, it would obviously have been so unwise to contradict him, that
+Bainbridge did not risk such a course. But, over-anxious to gain his
+point, he did something still more impolitic. He suggested a remedy of
+his own by which, he said, Peters would speedily be relieved--a new
+drug, I believe, or at least a remedy not known to Castleton. For a
+moment I looked for an explosion of offended dignity; but Castleton
+controlled his first impulse, and, not looking at Bainbridge, he centred
+his apparent attention wholly upon myself, and with exceedingly grave
+vigor, said,
+
+"I, sir, am a member of the Clare County Medical Society--I was once
+President of that learned body, and have since then for seven
+consecutive years been its Secretary--my penmanship being illegible to
+the other members, and often to myself, preventing many disagreements,
+by precluding a successful reference to the minutes of past meetings.
+Now, sir, tell me, as man to man, can I consult with, or listen to
+suggestions--even to suggestions, though worthy of a gigantic
+intellect--can I listen to suggestions coming from the mentality of a
+non-member of our learned body? Before replying, let me say that our
+society is known throughout all of Egypt--that is, you know, Egypt,
+Illinois. When a medical savant in Paris, or Leipsig, or London, alleges
+a discovery, we determine the questions of its originality and its
+value--the chief purpose of our meeting, however, being to present our
+own discoveries. Now, sir, I appeal to you whether our rules should or
+should not be strictly obeyed--and the second clause of section three of
+those rules and regulations--an ethical necessity, and found in the
+ethical codes of all well-regulated medical societies the world
+over--says that a member shall not meet in consultation a non-member,
+even to save a human life--a decidedly remote possibility."
+
+He paused. Neither Bainbridge nor I spoke. In fact, an expression of our
+thoughts would have been wholly unnecessary, as Castleton appeared to
+comprehend what was in our minds, as shown by his continued remarks.
+
+"'Liberality,'" you may say: "True, there should be liberality in this
+eternal world. Individually we _are_ liberal--we _are_ gentlemen; but it
+is different with us when you take us as a body. I am for harmony. I
+admit that at our meetings we do sometimes fight like very devils--life
+is a conflict, anyway. Sir, the country is full of cursed heresies and
+growing schisms.--But let me ask--not the doctor here, whom I respect
+for his immense learning and Cyclopsian (I mean large--not single-eyed)
+wisdom--what _his_ remedy would be? I ask you, sir, not him."
+
+Here Doctor Castleton stepped close to my side, and speaking into my ear
+in a ghastly whisper, said, "The ass isn't Regular!" He then drew back,
+and looked at me as if expecting astonishment on my part.
+
+I then exchanged a few words with Bainbridge, and informed Castleton of
+the result. "Ah, ha--ah, ha--indeed," he said, with as near an approach
+to sarcasm as was possible with him. "So my learned young friend thinks
+that an organ--the liver--weighing nearly four pounds is to be moved
+with a hundredth of a drop of--of--anything! Damn it, sir, am I awake?"
+
+"Ask Doctor Castleton, sir, what portion of a grain of small-pox virus
+it would require to disseminate over a whole county, if not checked, a
+dread disease? Ask him from what an oak-tree grows?"
+
+"Ask him," said Castleton, "how long it takes an acorn to act. In this
+case we require celerity of action--force and penetration."
+
+"Ask him," said Bainbridge, "if the solar rays have celerity, and force,
+and penetration; and how much they weigh. It requires fine shot to bring
+down the essence of a disease----"
+
+"Tell him," shouted Castleton, "that the liver is a mammoth that
+requires a twenty-four-pounder to penetrate its hide. We don't hunt the
+rhinoceros with bird-shot."
+
+"Say to the gentleman," said Bainbridge, slightly flushed, but still
+with dignity, "that in this case the animal is not to be slaughtered,
+but to be cured."
+
+"Damme," said Castleton, "who says slaughtered?--Have I, a surgeon of
+renown, a gentleman and a scholar, a member of the County Society, sunk
+so low that I can be called a murderer? Stop--stop where you are--stop
+in time. Say to the Gentleman that he has gone too far--say that an
+apology is in order--say that he treads the edge of a living crater. I
+am dangerous--so my friends say--devilish dangerous"--a smile crossed
+the face of Bainbridge; and even so slight and transient an appearance
+as a passing smile was not lost on Castleton, though he seemed to be
+looking another way--"I mean dangerous on the field of honor. Quackery,
+sir, is my abhorrence----"
+
+"Come, come, gentlemen," I said, "you are allowing your professional
+_amour propre_ to mislead you. Now," I continued, assuming an air of
+_bonhomie_, "it seems to me, an outsider, that this whole difference
+might easily be adjusted. Doctor Castleton here advocates firing
+twenty-four-pound balls into the patient, and Doctor Bainbridge suggests
+peppering the invalid with bird-shot. There is certainly room between
+the bowlders for the bird-shot to slip, and the one will not interfere
+with the other--I say, give both. Doctor Castleton advises that the dose
+be immediately given, whilst Doctor Bainbridge appears to think four or
+five hours hence the better time. I suggest a compromise: let them be
+given an hour or two hence. There seems to be also some obstacle in the
+way of one of you giving the other's medicine--so let me administer
+both the remedies. Now what possible objection can be advanced to this?"
+
+They both laughed; and as Castleton would be on his way home in a few
+moments, Bainbridge was thoroughly pleased with my proposal. Castleton
+tacitly consented, and in half a minute seemed to have forgotten the
+episode--or, at most, gave indication of remembrance only by an apparent
+desire to be over-agreeable to Bainbridge. A moment later he said to me,
+
+"My dear sir, I hastened my visit here this morning out of consideration
+for yourself. Last evening after you had departed, Mr. ---- called at
+the Loomis House to see you. I happened to meet him as, in some
+disappointment at having missed you, he was leaving the hotel, where he
+had learned that you might be gone for two days. I then offered to
+deliver any message that he should send to you, this morning. When he
+was informed that you were but ten miles away, in the country, he said
+that his business with you was pressing; and he asked if it would be
+possible for you to return to town for a few hours this morning. Then I
+said that I would convey to you his wishes, and that if you so desired
+you could be at your hotel before nine o'clock--at which hour he said he
+would call at the Loomis House, with the hope of meeting you."
+
+I thanked the doctor; and after consulting Bainbridge, said I would
+avail myself of the offer to return at once to Bellevue. I appreciated
+that it would be Bainbridge and not I who would have to manage Peters.
+It was a disappointment to think of missing Peters' story at first-hand;
+but I hoped to return by the middle of the afternoon, and I knew that
+Bainbridge could repeat with accuracy all that the old sailor should
+say. I doubted whether Bainbridge could extract very much from the old
+man's senile intellect before my return, as the aged voyager was, both
+in mind and body, quite feeble, and of little endurance. Besides, when
+once started and warmed to his subject--and very little information
+could be gained till he was so started--he would no doubt be garrulous.
+
+Doctor Castleton and I started for town at a brisk trot, the doctor
+having parted from Bainbridge in the best of humors. His last words,
+shouted back as we drove off, were, "Don't forget the calomel at
+nine-thirty, doctor; and add to the treatment whatever you may think
+best. I trust you implicitly. Send me word if you need help."
+
+Strange man! So pleasant, and so harsh; so grand, and so ignoble; so
+great, and so small; so broad, and so narrow; so kind, and so unkind. As
+my mind ran along in this channel, I wondered how one and the same man
+could express the views that he had proclaimed in connection with his
+medical association, and yet speak of life and death as he had spoken to
+me on the day preceding. What did he really believe? Could the
+actor-temperament, displaying itself on most occasions, in connection
+with a display at times of his natural self, as we say, account for all
+his eccentricities?
+
+As we fairly flew along the forest road, nearing our destination by a
+mile in each three minutes, we came to the only hill on the entire route
+which was considerable, both in extent and in degree of gradient. Doctor
+Castleton allowed the gait of his horses to slacken into a slow walk;
+and--ever nervous, ever active--he reached into the side pocket of his
+linen duster, and drew forth a small book, apparently fresh from the
+publisher.
+
+"'The Mistakes of the Gods, and Other Lectures,'" he said, looking at
+the back of the volume, and reading its title. "Ah, 'The Gods.' The
+title, sir, almost tells the whole story; and so far as you and I are
+concerned, it is almost a waste of time for us to open the book--and a
+crime against themselves for ignorant men to do so."
+
+"The author must be one of your 'holy terrors' that I hear mentioned," I
+said. "A Western 'bad man' no doubt. Sad! sad! is it not?"
+
+"Oh, no, no; the author is not a cowboy--he's a perfect gentleman--as
+polished as I am; and there's nothing very sad in the book. It contains
+several lectures in the line of agnostic agitation, which were from time
+to time delivered by a very talented, but, as I think, mistaken man.
+When I say mistaken, I do not mean mistaken in the sense that our church
+people might apply the term to him; for our church people seem to
+misunderstand him, almost as greatly as he misapprehends the purposes of
+nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxon Christian workers. But mark my words,
+sir, you will soon, in England, hear of this young 'infidel' lecturer;
+for with his keen brain, his invincible logic, his concise and beautiful
+rhetoric, he will soon be recognized as the most popular living
+agnostic. His home is not far distant from Bellevue, and I have
+frequently heard him lecture. I think him the best platform orator I
+have ever listened to, though I have twice been charmed by the eloquence
+of Phillips, and a dozen times by that of Beecher. I shall not outrage
+your own and my own manhood by alluding to anything which the more
+partisan church people say of this brilliant agnostic; and I say what I
+do, only because in your distant home you may some day wonder just what
+is behind an agnostic demonstration such as he is leading up to, and
+which is certain to centralize the dissatisfied spirit of the country
+into an anti-church propaganda of no mean proportions. I am opposed to
+such a movement; but I believe in truth as the only durable weapon, and
+I love truth for truth's sake--I should refuse to enter the gateway of
+heaven if liars were admitted. I cannot go into the history of this man,
+but this much is fact: There are reasons which cause him to believe that
+in striking at Christianity he is performing a highly praiseworthy
+action. In this belief he is as sincere and as enthusiastic in his cold
+logical way, as is any Christian in _his_ belief. If duplicity were
+possible to this man--or if he could have found it consistent with his
+sense of right even to keep silence concerning his opinion on religious
+subjects--he would by this time have been Governor of Illinois; and,
+with his ability, there is no elective office in the country to which he
+might not aspire with reasonable certainty of success. He himself is
+aware of all this, as are all who know him. At the early age of
+thirty-three, before his views were generally known, he was our
+Attorney-General. No political party will ever again dare to nominate
+him for an office."
+
+"This is all wrong," I said; "it savors of religious persecution."
+
+"True," said Castleton, "it does; but the fact is as I state it. He
+would if he ran for office lose enough votes from his own party to allow
+his opponent to win."
+
+"But, my dear doctor," I said, "I fail to catch your reasons for
+thinking this man mistaken. You surely would not have him be untrue to
+himself?"
+
+"Oh, no--never that! I mean that he is intellectually mistaken in
+thinking that the world is still to be benefited by agnostic agitation
+among the masses. Voltaire had a good reason for proclaiming and
+teaching his views, because in France, in his day, religious infidelity
+was necessary to political liberty. Tom Paine had a good reason for his
+course, because Christianity, misrepresented at that time by mistaken or
+corrupt men, was arrayed on the side of the despot, and so continued up
+to the beginning of the French Revolution. But this man has no good
+excuse for a fight against church influence in the United States, now in
+1877. The influence of the Christian church is now certainly exerted for
+good, and does not attempt to restrict the liberty of any man, or of
+society."
+
+"But did you not just say that this agnostic's views would forever
+prevent his election to public office, here in this great free country,
+in the year 1877 and onward?"
+
+"We cannot have a free country and not allow a man to vote against
+another, even if his vote were influenced by the cut of a candidate's
+trousers."
+
+"Yes," I said; "but if the cut of a candidate's trousers influenced a
+man's vote, such a man would be a good object for education. Your
+agnostic would no doubt say that the influence of church is to be fought
+so long as it judges of a man's capability to do one thing well by his
+opinion on a totally different subject."
+
+"You will never educate the people out of their prejudices; but I myself
+should vote against this man because his course shows his views to be
+inconsistent with statesmanship. No person desires to restrict another's
+individual opinions; we only combat this man's because of their effects,
+as he combats those of his opponents. There are as many agnostics,
+proportionally, that would not vote for a Presbyterian, for instance,
+for public office, as there are Presbyterians who, under like
+circumstances, would not vote for an agnostic."
+
+"But in what way does the belief, or want of belief, of an agnostic,
+prevent an otherwise able man from being a statesman?" I asked.
+
+"No doubt some of the best statesmen living are agnostics; but they are
+not agnostic agitators. Men who are able to digest and assimilate
+agnostic opinions, are able to initiate those ideas for themselves; and
+only men who are able to properly digest and assimilate such ideas
+should have them at all."
+
+"Can you," I asked, "state an instance in which what you indicate as
+premature education of the masses in agnostic ideas, might lead to
+injury to the persons so instructed, or to society at large?"
+
+"Yes, sir, I can. Your ignorant American--the 'cracker' element of the
+South, your ignorant Italian, and your ignorant Irishman are injured by
+taking away their religious beliefs. The first of these, when church
+people, dress neatly, are honorable, and have some upward-tending
+ambitions; whilst those of them that are infidels are reduced--men and
+women--to a state of ambitionless inertia and tobacco saturation--if no
+worse. The two latter are either under religious control, or under
+secret-society control. If the lower-class Irishman or Italian,
+unendowed with judgment to rightly use the little knowledge he already
+possesses--to properly interpret his own feelings or guide his own
+impulses--has not his church with its priestly control, he will have his
+secret-society with its secret executive control, its bovine fury, and
+its senseless pertinacity, the poison-bowl and the dagger. For my part,
+if a man must either seek liberty from ambush, and learn independence
+through treachery, or else be on his knees before a graven image, suited
+to his mental calibre--let us keep him on his knees till he can rise to
+something better than murder. Why, sir, an Irish Republican (a
+rarity)--an editor, once said to me that some of our Irish emigrants
+have hair on their teeth when they get to America; and, though I may be
+wrong, I never see an Italian organ-grinder without first thinking of a
+dagger between my ribs, and then settling down to a comfortable feeling
+that if the fellow's a Catholic the confessional stands between me and
+such a danger. The man who attempts to teach such fellows about complete
+liberty should be responsible for any consequent acts."
+
+"Still, doctor," I said, "the road to universal knowledge cannot be all
+smooth. Ground must be broken by somebody. If there is anything in
+Christianity that bars the way to final freedom of mind for the whole
+human race, then I myself say, clear away the obstructions--the work
+cannot begin too soon or continue too vigorously."
+
+"I see nothing in true Christianity but good for the human race--surely
+you speak only to call out my own views. If there is anything in any
+church policy or polity which requires reforming, let it be reformed."
+
+"Excuse me, doctor," I said; "but I had thought you yourself an
+agnostic. Do you not think that if a religion will not bear the test of
+cold reason, it should be discarded from the lives of men?"
+
+"No, I do not. The human mind is not comprised in intellect alone--it
+has its moral or emotional side, wholly apart from reason. Religion is
+not to be reasoned about--it is to be felt. No founder of a religion
+ever claimed for it a place in man's reason. Now just think for a
+minute. Let us leave the ignorant, and consider what the best of men
+are--men who have attained a mental cultivation certainly as great as
+will ever be possible to the masses. Take the very highest society in
+England and America--to what extent are its members controlled by
+_reason_, and to what extent by _feeling_ and by the fixed sentiments
+growing out of feeling? Ratiocination does not influence one of their
+actions in a million. There is not within my knowledge a single instance
+where a purely rational conception has been the basis of practice, in
+opposition to feeling."
+
+"Surely," I said, "you do not mean to say that educated men are not
+governed in the main by reason?"
+
+"I mean just what I say--that I do not know, in practice, a single
+instance in which they are so governed in opposition to feeling. Pshaw,
+pshaw! young man; if we are to compel the acts of practical daily life
+to conform with a dialectic demonstration of what is best for us--to do
+only what is in reason best for us--we must simply cease to live, though
+we do continue to breathe. Even in physics, of what use are logical
+demonstrations, when the premises are only a foundation more unstable
+than quicksand--purely provisional?
+
+"Now if these agnostics were truthful--which they try to be; and were
+consistent--which they are not, they would be in a trying situation.
+Reason shows no advantage to a man in kissing his wife; he has no
+syllogistic endorsement for supporting her and the children; in fact, he
+has no business to have children--all the result of feeling or
+sentiment, all rubbish, and beneath the intellect of a man who worships
+Pure Reason! And if the demands of man's moral or affectional nature are
+a reason for such indulgences, then his aspirations to the great primal
+cause of the known, the unknown, and (to us here and now) unknowable
+wonders and mysteries of the universe without, and of ourselves within,
+is also justifiable in reason, and ought not by wit and eloquence to be
+juggled out of the ingenuous mind. The masses are governed by religion,
+directly and indirectly, to an extent much greater than at first thought
+appears. The daily life of the agnostic himself is shaped by his
+Christian heredity and environment. Now our Author furnishes no
+substitute for this intuitive demand of being. If reason can supply
+nothing in place of religion, why not allow those who possess religious
+conviction to retain so agreeable, and to others beneficial, a
+belief?--Now right here I can detect the voice of the agnostic
+agitator--this is his strongest situation, and he simply smiles when you
+make this opening for him. The voice says, 'Agreeable? Agreeable to burn
+forever in hell? Well, well, my friend--our ideas of pleasure differ.'
+This is sophistical twaddle. It is not the Christian that suffers from a
+fear of hell--it is the sinner, through his guilty conscience.
+Conscience, conscience; the only barrier between us and hell on earth!
+Christians are comforted by the thought of a loving Christ--Christians,
+in my experience, do not suffer."
+
+"Why, sir," I said, "I cannot but wonder that you are not yourself a
+professed Christian."
+
+"Never mind me, young man.--But here we are on the edge of town. I
+could, if I wanted to, preach a sermon capable of converting every
+heathen within sound of my voice. Once, at a camp-meeting, I did preach
+a sermon; and I tell you, the old people looked mighty sober, and the
+younger and more susceptible of my auditors covered their faces with
+their hands and seemed to shake with grief and contrition. But, pshaw,
+pshaw; people don't go to hear either witty agnostics lecture, or
+preachers preach, to get something for their brain-boxes to reason
+about. Believe me "--tapping the volume, still in his hand--"this sort
+of thing won't make anybody reason. After all, the question is one of
+swapping off Christ for an Illinois lawyer."
+
+
+
+
+The EIGHTH Chapter
+
+
+It lacked half an hour of nine o'clock as we drove up before the Loomis
+House, where I alighted, and ran up to my rooms. I had scarcely more
+than made a hasty toilet, when Arthur came in. After telling me who had,
+during my absence, called to see me, and after attending to some
+trifling wants which I expressed, he shuffled his feet in a style that I
+had learned to recognize as indicating a desire to say something not
+within the compass of our purely business relationship--a liberty which
+the precedents of our first two days of acquaintanceship in connection
+with later events had solidified into a vested right.
+
+"Well, Arthur?" I said.
+
+"I read the whole book, sir--there it is, on the table. That book just
+did get me. But what did become of Pym and Peters? And is it true you've
+found that old soc-doligin' pirate?"
+
+I told him that Peters was found.
+
+"Well, now!" he continued. "I'd like to see the old four-foot-eighter.
+But if you love me, tell me what that white curtain reachin' down from
+the sky was, and what made the ocean bilin' hot? What made them
+ante-artic niggers so 'fraid of everything white, and what was the
+hiryglificks on the black marble meant to say? And, most of all, who was
+the female that stood in the way of the boat? Say--I don't blame
+anybody--but if Mr. Poe knowed he didn't know these points, what did he
+get our mouths waterin' for? Did you find out these points yet?"
+
+I explained to him that probably at that very moment Doctor Bainbridge
+was sitting on the edge of Dirk Peters' cot, drinking in the wonderful
+story; and that as soon as a certain gentleman had called to see me, I
+expected to return to Peters' house, and to remain until we knew all.
+
+"Go slow," said Arthur, "and don't fall down on any importing points.
+Better take time, and catch everything. I asked Doctor Castleton last
+night what made that ocean bile; and he said he guessed the mouth of
+hell was down that way, and Satin had just opened the door to air out.
+That's him; if it ain't heaven it's got to be hell. But how old Peters
+ever lived this long with Castleton monkeyin' with him is a mighty funny
+thing.--But who's that?"
+
+A rap had sounded on my door. My caller had arrived.
+
+I did not succeed in getting back to Bainbridge and Peters so soon as I
+had expected. My business in the town dragged along far into the
+evening, and it was nine o'clock by the time I was at liberty. At ten
+o'clock I sent for a conveyance, and was driven to Peters' house, where
+I arrived just before midnight.
+
+I found Peters sleeping soundly, and Bainbridge dozing in a chair. My
+entrance aroused Bainbridge. He arose, smiling, and was apparently glad
+to see me. I saw at a glance that he had been successful in obtaining
+from Peters the secrets of his antarctic voyage. "Well?" I asked.
+
+"The information which I have gained," said Bainbridge, "even could I
+procure no more, would suffice to explain all those mysteries that Poe
+hints at as fact, and much that he seems to apprehend with that sixth
+sense which in the genius approaches a union of clairvoyance and
+prescience--mysteries of which he does not speak in language
+sufficiently clear for common comprehension. At all events, I am not
+disappointed; and more may yet be procured. There remains much of
+interest, in the way of _minutiæ_, which I expect to learn to-morrow. I
+know now what made that antarctic region more than tropical, and what
+the white curtain was--and is. I know how the hieroglyphics came in the
+caverns of black marl. That antarctic country exceeds, in the truly
+wonderful, anything in the world, old or new, with which I am
+acquainted, or of which I have heard."
+
+"But is it true? Have you not been listening to fairy tales?--or,
+rather, to sailor tales?"
+
+"When to-morrow I tell you what I have, hour after hour, with brief
+rests, drawn from that poor old battered hulk"--he pointed toward
+Peters' cot--"and when you consider what he is--then say if he is the
+man, or his sailor friends are the men, to invent such a story. I admit
+that at times during the day his mind seemed to wander slightly, and
+that he has the usual faculty of sea-faring men for exaggeration; so
+that at times I had to employ my best discrimination to enable me to
+separate the real from the fanciful, that I might retain the true and
+discard the untrue. He seems to have lived for more than a year in
+proximity to the South Pole, and his experiences were as marvellous as
+that country is strangely grand, and its people truly wonderful--Oh,
+no--nothing on the Gulliver order; the people are not dwarfs or giants,
+and they have no horses either that talk or that do not talk; no
+yahoos--nothing in that line. 'Wings?' Oh, no--no flying men or women,
+no women in gauze, either; everything quite in good taste and genteel.
+Just wait, now; you'll hear it all in an orderly way--which I myself did
+not, however. 'One-eyed?' I told you, just now, that it was all in good
+taste and genteel. No, no; nothing Homeric--no sheep, and no sirens.
+Now, I'm really tired, and you'll not succeed in starting me on a story
+that'll take six or eight hours to tell, even if we do not stop to
+discuss matters as we progress. To-morrow, as I before said, we will get
+from Peters all other possible facts, and no doubt we shall gather
+further particulars; then we will go to town. I intend to come out here
+every day till Peters gets better or dies--and I suppose you will not
+refuse to keep me company. Every evening we will meet in my rooms, or in
+yours, and I will recite the story in my own way. Now does that satisfy
+you?"
+
+It satisfied me fully, I said; and then we spread our blankets, and made
+a night of it on the floor.
+
+The next day Bainbridge spent the forenoon, for the most part, sitting
+on the edge of Dirk Peters' cot, listening to the old man talk,
+describe, explain. I walked out, and explored the immediately adjacent
+country, entertaining myself as best I could. At about two o'clock in
+the afternoon we started for town, leaving Peters much better than when
+two days before we had first, together, entered his humble home. We
+promised to see him the next day; and, in fact, one or both of us
+returned each day for many succeeding days. That evening Doctor
+Bainbridge came to my rooms, and began the recitation of Dirk Peters'
+story; and that, too, was continued from day to day.
+
+And it is now time that the patient reader should also know the secrets
+of that far-distant antarctic region--secrets of which Poe himself died
+in ignorance--save as the genius, the seer, knows the wonders of heaven
+and earth--sees gems that lie in hidden places, and flowers that bloom
+obscurely, and feels the mysteries of ocean depths, and all that is so
+far--or near, so great--or small, that common vision sees it not.
+
+
+
+
+The NINTH Chapter
+
+
+There may be among my readers some who have never read "The Narrative of
+A. Gordon Pym," or have so long ago perused that interesting and
+mysterious conception, that they have forgotten even the outlines of the
+story. It is the purpose of the present chapter to review a few of the
+incidents in that narrative, a knowledge of which will add to the
+clearer understanding of Peters' story.
+
+Those who are familiar with Edgar Allan Poe's admirable and entrancing
+narrative just mentioned, are aware that it is written in
+autobiographical form, the facts for the most part being furnished by
+Pym in the shape of journal or diary entries, which are edited by Mr.
+Poe. For such readers it will be but a waste of time to peruse the
+present chapter, brief though it is. And let me further say to any
+chance reader of mine who has never had opportunity to enjoy that
+exciting and edifying work of America's great genius of prose fiction,
+that he is to be envied the possession of the belated pleasure that
+awaits him--only a treasured memory of which delight remains to the rest
+of us.
+
+From my own narrative I shall omit much of description and colloquy
+which, during its development in 1877, occurred concerning discoveries
+of a geographical and geological nature, and also many discussions of a
+character purely philosophical; but no fact shall be discarded. The
+historian has, in my opinion, no discretionary power concerning the
+introduction or elimination of facts. His duty is plain, and in the
+present instance it shall be faithfully performed.
+
+The following presents a very general outline of "The Narrative of A.
+Gordon Pym":
+
+In the year 1827, Pym, just verging upon manhood, runs away from his
+home in the town of Nantucket, on the island of the same name, in
+companionship with his boy friend, Augustus Barnard, son of the captain
+of the ship on which they depart. The name of the brig on which they
+embark is the Grampus, which is starting for a trading voyage in the
+South Pacific Ocean. Young Barnard secretes Pym in the hold of the brig,
+to remain hidden until so far from land as to make a return of the
+runaway impracticable. Pym, hidden amid the freightage of the hold,
+falls into a prolonged slumber, probably caused by the foul air in that
+part of the vessel. When the brig is four days at sea, a majority of the
+crew mutiny; and after killing many of those who have not joined them,
+Captain Barnard is set adrift in a small boat, without food and with
+only a jug of water. Young Barnard is permitted to remain on the vessel.
+There is a dog that plays a leading part in the mutiny episode by acting
+as a messenger between Barnard and Pym, who had no other means of
+communicating.
+
+Next comes a counter mutiny, made necessary to preserve the life of one
+Peters, a sailor to whom Barnard owes his life. The ship's cook is
+determined to kill Peters, and is about to accomplish his purpose, when
+Peters, young Barnard, and a sailor named Parker, who joins the two,
+devise a plan for overcoming the mutineers of the "cook's party." This
+they succeeded in doing by, at the right moment, producing from his
+hiding-place young Pym, who is dressed to resemble a certain murdered
+sailor whose corpse is still on the brig; and during the fright of the
+"cook's party," Peters and Parker kill the cook and his followers.
+
+Then the four--Barnard, Pym, Peters, and the sailor Parker--have many
+thrilling adventures. The brig is finally wrecked in a storm, and only
+the inverted hull remains above water, to which the four cling for many
+days. The party is at last rescued by a trading-vessel on its way to
+discover new lands in the Antarctic Ocean. They reach 83 south latitude,
+soon after which a landing is made on an island inhabited by a tribe of
+strange black people. Here, through a trick of the islanders, the crew
+lose their lives--all save Pym and Peters. Parker had already died, and
+in a manner more entertaining to the reader in the perusal than to
+Parker in the performance; and which, Peters said forty-nine years
+later, the mere thought of, always made him willing to wait for his
+supper when he had of necessity to forego a dinner.
+
+Whilst escaping in a small boat from this island, Pym and Peters abduct
+one of the male natives. Like his fellows, this native is black, even to
+his teeth; in fact, there is nothing white on the whole island; even the
+water has its peculiarities. And also like his fellows, he dreads the
+color _white_; and whenever he sees anything white he becomes almost
+frenzied or paralyzed with terror. The small boat with its three
+occupants is carried on an ocean current, to the south. One day Pym, in
+taking a white handkerchief from his pocket allows the wind to flare it
+into the face of the black islander, who sinks in convulsions to the
+bottom of the boat, later moaning (as had moaned the other islanders on
+seeing white), "Tekeli-li, tekeli-li." He continued to breathe, and no
+more. The following day the body of a white animal floats by, a body
+similar to one which they had seen on the beach of the island last
+visited. Then they see in the south a white curtain, which, after their
+further progress in its direction, they observe reaches from the sky to
+the water. The water of the ocean current which is hurrying them along
+becomes hour by hour warmer, and finally hot. An ash-like material,
+which seems to melt as it touches the water, falls all around and over
+them. Gigantic white birds fly from beyond the white curtain, screaming
+the eternal "Teke-li-li, tekeli-li"--a syllabication that dies away on
+the lips of the islander as his soul finally, on that last terrible day,
+leaves his body.
+
+The last words of the last of Pym's entries in his journal are as
+follows:
+
+"And now we rushed into the embraces of the cataract, where a chasm
+threw itself open to receive us. But there arose in our pathway a
+shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any
+dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the
+perfect whiteness of the snow."
+
+The following description of Dirk Peters as he appeared in the year
+1827, or just fifty years before I saw him, apparently a man of
+seventy-five years (though we finally concluded that he was nearer
+eighty), is Pym's, quoted from Poe's narrative:
+
+"This man was the son of an Indian woman of the tribe of Upsarokas, who
+live among fastnesses of the Black Hills, near the source of the
+Missouri. His father was a fur-trader, I believe, or at least connected
+in some manner with the Indian trading-posts on Lewis River. Peters
+himself was one of the most ferocious looking men I ever beheld. He was
+short in stature, not more than four feet eight inches high, but his
+limbs were of Herculean mould. His hands, especially, were so enormously
+thick and broad as hardly to retain a human shape. His arms, as well as
+his legs, were bowed in the most singular manner, and appeared to
+possess no flexibility whatever. His head was equally deformed, being of
+immense size, with an indentation on the crown (like that on the head of
+most negroes) and entirely bald. To conceal this latter deficiency,
+which did not proceed from old age, he usually wore a wig formed of any
+hair-like material which presented itself--occasionally the skin of a
+Spanish dog or American grizzly bear. At the time spoken of, he had on a
+portion of one of these bear-skins; and it added no little to the
+natural ferocity of his countenance, which betook of the Upsaroka
+character. The mouth extended nearly from ear to ear; the lips were
+thin, and seemed, like some other portions of his frame, to be devoid of
+natural pliancy, so that the ruling expression never varied under the
+influence of any emotion whatever. This ruling expression may be
+conceived when it is considered that the teeth were exceedingly long and
+protruding, and were never even partially covered, in any instance, by
+the lips. To pass this man with a casual glance, one might imagine him
+to be convulsed with laughter; but a second look would induce a
+shuddering acknowledgment, that if such an expression were indicative of
+merriment, the merriment must be that of a demon. Of this singular being
+many anecdotes were prevalent among the seafaring men of Nantucket.
+These anecdotes went to prove his prodigious strength when under
+excitement, and some of them had given rise to a doubt of his sanity."
+
+
+
+
+
+The TENTH Chapter
+
+
+During the early evening of the day on which Doctor Bainbridge and I
+returned from our stay with Dirk Peters, I sat in my room at the Loomis
+House, impatiently awaiting the moment when Bainbridge was to arrive. I
+knew that he was wearied by his labors with Peters, and I did not
+anticipate a prolonged talk from him. Still, I was anxious to hear at
+least a beginning of the promised story. At the appointed time he came
+in, and placing a roll of paper on the table, took the large easy-chair
+which I had placed for him.
+
+"As I know," he said, "that the developments of the past three days
+must, quite naturally, have developed a curiosity in you of some
+intensity to hear the sequel of the Pym adventures, I shall endeavor not
+to keep you unnecessarily waiting; but shall allay at once a portion of
+your curiosity. Later--tomorrow, if agreeable--I will deal with the
+particulars of that strange voyage--perhaps the strangest ever made by
+man."
+
+He picked up, and smoothed out upon the table, the roll of paper which
+he had brought with him; and then continued:
+
+"In the first place, I will briefly and in a very general way describe
+for you the south polar region, which, I feel certain, Pym and Peters
+reached, and where they resided for somewhat more than one year. Here is
+a map which I have with some care drawn from rough sketches jotted down
+as I sat on the edge of Peters' cot, and each of which sketches I had
+him verify.
+
+[Illustration: Map of Southpolar region and hili-li
+
+A. Central space of boiling lava Diameter 15 miles. Probable situation
+South Pole
+B. Ring of hot lava, white hot at inner edge, red hot at outer edge.
+Width, about 4 miles
+C. Ring of hot lava, dull red, shading to black heat at outer edge.
+Width, about 4 miles
+D. Ring 4m in width. Blocks of lava, rock salt, and coral-like terrains
+EEE. Volcanic mountains, up to 8m in height and valleys
+FFF. Antarctic Ocean with islands
+
+SOUTH POLAR REGION _and_ HILI-LI LAND.]
+
+"Now move this way with your chair, and look at this map. And in the
+first place, I will tell you that at the South Pole--probably not
+precisely at the pole, but certainly within the sixth of a degree of
+it--is a circular surface of absolutely white-hot, boiling lava, about
+fifteen miles in diameter. This surface was, in ages past, as indicated
+by surroundings, many times its present surface extent--say from seventy
+to seventy-five miles across. No doubt the surface of the earth at the
+Antarctic Pole had once cooled, and later become covered with water,
+though with very shallow water--probably at some points by none, at
+others by a depth of ten or fifteen feet. From some cause--and many
+causes might be imagined--this earth-and-water surface of say two
+hundred miles in circumference, sank into the interior of the earth, and
+the boiling lava came to the surface. We can scarcely conceive of the
+awful effect when the Antarctic Sea poured over the circumference of
+this mass of boiling earth and metal.
+
+"Now it must be considered that this boiling lava was not merely a great
+surface of white-hot matter, in which case it would, relatively
+speaking, soon have cooled. To flood its edges with an overflow of ten
+feet of water would be comparable to running a film of water a hundredth
+of an inch in depth over the top of a red-hot stove in which a large
+fire continues to burn and constantly to renew the heat on its surface.
+This surface of boiling lava must have had a practically limitless
+depth, and the water which poured over it must have evaporated
+instantly. After thinking the matter over, with the _data_ which I have
+well in view, I concluded that it required about two hundred years for
+the water to reach the limit which it finally attained as water _en
+masse_. A little thought on the subject has shown me that Peters is
+telling the truth, because his description, to my mind, harmonizes with
+the laws of physics. One of the earliest phenomena presented by this
+condition, was that so much sea-water evaporated, and evaporated so
+rapidly, that masses of rock-salt formed, creating a partial barrier to
+the inroads of the sea--I say a partial barrier, because the
+deliquescence of salt would cause it to be the poorest of all barriers
+to water. Still, we must remember that the immediately surrounding water
+must have reached, so far as salt is concerned, the saturation point,
+and would have been a very slow solvent of hard rock-salt in enormous
+masses and several miles in extent. Then, two other conditions soon
+arose: First, the warm surrounding water permitted a coral-like
+development, as shown by present appearances, and second, volcanic
+action began.
+
+"Now look at my map. This inner circle represents the present area of
+boiling lava, which, as I have said, is about fifteen miles in
+diameter--the South Pole, according to the natives, being at about the
+point corresponding to this dot, marked 'a.' The ring next without the
+circle I have made to represent a zone of lava which is at its inner
+edge white-hot, and at its outer edge red-hot, its width, let us say, as
+the division is arbitrary, about four miles. The second circle
+represents a zone of lava which is dull red at its inner edge, and
+black, but hot, at its outer. Of course the lava blends away from
+white-hot within, to barely warm without; but I thus map it, the better
+to picture reigning conditions. The next circle, some four or five miles
+in width, represents a ring of cold lava-blocks, masses of rock-salt,
+and animalculine remains, from twenty-five to two hundred feet high.
+Outside of this last-mentioned zone, we have several rings of volcanic
+mountains with intervening valleys, and many active craters at the
+summit of mountains; while on the mountain-sides lie numerous masses of
+rock-salt, thrown from below by eruptive action, glistening in the
+brilliant volcanic light, and slowly deliquescing. This zone of
+mountains and valleys is from ten to twenty miles in width, and whilst
+in the main its mountains are not more than from half a mile to a mile
+high, it contains peaks of five or six miles in height, and there is one
+peak which rises nine miles above the sea-level.
+
+"I want you to look particularly at these larger mountain-ranges, one at
+the right, the other at the left side of my map--each of which as it
+stretches out into the sea divides into two smaller chains. Upon these
+ranges, and the comparatively diminutive height of the intervening
+mountains, in connection with the fact that there is a constant
+wind-current from the lower Pacific (generally speaking, from the west
+of longitude 74 W.), depends the habitability of this large island, the
+Island of Hili-li (here represented in about longitude 75 E.), and many
+other islands which stretch out in the same direction from this enormous
+active surface-crater. I say that upon such conditions depends the
+habitability of these islands, and so I believe; but there is another
+cause for their greater than tropical warmth: If you will glance here on
+the right of this map, in the midst of the mountain zone you will see
+represented a bay, which, winding among mountains, makes its way very
+close to the zone of hot lava--in fact, is divided from it by little
+more than the ring of lava-blocks, rock-salt, and animal remains, which
+at this point is narrowed to a width of about two miles. The temperature
+of the water of this bay at its inner extremity is probably about 180
+F.--say 32 below the boiling-point of distilled water; and it flows in a
+steady current past the Island of Hili-li. This bay is undoubtedly fed
+from the opposite side of the great crater, and its supply flows for
+miles in contact with hot lava. It is probable that this extremely warm
+water current greatly assists the hot-air current in creating the
+super-tropical climate of Hili-li.
+
+"And now, as I have in part satisfied your curiosity, and as I am
+somewhat exhausted with my two days' and nights' experience with Peters,
+I know you will permit me to rest at so suitable a stopping-point.
+To-morrow evening I will take up the story of Dirk Peters where it joins
+the sudden break in Pym's journal, and will carry you along to the time
+when the inhabitants of Hili-li thought that the atmosphere of some
+other land would be more conducive to Peters' longevity and health, as
+well as to their own tranquillity. And I assure your Sultanship, that
+the story I shall relate to you to-morrow night will be more interesting
+than the dry physical facts which I have this evening imparted, and
+which it seemed best that you should know before hearing in consecutive
+detail the particulars of Peters' voyage."
+
+I assented to his suggestions, thanking him for the clear description
+which he had given of that strange region, and for the pains he had
+taken to draft of it so accurate a map--which map he allowed me to
+retain. I was about to ask a question, when the door opened, and Doctor
+Castleton rushed into the room.
+
+"Well, how's the old man?" he asked.
+
+We described Peters' condition; and I even recounted a few of the facts
+which Bainbridge had just imparted to me. Then I asked the question
+which Castleton's abrupt entry had delayed.
+
+"But," I asked, "has not Peters' imagination, owing to the
+administration of drugs, been unnaturally stimulated? There are drugs
+which it is commonly believed may have a wonderful effect in stimulating
+the imagination to flights of marvellous grandeur."
+
+"No," said Bainbridge. "The doctor here will say the same. No drug on
+earth could produce even an approach to such an effect."
+
+"Certainly not," said Castleton. "The mass of laymen are not only
+ignorant--excuse me, sir, but I know you want the facts--not only
+ignorant, but extremely and persistently ignorant on this subject. I
+have heard it said that Byron drank twelve--or perhaps twenty--bottles
+of wine the night he wrote 'The Corsair.' If he did, he simply wrote
+'The Corsair' in spite of the wine. I have heard it stated that Poe was
+intoxicated when he wrote 'The Raven'--which is not only an untrue
+statement but one that could not possibly be true, and which certainly
+every man who ever attempted to write under the influence of an
+alcoholic stimulant knows to be false. Drugs--including alcohol--which
+are supposed to stimulate what we might term a rational imagination,
+only stimulate an irrational fancy. They seem to the person affected to
+cause a play of imagination, but they really produce only a state of
+nervous action which causes their subject to feel appreciation of
+otherwise trifling mental pictures that in themselves are flimsy
+nothings. Let a man so affected try to impart to another his fancies,
+and--well, who has not been bored by a drunken man? Did De Quincey, with
+that superb mind, succeed in fancying anything that even he could tell?
+He speaks of glowing drug-born fancies, but he describes nothings. Now
+Milton, the old Puritan--the cold-water man--he had fancies which he was
+able to transmit, and which are worthy to be forever treasured. The
+early Greeks were exceedingly temperate, and the men who composed the
+'Nostoi' were not drunkards--Homer sang the 'Iliad' and the 'Odyssey'
+with a sober tongue, and a sober brain back of his utterances. The man
+who gets drunk to write poetry, will find it easier to write his poetry
+on the following morning, spite of headache, blue-devils, and all." He
+paused for a moment; and then this peculiar man continued:
+
+"And I know! Why, sir, I have drunk barrels of whiskey--barrels of the
+stuff. I have seen whiskey-snakes in squirming masses three feet deep. I
+have gone into a parlor, and had a lady say when she saw me fumbling in
+my pockets: 'Doctor, your handkerchief is in your back pocket.' Bless
+her! I was only putting back into my pockets the jim-jam snake-heads as
+the snakes _would_ try to emerge! I pity a weak devil that goes home and
+to bed because of a mild attack of delirium tremens. I brush the vipers
+away with a sweep of my hand, and go about my business. But I myself
+draw the line at roosters. A man who may laugh at snakes will quail
+before roosters. A fellow may shut his eyes to snakes, but he can't shut
+his ears to roosters. Well, well: it's all in a life-time. But, believe
+me, no good poetry, either in verse or in prose, is drunkenman poetry."
+
+With which final remark he shot out of the room. Then Doctor Bainbridge
+took his departure, and I retired to sleep and to dream of fiery
+craters, with snakes crawling out of them, and gigantic roosters picking
+up the snakes one by one and dropping them over a mountain of salt into
+a lake of boiling water. I was pleased when morning came, and I heard
+the comparatively cheering tinkle from bells on the team of mules
+drawing the little "bob-tail" street-car past the hotel.
+
+
+
+
+The ELEVENTH Chapter
+
+
+On the following evening Bainbridge came to my room as he had promised,
+arriving at about eight o'clock. I had not that day accompanied him on
+his visit to Peters, who it seems was daily gaining strength. I had
+spent my day in reading, except that Arthur had repeatedly come to my
+room, remaining for fifteen or twenty minutes at a time as his duties
+would permit, being curious to learn from me "some of the things about
+that ante-arctic country," etc. He was much interested in the subject,
+and studied with close attention the map made by Doctor Bainbridge.
+Arthur had asked permission to be present when the doctor should come in
+the evening, but I thought better to deny him that privilege. Doctor
+Bainbridge was taking the matter seriously, and I knew Arthur too well
+to expect from him a decorous reticence at any time. I could imagine the
+effect on Bainbridge as he closed some glowing description, should
+Arthur jump up with a remark about "ante-arctic niggers," or "gee
+whallopin big females." I had occasion later to know that my caution was
+most judicious, and to condemn myself for a want of firmness in
+maintaining so sensible a decision.
+
+Doctor Bainbridge, without unnecessary delay or preliminary remark,
+began the relation of Peters' adventures at the point indicated by him
+the evening before as the proper place of commencement.
+
+"The great white curtain you have no doubt already surmised to be a
+clear-cut line of dense fog, due to the fact that a perpendicular plane
+of extremely cold air in that situation cuts through an atmosphere
+which, on both sides of this sheet of frigid air, is exceedingly warm,
+and laden with moisture to the saturation-point. This curtain of fog is
+so thin that sudden gusts of wind, upon either of its surfaces, drive it
+aside much as a double curtain is thrown on either side by the arms of a
+person passing between. It was through such an opening that Pym and
+Peters rushed, on a cross-current of warm water which was carrying them
+along. The figure of a large, pure-white woman, into whose arms their
+half-delirious fancies pictured them as rushing, was simply a large
+statue of spotless marble, which stands at the entrance of the bay of
+Hili-li. The ash-like material which for days had rained upon them and
+into the ocean around them, was no longer seen. It proved to have been a
+peculiar volcano dust or crater ash, which, carried into the upper air,
+fell at a distance--sometimes directly on Hili-li; but rarely so close
+as within eighty or ninety miles of the central fire.
+
+"They had scarcely passed the white fog-curtain when they were accosted
+by a gay party of young men and young women, numbering some eight or ten
+persons, in an elegant pleasure-boat. Pym and Peters being ignorant of
+the language of Hili-li land, and the Hili-lites being ignorant of the
+English tongue, it was of course impossible for them to hold converse
+beyond that permitted by signs. The pleasure party, however, saw at once
+that the two men were almost ready to expire from want of food and rest.
+The Hili-lites took them into their own spacious boat, and hastened to a
+landing-place in the suburbs of the capital and metropolis of the
+nation, Hili-li City. There they all disembarked, and the strangers were
+supported across a lawn, the grass of which was of the palest green--(so
+nearly white, in fact, that its greenness of tint would scarcely have
+been noticed but for the contrast afforded by many brilliant white
+flowers that appeared here and there amid the grass)--up to a palace,
+the equal of which, for size and beauty, neither of the Americans had
+before seen, though Pym was familiar with the external appearance of the
+finest residences in and about Boston, and also of those on the Hudson
+River just above New York; whilst Peters had been in most of the
+sea-coast cities of the habitable world.
+
+"They were taken into this palace, were immediately escorted to the bath
+(which Peters declined to enter), were furnished with liquid
+nourishments, and were then allowed to sleep--which both of them did,
+uninterruptedly, for twenty-four hours. When they awoke they were
+furnished with new clothing of the best (the Hili-lites dressed
+something in the style of Louis XIV.), and then invited to a full
+repast. So well were they treated that in less than a week they felt
+quite as strong and otherwise natural as they had on leaving the harbor
+of Nantucket.
+
+"So elegant and expressive, yet so simple was the language of Hili-li,
+that Pym could in two weeks understand and speak it sufficiently well
+for ordinary converse; whilst Peters was able to employ it sufficiently
+for his purposes, in about a month.
+
+"The residents of the palace seemed to comprehend just about what had
+happened to the strangers. It appears that once or twice in a century
+strangers similar in general exterior to this pair had arrived in that
+region, generally in small boats, and on one occasion in a ship; but
+none of the strangers had desired to depart from a land so beautiful, to
+undertake a voyage both long and hazardous--none save the persons who
+had come in a ship nearly three centuries before--(you will recall what
+I told you of the small book that I read in the Astor Library). As there
+was little which the Hili-lites had any desire to learn from the
+strangers, there was not much to be said, anyway. Pym and Peters were
+permitted to roam at will, and many Hili-lites came to look at them.
+The palace in which they were permitted to reside belonged to a cousin
+of the king, so that no troublesome surveillance was inflicted upon
+these wrecked sailors--in fact, so completely isolated were the two,
+that no feelings except a mild degree of sympathy and curiosity were
+excited by their presence on the island. A small boat was at their
+disposal, and they soon almost daily took the liberty of rowing across
+the harbor to the wharf at the end of the main street of Hili-li, where
+they would disembark, and wander for hours around this strange old city,
+viewing in wonderment its beauties, its peculiarities, its mysteries.
+
+"Hili-li is a city of from one to two hundred thousand people. But, oh,
+lovely beyond power of language to describe!--past all conception, and
+comparable alone with fancies such as float through the brain of
+poet-lover as he lies dreaming of his soul's desire. I draw my
+conclusions from Peters' state of mind when he attempts to describe this
+strange city, rather than from what he says; and also from some of Pym's
+remarks on the subject, which Peters was able to repeat. In your
+imagination, compass within an area two miles in diameter the choicest
+beauties of ancient Greece and Egypt, Rome and Persia; then brighten
+them with natural surrounding scenery such as Homer and Dante and Milton
+might have dreamed of--and you may feel a little of what Pym and Peters
+felt when first they saw this glorious island. In ancient Greece a true
+democrat would have been displeased with the extreme discrepancy between
+the grandeur of public buildings, and the poverty of private dwellings;
+but in Hili-li these two bore a perfectly just relationship of elegance,
+each in its way being perfect.
+
+"Yet mere inanimate beauties were the least of all. Even Peters, old and
+dying--never a man to whom art spoke in more than whispers--even he was
+aroused from the arms of death when he spoke of the women of Hili-li.
+'Were they blondes?' I asked him. 'No.' 'Were they brunettes?' 'No.'
+They were simply entrancing--never to be forgotten. Each and everyone of
+them, like Helen, won by her mere presence the adoration of man. And the
+men--even they must have been superb--were types of perfect manly
+elegance.
+
+"I spent many hours in trying to draw from Peters facts which I might
+put together and so become competent to explain the perfection, physical
+and mental--for they possessed both of these charms--of the Hili-lites.
+And after combining what Peters could describe, and what he could recall
+of Pym's sayings, with a statement or two of the natives that clings in
+the old man's memory, I formed what I am able to assure you is a
+reliable opinion of the origin of the Hili-lite race:
+
+"At about the most trying period of the barbarian invasion of Southern
+Europe--certainly preceding the foundation of Venice, and I think in the
+fourth century--when the enlightened peoples of the Mediterranean were
+fleeing hither and thither like rats in a burning house from which but
+few escape--during this fearful time, a number of men with their
+families and a few slaves, took advantage of a momentary lull in the
+terrors of the period, to save themselves. They purchased a number of
+vessels, and loading each with tools, seeds, animals, valued
+manuscripts, and all that they possessed worth moving, started to seek a
+land in which they might colonize, there in time to found a new empire
+beyond the reach of all barbarians. They passed out of the Mediterranean
+and down the west coast of Africa. Fortunately they had thoroughly
+anticipated storms and wrecks, and each vessel was loaded in such a
+manner as to be independent of the others. When well on their way, one
+of those rare, prolonged storms from the north came on, and the vessels
+were soon driven far from land, and separated, each from all the others.
+One of these vessels managed to outlive the terrific storm, which lasted
+for thirty days; and when the winds abated, the hundred or more men,
+women, children, and slaves, found themselves among the islands of what
+now is named Hili-liland. There they settled--there, where nature
+furnishes, without labor, light and heat the year round, and vegetation
+is literally perpetual. They met with none of the initial difficulties
+of primitive peoples. They were educated, and they possessed the
+treasures of knowledge born of a thousand years of Roman supremacy; from
+the beginning they had that other priceless treasure, leisure--that real
+essential of perfect culture; they had for the first five hundred years
+no human enemy to contend with, and even then with the merest
+weaklings--weaklings in the hands of a people at that period very
+strong; for by that time the Hili-lites must have numbered a million
+souls, or almost as many as they now are. But of all that they
+possessed, the rest would have been comparatively little had they not
+retained in lasting memory the lesson of Rome's downfall--the price a
+people is compelled to pay for prolonged and unbroken luxurious
+indolence. This lesson of the downfall of Rome they never forgot; and
+to-day, with all their beauty and refinement, physical and mental
+effeminacy is left solely to the women. True, it requires from each
+inhabitant but a few hours of labor in the year to supply all purely
+physical material wants; but, beginning with the year of the settlement
+of Hili-li, up to the present time, the wealthiest in the land has
+performed his share of physical labor quite as conscientiously as has
+the poorest. Then with them, a man or woman is educated up to the time
+of death. The children are taught as with us, and the young men, and the
+young women, too, take a college course. But after the college course,
+they go on with their study. A great jurist at forty, or for that matter
+at seventy, concludes to make an exhaustive study of astronomy--or, if
+earlier in life he has exhausted all desire to know the facts of
+astronomy, he perhaps begins a study of anatomy--or whatever it may
+happen to please his fancy to investigate. The Hili-lites claim that in
+this way those who live to seventy or eighty acquire a fairly good
+general education, but of this I have my doubts. After the age of
+twenty, a man does not devote more than two hours a day to new branches
+of learning; but two hours a day is sufficient time, if well employed,
+to keep his mind always young and vigorous; and it has been shown by
+this people that a person under such a system retains more of the
+buoyancy and freshness of youth at eighty than do we in Europe and
+America at the age of fifty.
+
+"In Hili-liland the people have gone much farther than we in the
+development of the purely reasoning faculties--in fact, they have gone
+so far that they now ignore reason almost completely, having carried its
+development to a finality, and found it comparatively worthless in the
+practical affairs of life. They claim--and seem by their lives to
+prove--that, practically, society is happier and more moral when it
+exists without any pretence that it is controlled by anything else than
+by feeling--that is, as a matter of course, by properly educated
+feeling. Hili-li is a kingdom, but its people must, from what I can
+learn, have as pure and perfect a constitutional liberty as it is
+possible for mankind to enjoy--not liberty as the accident of a royal
+whim, but such a perfect liberty as the people of England are
+approaching, and in which by another century they will be able to
+indulge themselves. They claim that as liberty does not mean license, so
+government of self by feeling and not by reason need not mean
+license--and never will mean license when correctly understood and
+properly directed--and yet that such government alone brings complete
+happiness. This putting aside and dwarfing of the reasoning faculty
+seems to have resulted in an intuitional state of mind. Peters says that
+the Hili-lites always seemed to know what he was thinking about, and
+were always able to anticipate and thwart his acts when they so desired.
+
+"As I was able to gain from Peters in so brief a time a very limited
+range of fact from which to make correct deductions of importance, I did
+not expend much of that valuable time in seeking for descriptions of
+buildings; but I did learn sufficient in that direction to satisfy me
+that, to the fund of architectural knowledge brought by the ancestors of
+this people from Europe, they had, during the centuries, added much that
+is new and valuable, even sublime and truly marvellous.
+
+"But even here in this paradise on earth, there is a criminal class--not
+very terrible, but, legally, a criminal class. It seems that a portion
+of the old, restless, warrior-spirit must have trickled along in obscure
+by-ways of the sanguineous system of many of these people, for among
+the youths of each generation several thousand out of the whole
+population (residing on a hundred islands, large and small), would,
+despite every effort of their elders, become unmanageable. These--after
+each young man had been given two or three opportunities to reform, and
+in the end been judged incorrigible--were banished to the
+mountain-ranges which surround the great active surface-crater already
+described, and which are from thirty to eighty miles distant from the
+Capital of Hili-li. There they might either freeze or roast, as taste
+should dictate.
+
+"To-morrow evening," concluded Bainbridge, "I shall relate some
+particulars in the lives of Pym and Peters in Hili-liland. The purely
+personal experiences of these two adventurers I should ignore, were it
+not that they take us into the region of the wonderful crater and its
+peculiar surrounding mountains and valleys, where we shall see nature in
+one of the strangest of her many strange guises." Then, after a second's
+pause:
+
+"Do you accompany me to see the poor old fellow, tomorrow?"
+
+I promised that I would; and we agreed upon two o'clock as the time for
+starting. Five minutes later Doctor Bainbridge arose, and saying
+good-night, left me until the morrow.
+
+
+
+
+The TWELFTH Chapter
+
+
+The next evening at the appointed hour Doctor Bainbridge came in. I had
+not been able to accompany him in his daily visit to Peters. As
+Bainbridge took his seat he said a few words concerning the old sailor,
+who, to the surprise, I think, of both physicians, appeared to be
+recovering. They hoped for scarcely more than a temporary improvement,
+but a little longer life for the poor old man seemed now assured.
+
+Doctor Bainbridge glanced at the map of Hili-li, which I had spread out
+on the table, and began:
+
+"In the ducal palace," said he, "in which through the kindness of the
+younger members of the household, Pym and Peters were permitted to
+reside--at first only in the servants' quarters--the servants, however,
+being, at least in social manners, equal to the strangers--there were,
+besides the immediate family of the duke, many more or less close family
+connections. Among these was a young woman, corresponding in her period
+of life to New England women in their twentieth or twenty-first year,
+but really in her sixteenth year. Now I should imagine from the actions
+of that old sea-dog, Peters, lying there in his seventy-eighth or
+seventy-ninth year, and forty-nine years after he last set eyes on the
+young woman, that she must have been the loveliest being in a land of
+exceeding loveliness. Her eyes, the old man says, were in general like a
+tropical sky in a dead calm, but on occasions they resembled a tropical
+sky in a thunder-storm. She had one of those broad faces in which the
+cheeks stand out roundly, supporting in merriment a hundred changing
+forms, and laughing dimples enough to steal a heart of adamant--the
+loveliest face, when it is lovely, in all the world. Her hair was
+golden, but of the very lightest of pure gold--a golden white; and when
+in the extreme warmth of her island home she sat amid the trees, and it
+was allowed to fall away in rippling waves--to what then am I to liken
+it? It was transcendently beautiful. I think that I can feel its
+appearance. It must have looked like the sun's shimmer on the sea-foam
+from which rose Aphrodite; or like the glint from Cupid's golden
+arrow-heads as, later, sitting by the side of Aphrodite, he floated
+along the shores of queenly Hellas, in gleeful mischief shooting
+landward and piercing many a heart. Ah, love in youth! The cold
+reasoning world shall never take away that charm; and when the years
+shall cover with senile snows those who have felt it, then Intuition and
+not Reason shall give Faith to them as the only substitute for glories
+that have faded and gone.
+
+"But the form of this lovely being--what shall I say of her form! Here I
+pause. When Peters, at my urgent solicitation, attempted to describe it,
+he simply gurgled away into one of his spells of delirium. It was no use
+to try--though I did, again and again, try to draw from the old man
+something definite. It seems that she was so rounded and so proportioned
+as to meet every artistic demand, and to divert even from her beautiful
+face the glance of her enraptured beholders. If we are to gain an
+approximate idea of a figure so perfect, we must try to conceive what
+might be the result of a supreme effort of nature to show by comparison
+to the most artistic of her people just what puling infants they were in
+their attempts to create forms of true beauty from marble.
+
+"Her name was Lilama.
+
+"It appears that young Pym was at this time a handsome fellow, almost
+six feet tall; and in his attire, of which I have spoken as resembling
+in many respects that of the court _habitués_ of Louis XIV, he was
+indeed a fine example of natural and artificial beauty combined. And
+then, he had suffered! Need I say more? What heart of maiden would not
+have softened to this stranger youth?
+
+"Well, these two loved. From what Peters tells me, the episode of Romeo
+and Juliet sinks into insignificance by the side of the story of their
+love. With leisure and with opportunity to love, for several months
+these young people enjoyed an earthly heaven which it is rarely indeed
+the lot of a young couple to enjoy. But alas! and alas! True as in the
+days when moonlight fell amid the palaces of Babylon and Nineveh is the
+old poetic expression--its truth older than Shakespeare, older than
+historic man--that 'The course of true love never did run smooth.'
+
+"It seems that among the so-called criminal exiles to the Volcanic
+Mountains was a young man of good family, who had known--and of course
+loved--Lilama. And I will say in passing that the youths who comprised
+this class would, the larger part of them, never have been exiles, if
+Hili-li had required a standing army, or had even not forbidden by law
+the more rough and dangerous games to be played--I allude to some very
+rough sports and pastimes, in which bones were frequently broken--games
+which these youths and preceding generations of youths had initiated and
+developed. But there was in Hili-li, aside from boating, no allowable
+means for the gratification of that desire to contend with danger which
+is inherent in manly youths the world over. Hence these young men were
+by their very nature compelled to violate laws thus unnatural, and, as
+generally happens, in doing so they went to extremes. The young
+Hili-lite to whom I have alluded had been for more than a year with the
+exiles. His name was Ahpilus. Lilama did not reciprocate his love. She
+had known him from infancy, and for her there was no romance in poor
+Ahpilus. But the young Hili-lite was madly infatuated with her, and it
+seems by later developments that his enforced absence from her had
+driven him almost, if not wholly, insane.
+
+"Thus stood matters about three months after the arrival in Hili-li of
+the Americans. It will be remembered that, according to Poe's account,
+Pym and Peters passed through the 'great white curtain' on March 22d.
+Peters says that this statement is probably correct. That date
+corresponds to their autumnal equinox--about. Three months later
+corresponds to our summer solstice--their midwinter. By the latter time,
+and for weeks before, the antarctic sun never rose above the horizon.
+But this season was in Hili-li the most beautiful and enjoyable period
+of the year. The open crater of almost pure white boiling lava which I
+have described, and which presented a surface of the most brilliant
+light, covering an area of more than 150 square miles, was amply
+sufficient to light islands from 45 to 75 miles distant. Hili-li
+received some direct light from a hundred or more volcanic fires--two
+within its own shores; but by far the greater illumination came from the
+reflected light of the great central lake of boiling lava. The sky,
+constantly filled with a circle of high-floating clouds formed of
+volcanic dust, the circumference of which blended away beyond the
+horizon, but in the centre of which, covering a space the diameter of
+which was about thirty miles, was a circle of light of about the same
+brilliancy as that of the moon, but in appearance thousands of times
+larger. From this overhanging cloud (the City of Hili-li lay under a
+part of its circumference) came during the antarctic winter a mild and
+beautiful light, whiter than moonlight, and lighting the island to many
+times the brilliancy of the brightest moonlight, though quite subdued in
+comparison with that which would have been derived from the sun if
+directly in the zenith. Peters says that the illumination in Hili-li at
+its midwinter was about as intense as with us on a densely cloudy day;
+the light not, however, being grayish, but of a pure white, now and
+again briefly tinted with orange, green, red, blue, and shades of other
+colors, caused by local and temporary outbursts of those colors in the
+enormous crater fires.
+
+"I will digress for a moment longer from the relation of those
+occurrences which developed out of Pym's love affair, to say a word
+concerning some of the physical effects of this artificial light, and to
+explain certain facts related by Poe in his narrative of the earlier
+adventures of our younger hero--I say of our younger hero, because I
+cannot determine in my own mind which of the two, Pym or Peters,
+deserves to be called the hero of their strange adventures.
+
+"On the island of Hili-li the mean summer temperature was about 12° or
+13° Fahrenheit higher than that of winter. The almost steady temperature
+of the island in winter was 93° F.--occasionally dropping two or three
+degrees, and, very rarely, rising one or two degrees. The extremes in
+temperature during the year were caused by the sun's relative
+position--constant sunlight in summer, and its complete absence in
+winter. Each year, by December--the south-polar midsummer
+month--vegetation has become colored; and its delicacy yet brilliancy of
+tintage is then very beautiful, and varied beyond that of perhaps any
+other spot in the world. Peters has travelled over much of the tropics
+and subtropics, and he says that only in Florida has he seen anything to
+compare with the beauty of Hili-li vegetation in October and November. I
+should imagine from what he says that the coloring of vegetation is in
+great part the merest tintage, the large admixture of white giving to it
+a startling luminosity, and permitting the fullest effect of those
+neutral tints which are capable of combinations at once so restful and
+so pleasing to the refined eye. In the vegetation of Florida there is
+luminosity; but chromatic depth, as in most tropical coloring, is the
+chief characteristic of its visual effect. To hear Peters talk of the
+flowers of Hili-li, almost half a century after he himself viewed them,
+is a sympathetic treat to my sense of color. But for strangeness--and it
+was not without its element of beauty, too--the vegetable growth of July
+and August in that peculiar land must exceed anything else of the kind
+known to man. Think for a moment of the effect on vegetable growth of
+warmth and moisture, a rich soil, and the complete absence of sunlight!
+From the middle of their winter to its close, though vegetation is
+luxuriant, it is colorless; that is to say, it is apparently of a pure
+white, though, on comparison, the faintest shades of hue are
+discernible--a very light gray and a cream color prevailing. The
+peculiar grass of Hili-li, probably not indigenous yet certainly
+different in form from any other grass, is very tender and very
+luxuriant, but, even in their summer months, has a pale, almost hueless
+though luminous green; whilst in winter it is almost white. Many flowers
+bloom in the winter, but they differ one from another only in form and
+in odor--they are all quite hueless. And this effect of artificial heat
+in connection with absence of sunlight has a similar effect on animal
+life, the plumage of the birds being a pure white. But in the appearance
+of animals the summer sun does not produce much change--in that of
+birds, none whatever.
+
+"This brings me to the point in Peters' story at which I may most
+naturally explain certain of Poe's statements--or, rather, of A. Gordon
+Pym's statements--which have caused more comment than any other part of
+the narrative. Hand me your Poe, please.--Here now: Poe says, quoting
+from Pym's diary:
+
+"'On the seventeenth [of February, 1828], we set out with the
+determination of examining more thoroughly the chasm of black granite
+into which we had made our way in the first search' (this, you will
+recall, was on the last island upon which they set foot before being
+driven by winds and ocean currents farther south. They were then in
+hiding from the barbarians of that island, and were only a few hundred
+miles from the South Pole). 'We remembered that one of the fissures in
+the sides of this pit had been partially looked into, and we were
+anxious to explore it, although with no expectation of discovering here
+any opening. We found no great difficulty in reaching the bottom of the
+hollow as before, and were now sufficiently calm to survey it with some
+attention. It was, indeed, one of the most singular-looking places
+imaginable, and we could scarcely bring ourselves to believe it
+altogether the work of nature.' He proceeds to explain that the sides of
+the abyss had apparently never been connected, one surface being of
+soapstone, the other of black marl. The average breadth between the two
+cliffs was sixty feet. Here are Pym's own words again: 'Upon arriving
+within fifty feet of the bottom [of the abyss], a perfect regularity
+commenced. The sides were now entirely uniform in substance, in color
+and in lateral direction, the material being a very black and shining
+granite, and the distance between the two sides, at all points, facing
+each other, exactly twenty yards.' The diary goes on to state that they
+explored three chasms, and that in a fissure of the third of these
+Peters discovered some 'singular-looking indentures in the surface of
+the black marl forming the termination of the cul-de-sac.' It is
+surmised by Pym and Peters that the first of these indentures is
+possibly the intentional representation of a human figure standing
+erect, with outstretched arm; and that the rest of them bore a
+resemblance to alphabetical characters--such, at least, it seems from
+Pym's diary, was the 'idle opinion' of Peters.
+
+[Footnote: See Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, in any complete edition of
+Poe's Works.]
+
+"Pym later had a clew to the meaning of these characters, and no doubt
+recorded the facts in a later diary, many of the pages of which Poe
+never saw. But if Pym and Peters had analyzed more closely the
+indentures, they might have gained at least the shadow of an idea of the
+meaning of these representations. Pym made a copy of them, as you know,
+and Poe here gives us a fac-simile of that copy in his Narrative. Peters
+now knows in a general way of what these indentures were significant,
+and I will in a moment explain to you their general meaning; but first
+look at this fac-simile."
+
+I drew up my chair to the side of Doctor Bainbridge, and together we
+looked at the representation of these indentures which Poe has furnished
+us. Bainbridge continued:
+
+"Now look at this first figure, which Pym says 'might have been taken
+for the intentional, though rude, representation of a human figure
+standing erect, with outstretched arm.' The arm, observe, is here--the
+arm and forearm, to my mind, separated; and directly above and parallel
+with the arm is an arrow; and if we trace out the points of the compass
+as described in the diary, we find that the arm is pointing to the
+south, the arrow is pointing to the north; or in other words, the arm
+points to Hili-li; the arrow, by inference, back to the island on which
+the indentures exist. Now among most savages the arrow, as a symbol,
+represents war--a fight--individual or even tribal death.
+
+"Many centuries preceding the time at which Pym and Peters stood
+examining the indentures in the black marl, and at least five centuries
+after the foundation of Hili-li, the natives of that zone of islands
+almost surrounding the South Pole at a distance of from three hundred to
+seven hundred miles, were affected by one of those waves of feeling
+which perhaps once in a thousand or several thousand years sweeps aside
+all the common inclinations of a people, and for some reason which lies
+buried in unfathomable mystery moves them to a concerted action not only
+unknown in the past of those who participate in it, but, so far as can
+be conceived, also unknown to the ancestors of the actors. Such a wave
+of impulse, when it comes, seems to affect all the individuals of every
+division of a race. In the example to which I am alluding, the impulse
+seemed spontaneously to move the inhabitants of islands far apart, and
+apparently not in communication--certainly not in direct communication.
+With the singleness of purpose and uniformity of action seen in an army
+under command of a leader, the natives of a hundred antarctic islands
+swarmed into ten thousand fragile boats, and directed their course
+toward the south. Why toward the south? Did instinct tell them that by
+such a course the various bands would converge to a union? They knew
+not. The first few boats arrived at Hili-li. Nine of every ten of those
+that began the journey were lost--but still, boats continued to arrive
+at the islands of the Hili-li group. Then, and after five hundred years
+of peace, the Hili-lites saw that they were to be overrun by barbarians,
+as their history told them their ancestors had once, in distant lands,
+been overrun. The Hili-lites did not have formidable weapons; but
+fortunately those of the invaders were scarcely more efficient. The
+conflict came to a hand to hand engagement. The invaders could not
+return, even had they so desired; so they must fight and win, or die.
+The Hili-lites had no place of retreat, even had they been willing to
+flee; and they too must fight and win, or die. The invaders numbered
+more than a hundred thousand men; the Hili-lites, about forty thousand
+that were able to fight in such a battle. The latter armed themselves
+with clubs about four feet long, one inch in diameter at the handle, two
+inches in diameter at the farther extremity, and made of a wood similar
+to the dense tropical lignum-vitæ (almost an inconceivable growth in
+that comparatively sunless region); and, for additional weapons, behind
+natural and artificial barriers they heaped piles of lava-blocks, sharp,
+jagged, and weighing each from one to five pounds. The invaders had a
+few very flimsy bows, scarcely six arrows to each bow--and nothing else
+in the way of weapons. From all sides, on came the invaders in their
+frail boats, in one mad rush upon the main island of Hili-li, where the
+Hili-lites had, including their women, children, and aged men, gathered.
+
+"The invaders were ill-fed, tired out by a sea-voyage exhausting almost
+past comprehension, ignorant, almost weaponless, and making a charge in
+small boats; whilst for them the favorable elements in the coming battle
+were that they possessed five men for each two of the defenders, and
+were impelled by a mad, instinctive impulse to advance, similar to that
+of a swarm of migratory locusts, which advances even through fire, and
+though it require the charred bodies of ninety-nine thousand of their
+number over which the remaining thousand may cross. The Hili-lites were
+well-fed, not fatigued, intelligent, comparatively well-armed, and were
+on land, prepared for the battle; whilst they possessed also the
+inherited Roman spirit, once lost by their ancestors, but by the
+descendants recovered amid new and pure surroundings.
+
+"Before a landing could be made, half the invaders, in the confusion
+incident to a bombardment with lava-blocks, were thrown from their boats
+and drowned, or knocked on the head as they swam ashore. Of the other
+half, a third were killed as they attempted to land, and another third
+within five minutes after they reached the shore. Then the remaining
+fifteen thousand or more rushed back to their boats, only to find them
+sunk in the shallow water near the shore--it having been quite easy for
+eight or ten Hili-lites to sink each boat, by bearing in unison their
+weight on one gunwale--a thousand or two young Hili-lites having been
+assigned to that duty. Then the poor wretches who remained threw down
+their flimsy bows, and fell face-downward on the ground, at the feet of
+the victors. Under the circumstances, what could so noble a people as
+were the Hili-lites do? They could not slaughter in cold blood nearly
+twenty thousand trembling human creatures. So it was finally decided to
+build a thousand large-sized row-boats, and it being the best time of
+the year for that purpose, take them back to their own islands. This was
+done. But in punishment for their offence, and as a constant reminder of
+the existence of the Hili-lites--(who, as these savages knew, had
+destroyed more than eighty thousand of their number, with a loss of only
+twelve of their own killed, and thirty-seven seriously wounded--which
+fact, by the bye, Peters says is inscribed on a monument in the City of
+Hili-li, as well as recorded in the official history of the
+Hili-lites)--as a constant reminder, I say, of a people so powerful,
+they were ordered never, on any island in their group, to display any
+object of a white color--the national color of the Hili-lites. So strict
+and inclusive was this command, that the natives were ordered to take
+each of their descendants as soon as his teeth appeared, and color them
+with an indelible, metallic blue-black dye, repeating the operation
+every year up to ten, and thereafter once in five years. The command
+closed with the statement that the natives would be allowed to retain
+the whites of their eyes, but only for the reason that, as they looked
+at each other they would there, and only there, see the national color
+of Hili-li, and so have always in mind the promise of the victors, that
+if another descent on Hili-li were ever attempted, no single
+native--man, woman, or child--would be allowed to live. In addition to
+this, the Hili-lites engraved on a number of suitable rocks on each
+island an inscription, briefly recording a reminder of the terrible
+results of this attempt at conquest, heading each inscription with the
+rude representation of a man with arm extended to the south, over which
+and parallel with which was placed an arrow pointing to the
+north--meaning, 'There is the direction in which a certain foolish
+people may go to find quick death: from there comes war and
+extermination!'
+
+"So effective were the means employed by the Hili-lites to prevent
+future raids, that, though the inhabitants of these islands had again
+increased, probably to a million or more, no second invasion had ever
+been attempted by even the strongest and bravest of their savage
+chiefs."
+
+"Well," I said, as Bainbridge paused, and seemed to be thinking just
+what to say next, "what of the beautiful Lilama and the infatuated
+Ahpilus? I hope poor Pym is not to have so charming a love-feast broken
+into by any untoward event. I must say, Bainbridge, those Hili-lites
+were wonderfully careless of their loveliest women--of a beautiful girl
+of sixteen, and so close to royalty itself."
+
+"Well, my cold-blooded friend, what will you say when I tell you that
+Lilama was an orphan, and had inherited from her father the only island
+in the archipelago upon which precious stones were found, and that even
+in that strange land she was wealthier than the king? Had she been able
+to get the products of her islands into the markets of the world, she
+would have been wealthier than Croesus, the Count of Monte Cristo and
+the Rothschilds, all combined. However, in Hili-li, wealth was
+not--well, not an all-powerful factor; important, but not having the
+power which in the remainder of the civilized world it possesses. To
+have power, money must be able to purchase human labor or its products,
+as only by human power is all other force utilized. In Hili-li, a
+citizen possessed everything that he required for his ordinary wants,
+and it was almost impossible to purchase the leisure time of any man. It
+was possible on certain conditions to procure human labor, but it was
+extremely difficult to do so. Then, for seven or eight hundred years
+slavery had been prohibited in the land, all existing slaves having been
+emancipated--after which, in the course of a few generations, Hili-lian
+history says, the slaves and the slave-spirit were lost in the mass of
+the population.
+
+"In thinking over the position of Lilama and Pym, you must consider that
+the older members of the family would probably not soon hear of such a
+thing as love between these two, and, even when they did hear of it,
+would have little doubt of being able to 'control the situation' as they
+should please. Then, with the ideas possessed by the Hili-lites, there
+would not arise any very serious objection to a union by marriage of
+Lilama and young Pym. The Hili-lites believed the feelings to be a guide
+to true happiness; and whilst they would certainly have controlled the
+circumstances leading up to the seemingly unwise marriage of a girl of
+sixteen--for they believed also in a proper education of the
+feelings--they would not have prevented even a seemingly unwise
+marriage, provided the feelings of those concerned loudly demanded such
+a union--I mean that if in _reason_ such a marriage should seem
+unwise--But enough. The hour is late, and I shall not before to-morrow
+evening at eight o'clock begin a description of the exciting scenes
+through which the beautiful Lilama was so soon to pass, and the
+adventures of Pym and Peters--adventures so terrible that for centuries
+to come they will descend, a thrilling romance, from generation to
+generation, in those usually quiet and peaceful islands."
+
+And then, against my protest, he took his departure.
+
+
+
+
+The THIRTEENTH Chapter
+
+
+The following morning, after leaving the hotel on some trifling errand,
+I returned to find Arthur awaiting me. He stood by my table, and
+occupied himself in turning the leaves of one of my books. He was
+looking with much interest at a picture in a work on paleontology, a
+book which by some chance had accompanied a few selected works that I
+had brought with me from England. The picture that so interested him, I
+saw as I drew nearer, represented the skeleton of a prehistoric mammoth
+with a man standing by its side, the latter figure placed in the
+picture, no doubt, for the purpose of showing relations of size. As I
+stepped up close to Arthur's side, he turned a page in the book and
+disclosed a still more startling representation, that of a reconstructed
+mammoth, wool, long coarse hair, enormous tusks, and the rest. Arthur,
+with his usual curiosity, wanted to be told "all about it," and I with
+my usual desire to teach the searcher after knowledge even of little
+things--though a mammoth is scarcely a "little thing"--briefly gave him
+some insight of the subject, running over the differences between the
+mastodontine and the elephantine mammoth; and then remarked to him,
+incidentally, that an American _mastodon giganteus_, found not far from
+where we stood, over in Missouri, a third of a century before, was now
+in our British Museum, where I had seen it. Of course Arthur had many
+questions to ask concerning the "gigantic-cus" which I had actually
+seen. I gave him, from memory, the best description possible, telling
+him that it was more than twenty feet in length, about ten feet high,
+and so on. He seemed very thoughtful for several moments, whilst I sat
+down to look at my morning paper. After somewhat of a pause, he asked
+permission to speak--for with all Arthur's lack of cultivation he was
+not wanting in a sense of propriety, which he usually displayed in his
+relations with those whom he liked. I gave the desired permission, when
+he said,
+
+"I just wanted to say, sir, that I wish't you'd let me come up of an
+evenin' and sit off in the corner there on that chair, and hear Doctor
+Bainbridge tell about Pym and Peters. I know you've been mighty good to
+tell me the most of it so far, but to-night he'll tell how that
+beautiful female loves Pym, like you said early this morning he was
+goin' to; and I'm awful anxious to hear soon. Something big's goin' to
+happen, and I pity the natives if they rouse up that orang-outang
+Peters. You said I would disturb the flowin' of Doctor Bainbridge's
+retorick by goin' out and in. But I won't go out. I just won't go out;
+if the Boss don't like it he can lump it--I can quit. Right down the
+street I can rent a little shop-room, and a feller and me has been
+talking of startin' a ice-cream saloon for the summer--yes, I can quit
+if the Boss don't like it. I work all day, and half the night; I can't
+keep up my system with a single drink without there's a kick a-coming;
+and now if I can't have a little literature when it's right in the
+house, it's a pity. No: I'll not interrup' the retorick."
+
+Well, the end of it was, I gave my consent; and Arthur went off
+delighted. I mention these facts in explanation of my position. It has
+been said by one who ought to know, and the statement has been often
+enough quoted to evidence some general belief in its truth, that
+consistency is a jewel. I had said, that, during Doctor Bainbridge's
+recitations of Dirk Peters' story, Arthur should not be present; and now
+that he will be seen in a corner of my room evening after evening, I
+desire that the reader shall know all the circumstances.
+
+That afternoon I accompanied Bainbridge on his visit to the aged sailor.
+I was pleased to see the old _lusus naturæ_ sitting in a chair, and
+seemingly quite strong. Bainbridge made himself agreeable, delivered to
+Peters some small gifts of edibles, and then proceeded to ask a number
+of questions--I presume, from their nature, concerning _minutiæ_
+relating to the adventures under consideration. Then we returned to
+town, and separated.
+
+Promptly at eight o'clock Bainbridge entered, and, as he took his
+customary seat, cast a glance at Arthur, who sat on a chair in the
+corner of the room.
+
+"Well," began Bainbridge, after a moment's thought, "we were remarking
+that within our own knowledge and experience, true love has been
+exceedingly likely to meet with obstructions to its complete
+fruition:--and Lilama and Pym met with a similar experience in far-away
+Hili-li. Peters took a great interest in Pym's love affair; in fact, he
+had grown almost to worship the young fellow whose life he had many
+times preserved, and who in less than a year had, under his eye, grown
+from a careless boy to a thoughtful man. Pym returned the liking of his
+old companion and benefactor; but Peters' sentiment was one of
+infatuation, such as only those persons who are 'close to nature' seem
+capable of feeling in its fullest development. When the feeling of which
+I speak exists in its most intense form, it includes a devotion equal to
+that of the dog for its master: it is wholly instinctive, and not even
+the certainty that death stalks in the path between can keep it from its
+object.
+
+"One morning early, there was excitement in the ducal palace. Lilama was
+missing. Search was diligently made. Pym was wild with excitement; and
+as the morning wore on Peters grew almost mad. (I shall speak of
+morning, afternoon, evening, and night. The degree of light in Hili-li
+did not now vary in the twenty-four hours; but it is necessary that I
+should in some manner divide the day, and our usual method seems the
+best.) The Duke himself arrived at about ten o'clock, by which time the
+search had ceased, and what to do next had become the question. The Duke
+appeared surprised at something, and spoke a few words to his son, a
+young man of twenty-two or twenty-three, by name Diregus, who thereupon
+looked slightly foolish, as one does who has made some puerile mistake.
+The Duke appeared to feel a real touch of pity for Pym, who sat
+dejected, a picture of intense anguish, now and then casting a
+beseeching look at the Duke--the only person who, to his mind, might be
+able to assist him to regain his sweetheart. The Duke again spoke to his
+son, who, turning to Pym, motioned him to accompany them. Then, followed
+by Peters, they walked down to the shore, and entered a boat.
+
+"From the moment of starting, every movement of the Hili-lites seemed as
+if prearranged. It was a peculiarity of this people that a number of
+them acting together talked very little, each of the party appearing to
+know the wishes and intentions of the others, without a word spoken. And
+so was it on this occasion. Scarcely a word was uttered, and each seemed
+to comprehend the wishes of the others, mainly by glances and by
+semi-involuntary movements. In the present instance, father and son did
+not once glance at each other, yet the son was evidently aware of each
+wish of the father. They finally came to a landing, across the bay, in
+the suburbs of the city most distant from the locality in which stood
+the ducal palace. There, some four hundred feet from the shore, amid
+giant trees, in spacious and seemingly neglected grounds, stood a very
+large residence, evidently many centuries old, and of a style of
+architecture not seen by the Americans elsewhere in Hili-li. The
+building had an eerie look, and as the party drew near to it Peters
+observed that but one of its wings was inhabited, the remainder of the
+mansion being in a state of almost complete decay. They all entered by a
+side doorway into the inhabited wing. Pym and Peters were motioned to
+seats in the hallway, the Duke remarking, in hushed tones, 'The home of
+Masusælili,' as he and Diregus passed through a broken and decaying
+doorway into apartments beyond. Soon Diregus returned, and, escorting
+Pym and Peters through several disordered rooms, finally paused before a
+large curtained doorway. Then Diregus spoke, but in a hushed voice, and
+with an awed solemnity that chilled his hearers through and through.
+
+"'Fear not,' he said; 'no harm will befall you. If the benign Fate is to
+smile--well; if the Furies are to rage, we can but bow to the Will that
+has held in its hand for countless cycles this petty planet--a grain in
+the wastes of Eternity. Come!'
+
+"He passed through the doorway, and the two followed him. The room they
+entered was spacious--almost thirty feet square. It was crowded with
+strange devices, and was lighted by six colored swinging globes. A
+strange odor filled the atmosphere of the apartment. The room was
+brilliantly enough illuminated, though the light was variously colored
+and its shades and blendings were confusing; whilst the strange,
+intoxicating perfume also helped to perplex the senses. If the apartment
+had contained not more than several objects, the visitors might soon
+have detected and observed all of them; but, as it was, Pym and Peters
+stood gazing confusedly about them, momentarily beholding fresh objects,
+all of them strange, many of them bizarre, some of them frightful. It
+was apparently at the same instant of time that the sight of Pym and
+Peters fell upon an object so awesome that their hearts almost ceased to
+beat, and then bounded on with throbs that sent the cold blood leaping
+down their spines and to their scalps in chilling waves that ceased only
+when their terror reached the numbing stage. There before them, not six
+feet away, among great cubes of crystal, and vast retorts, and enormous
+vase-like objects on the floor, stood an aged man. How aged? He was old
+when the antarctic barbarians were slain, and their remnant sent back to
+its home on those dreary islands to live forever in blackness. None knew
+how old he was--they, the rulers, knew not; or if they did, on that
+subject they were silent. Some said that on the ship which brought the
+nucleus of their race from Rome, came Masusælili with the others--an
+aged man, the oldest on the vessel. There he stood before the visitors,
+his white beard trailing on the tiling at his feet, his shrunken form
+erect. But, whence the terror? Three times ere I could learn this fact
+(and even then I learned it more by inference than by words) did Peters
+sink into delirium, muttering, 'Oh, those eyes--the eyes of a god--of a
+god of gods.' The aged man seated himself at a small Roman table, and,
+turning to the Duke without a question, said in a voice unlike any other
+voice in all the world--steady, but thin, high-pitched, sharp,
+penetrating and agitating depths within the hearer never reached before,
+
+"'You come for knowledge of The Lily. Behold!'
+
+"He pointed to a cube of crystal near him, which, Peters will swear, was
+a moment earlier perfectly transparent. But now it looked as if filled
+with milk of purest whiteness. As they gazed at it, a fire appeared in
+the centre; and soon around the fire there sprang into being a circular
+range of mountains, and on the side of one of these--the nearest--stood
+two persons.
+
+"'Lilama--Ahpilus,' screamed Diregus; 'he has stolen her away!'
+
+"Yes: for though Pym and Peters had never seen the exiled lover, they
+recognized Lilama; and even they could surmise the rest.
+
+"'The youth is mad,' said the Duke. 'We must rescue our darling from the
+maniac.'
+
+"Pym, in his impatience, was about to rush from the room; but the old
+man beckoned for him to approach. He did as desired. Then the aged man
+placed a hand upon Pym's head, and drew it down to him; and the man who
+had lived thousands of years whispered some words into the ear of the
+youth who had lived not yet four lustrums. As Peters described for me in
+his homely way the change that came over the face of Pym as that human
+millenarian spoke perhaps one hundred words into the young man's ear, I
+was reminded of reading as a boy, some years ago, a description of the
+burning somewhere in South America of a great cathedral. The fire
+occurred during a morning service, and with the alarm the doorways of
+the building were at once obstructed by a mass of struggling humanity.
+Some two or three thousand persons were consumed in this terrible
+holocaust. The correspondent who wrote the description of the fire of
+which I speak said that for ten minutes he stood outside the cathedral
+after the surrounding heat had become so intense that efforts at rescue
+ceased, and from a raised spot he looked through the windows from which
+the glass had crumbled--looked across the great window-sills raised
+eight feet from the cathedral floor, looked into the faces of the
+doomed. And as he gazed, he saw the faces of many maidens with their
+lovers by their side--(it was a gala day, and all were in their best
+attire). As he looked, within a brief ten minutes he saw horror-stricken
+eyes gaze at the approaching fire, and at other victims sixty feet away
+already burning; then quickly would the fire approach the owner of those
+eyes, reach him, consume him: And in those fleeting moments the face of
+a young girl would pass through every stage from youth to extreme age,
+and then sink down in death. As the aged mystic whispered to Pym, the
+young man's face turned ghastly, then worked convulsively, then settled
+into firm resolve. And Peters never again saw on the face of the youth
+whom he loved with the love of a mother and of a father in one--never
+again saw the old, careless, boyish smile. Did the old man--shall we
+call him a man?--did the old man whisper into Pym's ear the secret of
+eternity? Would such a revelation have changed youth to manhood in a
+hundred seconds?
+
+"As Pym was led by Diregus from the room, Peters started to follow; but
+the aged mystic motioned for him, too, to approach. Peters says that
+after what he had just seen he felt much more like taking to flight than
+he did like obeying the summons; but he obeyed it. The old man pointed
+to one of the smaller crystal cubes, which would have measured some five
+feet across. As Peters gazed upon it, it began to take on the milky hue
+which he had before witnessed. Peters says that at first he thought
+these cubes were of solid crystal, but after he witnessed the strange
+alterations of which they were capable, he believed they were hollow. He
+continued to gaze as directed, and soon he saw, sitting at a table, with
+a lighted candle by her side, knitting, his poor old mother, from whose
+side he had, fifteen years before, when a thoughtless, wicked boy, ran
+away to sea. He had never seen her again--he has not seen her again to
+the present day. As he gazed upon that aged, wrinkled face--that hard,
+Indian face (his mother was a civilized Indian), he saw that look which
+man sees nowhere else on sea or land save only in a mother's face. He
+threw himself face-downward on the floor, and wrung in agony his hands,
+and moaned out pleas for forgiveness; but the poor, old, fragile form
+knitted on, and on, and the face was never raised. Alas! why must we all
+feel the full force of a mother's love and sacrifices only when too
+late? Why must it be that the deepest of all unselfish love goes ever
+unrewarded?
+
+"Peters scarcely knows how he got from the room. He staggered out into
+the grounds, and saw that the remainder of the party were already seated
+in the boat.
+
+"But I must hasten on. Let me say in a few words, that the party
+returned to the ducal palace, and immediately prepared to rescue Lilama
+from the power of her discarded lover, the exiled Ahpilus. The rescue
+party, on the advice of the Duke, was small. He explained to Peters that
+so far as mere human force was concerned, a thousand men could never
+rescue the maiden. Her return to them, alive and in health, would depend
+upon strategy, or possibly might be accomplished as a result of some
+superhuman individual effort. He was of opinion, he remarked--and he
+judged from what he had been told by government officials lately
+returned from 'Crater Mountains' and also from changes in the young man
+observed by himself preceding the sentence of banishment--that Ahpilus
+was a maniac. The Duke went on to say that he really felt but little
+hope of ever again seeing, alive, his loved young 'cousin.' Then he
+explained that, whilst there were spots on 'Crater Mountains,' from five
+to eight miles from the central crater, on the far side of the nearer
+hills, hot enough to roast a large animal, there were other spots on the
+far side of the remoter mountain ranges where, protected from crater
+radiation and exposed to antarctic air-currents, the temperature was
+almost always far below the freezing-point, and sometimes so cold that
+no animal life, even antarctic animal life, could endure it for an hour.
+He said that poor Lilama was lost, unless some other exile should save
+her--which was unlikely, even if possible--or unless we could invent
+some plan of capture so peculiar as to baffle the madman--a man, by the
+bye, of enormous physical strength, and with a madman's cunning. Peters
+stood drinking in every word spoken by the Duke; whilst Pym listened as
+if heartbroken, but in an impatient, anxious way, indicative of a
+restless impulse to be gone. The Duke continued to instruct and advise
+them, until a large sail-boat was provisioned and manned, when the
+rescue party hastened away on its errand of love and mercy.
+
+"The party consisted of the young man Diregus, Lilama's cousin; of Pym
+and Peters; and of six boatmen, who might or might not be employed
+directly in the attack and rescue, as should later seem best. The party
+had no weapons other than a few peculiarly-shaped clubs, similar to
+those mentioned by me in describing the fight of the early Hili-lites
+against the invading barbarians, and a long dirk-knife in the possession
+of Peters.
+
+"By glancing at this map of Hili-liland, you will observe that the
+sea-course to 'Crater Mountains' was almost direct, it lying in a
+straight line out of Hili-li Bay and across the open sea for thirty
+miles. They were to enter 'Volcano Bay,' which pursued a tortuous course
+amid the mountains, until they should reach a certain pass between two
+of the highest mountains in the whole range. In the centre of one of
+these mountains was a peak some eight miles high, named by the founders
+of Hili-li 'Mount Olympus.' It was possible to sail (or to push their
+boat) to within seven miles of a point where the lavabed was still red
+hot--about thirteen miles from the edge of the central, white-hot,
+boiling lava. This, however, they did not do; first, because the pass
+mentioned, which was the best course up into the mountains, began about
+three or four miles short of the inner extremity of Volcano Bay; and
+second, because within a mile or two of that extremity the water of the
+bay sometimes actually boiled, and the heat would there be quite
+unendurable."
+
+Here Bainbridge paused for a moment, and then continued, "Well, my
+attentive friend, 'the witching hour' approaches. We lost too much time
+in discussion this evening--What! only ten o'clock?" he said, looking at
+his watch. "Well, I am at a good resting-place in the story, anyway, as
+you will to-morrow evening admit. Why, if I started you up into those
+mountains to-night, we should get no sleep before daylight. No, no:
+'sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof; more I would'--how does it
+go? Well, it means that the evils of two days should not be crowded into
+one day. The attempted quotation--as generally happens when I attempt
+quotation from the Bible--is a double failure: not a success simply in
+accuracy of repetition; and, at best, not appropriate. For I have more,
+and a great deal more. But"--rising from his chair--"I must depart. So
+adieu until the morrow--and good-night to you."
+
+He had not been gone five minutes, and I was just complimenting Arthur
+on his silence and otherwise commendable behavior, when Doctor Castleton
+bounced into the room. He knew in a general way the drift of Peters'
+story, up to the developments of the evening before. His curiosity to
+hear what Doctor Bainbridge had so patiently and laboriously gleaned
+from Peters did not seem intense, or it was wonderfully well suppressed.
+Still, he liked briefly to learn from me the outlines of the story, and
+had not failed to meet me at some period of each day, and to hint at a
+desire for information. Therefore, I knew with what object he had this
+evening come to see me, and I ran rapidly over the facts developed the
+preceding evening, and then over those of that evening.
+
+"Yes, yes," he said, "I see, I see. Rich people, but money no good; poor
+people, but poverty no hardship. That's Bainbridge's nonsense--he never
+got anything out of Peters along that line. Money, but money no value!
+Oh, well; Bainbridge is young and full of theories. The next thing he'll
+be saying that they've found a way in Hili-li to make life as valuable
+and agreeable for the lazy and the vile as for the industrious and moral
+classes. He's just philosophizing to suit himself. Why, a people would
+have money if they had to make it out of their own hides, and the money
+would have value, too--yes, and labor-purchasing value. No people will
+ever have all they want, for they will invent new wants forever, and
+more rapidly than the old wants can be gratified. They may get all they
+require of food and clothing, and that, too, in exchange for next to no
+work; but they will always want things that they are unable to procure.
+So long as people do different kinds of work--supply the community with
+different necessaries--they will trade; and when they trade,
+common-sense will soon invent a circulating medium. And so long as one
+man is the mental or the physical superior of another, and fills more of
+the demands of the community than another, he will have the means of
+gratifying more of his own wants than the other man; and as differences
+increase, and different temperaments develop their varying
+propensities--some anticipating their ability to expend, others desiring
+to accumulate for the everlasting rainy day--there will, and necessarily
+must, arise stable methods of preserving values. Oh, pshaw! Who wants to
+make all men--and all women, too--in a single mental and physical
+mould?--and a mighty insignificant mould at that? The world is not made
+better by ease and plenty, but by hardship. Ease and plenty come not but
+as a reward of striving. When every man is like every other man, and all
+are too lazy to want anything, the reign of money will be ended.
+
+"Why not enroll the whole world, and have a great army in civil life,
+constantly under command, with the nature of its wants and their form of
+gratification fixed or regulated by--well, by a majority of these dough
+men? That's the only way I know for the people to get rid of a
+circulating medium, and live."
+
+He paused for a moment, both in his locution, and in his walk back and
+forward across the floor. Then he resumed both:
+
+"I do not know of anything quite so idiotic as is this howl directed
+against the possession of wealth. I myself am a poor man: if I do not
+earn a living each year, I go hungry or go in debt. But I would not
+trade off my chances of a competency and of wealth--a reasonable
+ambition for every man in England and America--no, not to see every rich
+man on earth starve--or even sent to hell. This howl is the mark of a
+plebeian, or at least of a wickedly childish cast of intellect. I know
+of nothing quite so foolish, and of nothing half so brutal. The
+Jew-baiting folly is a phase of the same nonsense. It is foolish,
+because if the possession of capital is denied to the men who can best
+acquire and hence best continue to employ it, then commercial
+civilization must take a back seat--in fact, go, and go to stay; and
+this means abject poverty for everybody but a handful of state and
+church aristocrats. It is brutal, because it is unreasoning and
+mistakenly vindictive. It is the howl of the mentally weak--of the mob;
+and the mob is always brutal.
+
+"If we are to suppress those whose possessions evidence a past or a
+present performance of some service that the world demanded and paid
+for, we cast aside the useful of the earth: we know that their
+possessions were gained, not from the pauper, but from those who held
+material wealth; and I know, and can most solemnly swear, from personal
+experience, that in this world nobody gets anything for nothing.
+
+"Oh, the first French revolution! The French revolution was all right.
+The fight was not against commercial wealth, but against a corrupt
+church, state, and social order. And nobody maintains that the
+commercial class is immaculate: every class should come under the
+regulation of good statutory law. I only claim that it would be wrong
+and foolish to take away in whole or in part the accumulations of the
+commercial class. With us the only wealthy citizens are commercial
+people, and those who have acquired wealth through them, for with us
+here, at this time, the wealthy owners of realty are commercial men who
+have put their surplus money into land. Oh, yes: control them; but it's
+not the business men of the world who need the most looking after."
+
+And with that he shot out of the room and down the stairs; and I soon
+after retired to rest.
+
+
+
+
+The FOURTEENTH Chapter
+
+
+The next evening at an early hour Arthur was seated in the least
+conspicuous corner of my room, a spot which he seemed to have selected
+as his own; and, as usual, Doctor Bainbridge entered promptly at eight
+o'clock. After the customary minute or two of thoughtful quiet, and a
+glance at the map of Hili-li, which each evening I kept spread on my
+table in the centre of the room, Bainbridge continued his recital:
+
+"Last evening brought us to the moment when the rescue party, having
+entered Volcano Bay, were about to land at the foot of the great
+mountain, called Olympus--the Hili-li synonym for Mount preceding the
+name Olympus when the peak, some eight miles high, was referred to. Now
+if you will examine this map with a little care you will observe here,
+near the inner extremity of Volcano Bay, an apparently narrow inlet
+passing directly into the mountain-side. This does not represent an
+inlet from the bay, but an outlet from Crater Lake, a very deep lake,
+the surface of which is several thousand feet below its banks, the lake
+being on the top of the mountain, just south of Mt. Olympus, and
+emptying into Volcano Bay. This outlet is a small stream at the bottom
+of a chasm which cannot correctly be represented on my map, as it is
+relatively very narrow, being only from ten to one hundred feet in
+width. This chasm is what we here term a canyon, or _cañon_, the walls
+of which in this instance rise perpendicularly from the water to the
+average height of ten thousand feet. The paths up the mountain are on
+the sides of this outlet--not close to the water, but winding in and out
+along the mountain-side above, there being a passable way on each side
+of the canyon from the bay to the lake, the distance from bay to lake
+along either path being, in its tortuous course, about thirteen miles.
+At Crater Lake the mountain rises to a height of about six miles, the
+surface of the lake being about four miles above the sea level, its
+banks some ten thousand feet in height. A perfectly straight line down
+the mountain-side would measure about eight or nine miles.
+
+"As the canyon leaves the bay, its walls are about a hundred feet high,
+and are separated by about the same distance; but as the mountain is
+ascended, the walls rapidly rise, and soon become far above the water
+between, and they gradually approach each other. At certain points the
+walls actually overhang the stream below, and almost meet, at one spot
+approximating to within ten feet of each other. Three miles from the bay
+the walls are twenty feet apart, and for the remaining five miles they
+do not at any place approach closer, but on the other hand very
+gradually separate to about sixty feet at the extreme top. At five miles
+from the bay the walls are fully ten thousand feet in altitude, and are
+nowhere less in height from that point to the edge of Crater Lake.
+
+"Our party started up the mountain on one side of this canyon, or giant
+chasm, Diregus appearing in some way to know that this was the proper
+course to pursue. When they were some three miles on their way, a young
+man was seen approaching, but on the opposite side of the chasm. He was
+a young fellow of prepossessing appearance, dressed in plain, coarse
+loathing, and having the elastic movement and grace of the better
+classes. Peters observed, when only the width of the chasm separated the
+two, that the young Hili-lite had a laughing eye, full of latent
+mischief, but also of intelligence.
+
+"He was known to Diregus, and the two began a conversation. He was one
+of the exiles, by name Medosus. Diregus soon ascertained that the exiles
+had long known Ahpilus to be insane; that, three days before, his
+condition had become much aggravated, and that on the preceding day he
+had suffered from an attack of raving mania which lasted several hours.
+Medosus did not know of the abduction of Lilama, but he had three hours
+earlier seen Ahpilus a mile or two from Crater Lake.
+
+"When the party heard this, they were anxious to proceed, but Medosus in
+turn had a few questions to ask, and in common courtesy Diregus was
+compelled to wait and reply to the poor exile's interrogatories.
+
+"Whilst the two conversed, Medosus took from his pocket some dry, brown,
+crumpled leaves, and put a wad of them into his mouth, much as would an
+American planter who raises tobacco and chews the unprepared leaf. Now
+Peters was a lover of tobacco, and the sight of this action, so
+suggestive of his loved weed, excited him greatly, as he had not so much
+as seen a scrap of tobacco for months. When it developed that it was
+tobacco that Medosus had placed in his mouth, and that in some of the
+valleys between these mountains a species of wild tobacco grew, Peters
+was determined to have some of it, the craving of months seeming so near
+to gratification; and he asked Medosus to give him a little of it, to
+last until he could procure a fuller supply. Medosus was perfectly
+willing to grant this request; but on rolling up a wad and attempting to
+throw it across the chasm, it fell into the abyss and fluttered downward
+to the water nearly two miles below. He was about to make a second
+effort, when Peters stopped him, and then a pretty, though a really
+terrible thing happened--to relate which was the real purpose of this
+digression from my story proper.
+
+"Peters was at the moment standing some fifteen feet from the edge of
+the chasm, the chasm being at this point about twenty feet in
+width--twenty feet in width, and even here, where it was two thousand
+feet less in depth than it was a mile higher up, at least eight thousand
+feet in descent--sheer to the raging torrent and the huge, jagged
+lava-bowlders below. It was all done so quickly that none of the party
+had time to become alarmed. Peters, whose arms when he hung them reached
+to within four inches of his feet, stooped just enough to bring his
+hands to the ground. Then, as a lame man using crutches might swing
+himself along, but with lightning-like swiftness, Peters took two rapid
+jumps toward the edge of the chasm, the second jump landing him directly
+on its edge. Then he shot up and out into the air over that awful abyss,
+and landed on the opposite side as gently as a cat lands from a six-foot
+leap; and it did not seem to require of him an unusual effort. He
+received his tobacco, and turned to make the leap back.
+
+"When Peters mentioned to me the circumstance of this leap, it was only
+because he had at the time it was made been so interested in the
+incident of getting the tobacco, that he never forgot the occurrence; in
+fact, it seems to have impressed his mind and memory almost as deeply as
+did the old man with the 'snow-drift beard and the eyes of a god.'
+
+"I attempted to get out of Peters just how he made the leap--whether
+with the legs, or the arms, or both as an impelling force; but it was no
+use. I believe that he does not himself know--he did it by an animal
+instinct, and that is all there is to be said. The old fellow does not
+really know his age, but I should place it, at the present time, at from
+seventy-eight to eighty years, which, if correct, would indicate that he
+was twenty-eight or thirty at the time he was in Hili-li. He must have
+been as strong generally as three average men, and in the arms as strong
+as five or six such men. You remember telling me yourself how he twisted
+that iron poker, and broke the oak pole; and that was the act of an
+invalid nearly eighty years of age. Oh, he must have been a Samson at
+twenty-eight, and as agile as a tiger. What I could draw out of him
+concerning the leap, reminded me of descriptions I have read of the
+_Simiidae_--particularly of the Borneo orang-outang.
+
+"But to return: The party separated from Medosus, who, when about two
+hundred feet away, shouted back, 'You'd better stay with us, Diregus. We
+do not here have to hide away when we play--or at--' (mentioning the
+names of two very rough games prohibited by law on all the islands of
+the Hili-li Kingdom--games corresponding to our foot-ball and our
+wrestling). The party continued up the mountain-side, resting as they
+felt the need of rest. No preparation for the darkness of night was
+necessary; for here the crater-light was very bright--in some unshaded
+spots it was even painfully brilliant.
+
+"After several hours of laborious ascent, the small party of four
+(Diregus had taken with them only one of the boatmen) came within plain
+sight of the rim of Crater Lake, half a mile ahead of them, and almost
+perpendicularly above, though nearly two miles away measured along the
+shortest route that travellers might pursue. It was not at the time
+known, and therefore never will be known, whether or not Lilama had
+caught a glimpse of her approaching friends; but at that moment a
+piercing scream rang through the air from above. Peters thinks that
+Lilama saw some of the party, because the quality of the scream was not
+such as to convey an impression that she was in instant danger. The
+signal, if signal it was, was not repeated, nor did the party wait for a
+repetition. They all hurried onward with renewed vigor; and, in a short
+time, considering the severity of the ascent, had reached a point near
+which they supposed the scream must have been uttered.
+
+"The party had scattered, and were searching among the mammoth
+lava-bowlders, and in the small side valleys and fissures; Peters,
+however, as he then always instinctively did, keeping by the side of
+Pym. The two had separated to quite a distance from the others, when,
+being then quite close to the edge of the great chasm, they heard a deep
+though penetrating voice say the one word (of course in the Hili-li
+language), 'Well?'
+
+"Looking in the direction from which the voice came, they saw on the
+opposite side of the chasm a young and handsome man, dressed much as was
+the exile, Medosus. There could not for a moment be any doubt in the
+minds of Pym and Peters concerning the identity of this young man; but
+if there had been, it would immediately have been dispelled.
+
+"'Well, gentlemen?' the voice further said.
+
+"Pym and Peters had stepped up close to the edge of the abyss, which
+here was, as it was throughout the upper third of its length, from
+forty-five to fifty-five feet in width (Peters thinks that at this part
+of its course it was fully fifty feet broad).
+
+"'Well, gentlemen: why are you two, strangers to me, and to my people,
+also, I think--why are you here?'
+
+"The speaker would have seemed very far from insane, had it not been for
+his large black eyes, shifting and glittering in the bright volcanic
+light.
+
+"At last Pym spoke:
+
+"'Sir,' he said, very calmly, 'we came to assist our friends of the
+neighboring island--friends who have been very kind to us--to search for
+a maiden who by some strange mischance has been lost from her
+people--from her people and her friends, who grieve sorely over their
+loss.'
+
+"'Ah, ha,' said Ahpilus--for it was he--'very good. And they grieve, do
+they? Curse them, let them grieve! And a certain lover--and curse him,
+too--does he grieve? He would better! Ah, ha, ha, ha'--the voice rising
+with each syllable, until the last was almost shrieked at Pym--'Kind to
+you, were they? Well, there is one of them near by--on this side the
+chasm, curse you--who won't be kind to you again. Yes, and you may see
+her, too.' Then Ahpilus stepped off behind some thick, stunted bushes of
+a variety of evergreen, whence, in a moment, he returned, leading by the
+wrist Lilama. 'Great Jove above! Girl, do you see your lover over there?
+You have no love for me--you never had; but never again in time or in
+eternity shall I lie with burning brain, thinking of those snowy arms
+about the stranger's neck--aye, as once I saw them in the palace
+grounds. Curse you all, and may you all alike be d----d. Why should a
+stranger come through ten thousand perils to add to all my untold
+agonies.' Here for a moment his voice softened, almost to a gentle
+whisper. 'Ah, Lilama, once, only once, you shall, of your own free will,
+clasp those arms around me--if not in love, then in terror. A moment
+more, and over this abyss together we shall go!' With terror in his
+eyes, Pym glanced at Peters; and even the phlegmatic Peters was
+startled. 'Yes, for one moment in each other's arms; and then for me,
+the everlasting darkness of Tartarus, or of endless oblivion.'
+
+"As he talked, he had dropped the wrist of Lilama, and she crouched upon
+the ground with her hands before her face, whilst Ahpilus continued to
+rave, and to pace from the chasm's edge away and back again, in maniac
+strides, until he had almost beaten where he paced a pathway. There was
+not the slightest necessity for Ahpilus to guard Lilama, for the awful
+chasm was more than twice the width that any sane and normal man, even
+an athlete, would dare attempt to leap, even to preserve his own life;
+and the distance to be traversed to gain a point in the chasm so narrow
+that an ordinary man would dare attempt to leap it, was several miles
+down the mountain-side; so that Lilama was at least ten miles beyond the
+reach of Pym, though less than eighty feet away.
+
+"The mental strain on poor Pym was almost enough to make him a madman.
+There strode the maniac, to and from the edge of the abyss,
+rhythmically, rarely varying the distance by a yard--twenty yards off,
+then back again, then away. On every third or fourth approach he stepped
+literally to the edge of the chasm, and glanced down, ten thousand feet
+to where the stream below looked like the finest silver thread, lighted
+by the dazzling light from the giant crater, reflected into every
+smallest fissure. Now and again the madman would lash himself into a
+fury, and stop for a moment to gaze at Lilama, who never moved from her
+crouching position some ten feet from the canyon's brink. Even Peters,
+the stoic, was moved--but moved to anger rather than to grief or fear.
+He inwardly chafed, and madly raved, by turns, at the impotency of his
+position; whilst Pym seemed frozen into statuesque despair. How much
+longer would this scene of terror last? Oh, the thought of that awful
+leap into space! The maniac might any moment end the scene--each time as
+he approached in that wild rush backward and forward might be the last.
+The slightest move, the slightest sound, might precipitate the dire
+calamity--and Lilama as well as Pym and Peters seemed to feel this
+truth. The madman, like the wild beast, appears to need an extraneous
+stimulus, be it ever so slight, to suggest an initiative: the crooking
+of a finger, the whispering of a word, may be sufficient, but it must be
+something.--Ah! Has the moment come? Has the insane man caught some
+sound inaudible to the others? He pauses. Yes, he is going to act.
+
+"'Oh! friend,' wailed Pym to Peters, in a low voice, 'save her, save
+her, or where she goes, there go I.'
+
+"Then Peters looks across the chasm, down upon the scene beyond. The
+opposite brink at this point is ten or twelve feet lower than the spot
+where Pym and Peters stand, which gives them an excellent view of Lilama
+and Ahpilus. It is impossible to say just why, but it is obvious that
+the time which they dread has come. Ahpilus stands looking at the
+beautiful maiden who crouches in front of him; and as he gazes his
+powerful form seems to swell, as does that of a wild animal that has
+determined to spring upon its prey. His arms move forward to grasp her.
+He has no fear of interruption--he has for the moment forgotten the
+strangers. He slightly alters his position--his back is toward the
+chasm--his hands touch the person of his prey. Lilama partly raises her
+head. She glances past the maniac for a last look at her lover. She does
+not scream, even as those vise-like hands close upon her, and slowly,
+oh, so slowly, but steadily, draw her within that iron embrace--slowly,
+slowly, as might a maniac devotee move in the desecration of his idol.
+
+"But why does she not scream? Why are her eyes fastened--not on her
+lover--not on the madman, but upon another object? What is that object?
+Is it a man? Can any man move as that thing moves? Surely that cannot be
+a man, that streak of drab color--yonder thing that casts to the ground
+a garment, then shoots backward twenty feet from the abyss--swifter than
+a panther, as silent as death, with two balls of living fire glaring
+from--from a face? Surely not a human face! Yes, it is a human face. She
+does not see the pallid face, the wild eyes of her lover, looking, too,
+at that thing--that human embodiment of animal agility. No: she has not
+time to look, for though the human eye is quick, that thing is quicker;
+and if she take her eye from it for half a second, her gaze will lose
+it. She cannot take from it her gaze--she is fascinated. Within the past
+second of time an heroic resolve has been formed, and a drama has begun;
+in the next two seconds an act in the drama will be completed; in sixty
+seconds more, a whole tragedy will be added to the list of human
+sorrows.
+
+"No tongue can tell what cannot quite be seen. A rush of color toward
+that awful gap; it reaches the edge; it rises in the air and shoots out
+over that gulf that might indeed have been the portal of Tartarus. Fifty
+feet as flies the bird. It is in the air--it is half-way over--and yet
+the maniac has seen it not. But the maniac is turning with his victim in
+his arms. The streak of drab has passed forty feet--ten feet further if
+it is to reach the other brink--ten thousand if it fails to reach it;
+and it has already sunk ten feet in space--with ten feet more of
+horizontal distance to cover, it is already on a level with the edge of
+the abyss which it must safely reach, or--The maniac has turned; and the
+streak of drab has reached the brink--but, ah! below the surface. The
+form is that of Peters--the only man who could be in such a situation
+yet live on. One of those invincible arms is thrown upon the surface
+above the chasm, and those long fingers fasten upon the immovable lava.
+And now the madman sees the danger that menaces his design--but too
+late, for Peters the unconquerable stands erect between him and the
+chasm. Then Ahpilus quickly sets on the ground his living burden; and
+Peters, the human bird of passage, risks again his life.
+
+"But, for a man like Peters, such a contest was scarcely a risk. Had
+Ahpilus been less savage in his baffled rage, Peters would have spared
+the madman; but it was not to be. There was scarcely a man in all
+Hili-li that could physically cope with Ahpilus; but he was no match for
+Peters. For a few moments the sailor protected himself without any act
+of aggression; but it soon became apparent that he would be obliged to
+destroy his adversary, or himself be destroyed. Ahpilus had pushed
+Peters, or Peters had carelessly allowed himself to shift his own
+position, to within dangerously close proximity to the chasm, and at the
+moment when Peters noticed this circumstance, he also saw that he was
+between Ahpilus and the abyss: and Ahpilus, in all his furious madness,
+also observed his advantage. Peters had in his possession a very long
+and keen knife, but, as he afterward said in talking over this incident,
+he had never yet seen the time when he was compelled to use an
+artificial weapon in an encounter with a single combatant; and
+particularly would he never have used a knife, even though his adversary
+were a maniac, if a maniac without an artificial weapon. Peters saw that
+Diregus had found Pym, and, as was also the boatman, he and Pym were, of
+course, viewing the struggle. I should not, however, have included Pym
+in the party of observers; for he knew too well how the combat would end
+to be much absorbed in it. He had no eyes for anything but Lilama.--But
+to return: As Ahpilus saw his advantage, by a supreme effort he summoned
+all his great muscular strength, and aided by that invincible motor, the
+will of a madman, he endeavored to force Peters over the brink. At that
+precise moment the sailor had his right hand closed on the top of
+Ahpilus's left shoulder, and his left hand just beneath Ahpilus's right
+arm on the side of the exile's chest. He quickly shifted his left hand
+to the side of the hip; and then those great gorilla arms raised from
+the ground the body of the madman, swung it overhead as another man
+might swing the body of a three-year-old child, as he did so bringing
+the back of his adversary downward; and then came a movement of
+Herculean power in which the long arms approximated with a twisting,
+bending effect; two vertebras in Ahpilus's back at the point of least
+resistance separated, the spine was dislocated, and a mass of helpless,
+vibrating human flesh fell at the feet of the victor. Peters, whilst his
+brute instinct was in full possession of him, might, instead of dropping
+Ahpilus to the ground, have thrown the body into the abyss; but Diregus
+had anticipated such an action, and called to Peters not to injure the
+poor insane fellow more than was necessary to prevent him from injuring
+others. Ahpilus was not dead--that is, he was not dead over his entire
+body: the hips and all below were as nerveless as the body of a corpse;
+but above the hips, the same old vigor remained--and so it would be
+though he lived for yet a hundred years."
+
+Here Doctor Bainbridge ceased to speak. Doctor Castleton had entered the
+room two or three minutes before, and, keeping silent, had heard the
+last three or four hundred words, which described the close of that
+brief but terrible combat.
+
+
+
+
+The FIFTEENTH Chapter
+
+
+"Well," said Doctor Castleton, as Bainbridge closed. "Peters could, when
+he was fifty years younger, have done that very thing to any living man
+weighing not more than a hundred and eighty or a hundred and ninety
+pounds. I myself have seen him throw to the ground a powerful horse, and
+the little giant must have been older than sixty at the time. Then
+again, he possesses that wonderful instinct of certainty in action which
+belongs to purely animal life. It is said that the tiger when it strikes
+never misses its aim; and that our American panther makes the most
+unusual leaps without ever making an attempt beyond its powers. I have
+many times observed that even our comparatively degenerate domestic cat
+very rarely indeed, if ever, fails to accomplish the purpose of a
+stroke. Peters possesses, or did possess, that instinct."
+
+"Yes," said Bainbridge, "you are right. Peters says that on almost every
+vessel he ever shipped on he was called 'the baboon'--because of his
+great physical power and agility, he says; but as we know, rather
+because of his extremely short stature, his large mouth--in fact, his
+resemblance in many striking ways to the gorilla, or the orang-outang;
+and perhaps, also, in part, to his habit, mentioned in Pym's description
+of him, of feigning mental aberration--assuming to be 'simple.'"
+
+"This won't do," said Castleton, with that peculiar look on his face
+which always appeared when he was about to deflect from the serious to
+the humorous. "Whilst I should not object to hearing my old friend
+Peters called a gorilla, I draw the line at gorilla. I should object to
+the appellation orang-outang, and I should resent with emphasis that of
+baboon. But gorilla I will accept, for in many ways the gorilla is, or
+at least once was, the superior of man. Even if we limit the source of
+our deductions to the skeleton of the animal, the truth of my last
+assertion is strongly evidenced. In the first place, the gorilla is more
+sedate and less pettily curious than man; this is proved by his having
+only three, instead of four, bones in the last division of his spine,
+giving him a shorter caudal appendage than man's, and proving the animal
+to be farther from the monkey than are we; then in the second place, the
+gorilla has thirteen ribs, which would seem to be rational evidence
+that, whatever the present gorilla may be, his ancestors of by-gone ages
+were handsomer than man; because in the gorilla's first search for a
+wife the field of operations was not limited to his own chest."
+
+"That will do very well, doctor; but don't you think you are a little
+severe on Adam?" I said.
+
+"I have no sympathies with Adam. Not that I ever blamed him for his
+weakness in the apple incident; but I do blame him for his garrulity,
+and his paltry cowardice in exposing Eve. Eve was an instinctive
+agnostic--and she didn't purpose to be anybody's slave. If Adam decided
+to keep up with the procession, as he at first did decide to do, he had
+no business to whine over the outcome. I'd wager freely that Eve earned
+the living after the pair left paradise. Cain took after his mother; and
+I hazard the opinion that Eve was in sympathy with Cain in the Abel
+episode--that is, after the tragedy. Eve and Cain had the best of
+everything all the way through, for they acted in harmony with their
+feelings; whilst poor old feeble, vacillating Adam tried to use his
+worthless old brain-box, and the natural consequence ensued. His
+feelings, which constituted the strongest part of his mind, were always
+in conflict with his intellect, which was just strong enough to get him
+into trouble when a pure out-and-out unreasoning animal would have been
+safe; and he never had enough will properly to correct an error when he
+did see it."
+
+We laughed over this conceit of Castleton's, and Bainbridge said:
+
+"Speaking of biblical characters, I have thought that Moses would, with
+even slight literary training, have far surpassed the modern writer of
+adventure-fiction. His style may be open to adverse criticism, but his
+originality is beyond question. If he left any material for a purely
+original story, I fail to detect it. He gave to literature the
+sea-story, the war-story, and the love-story--stories that hinge on all
+the human passions, and stories of the supernatural in all its phases.
+He first presented to a world innocent of fiction-literature the giant
+and the dwarf; the brave man, the strong man, and the man of supreme
+fortitude; the honest man, the truthful king, and the woman that knows
+how to wait for the man she loves; voices in the air, signs in the
+sky--in short, everything. Even poor old Aesop wasn't in time to grasp a
+reputation for originality. The modern story-teller may combine, extend,
+and elaborate; but all opportunity for a display of invention seems to
+be forever barred."
+
+"By the bye, doctor," said Castleton, evidently impatient at his
+enforced silence whilst another spoke, "do any of your volcanoes or
+mountains in Hili-li blow up?"
+
+"No, sir," answered Bainbridge, with dignity.
+
+"Well, if I had been Pym I should have blown those mountains into the
+Antarctic Ocean," said Castleton. "I understand from the words that I
+caught this evening as I entered here that your heroine is safe; but if
+I had been Pym, I should have taken no risks. I should have sent your
+madman word to return the girl, or take the consequences--the
+consequences being that I should have blown him and the entire mountain
+into the mighty deep. 'Sir,' I should have said, 'return the lady, or I
+will annihilate you.' And so I should have done, if a hair of her head
+had been harmed.--By the bye, gentlemen, I believe you never heard of my
+invention for stopping war, did you?" We intimated that we had thus far
+been deprived of that pleasure. I saw that one of his peculiar outbursts
+was at hand--one of those apparently serious, though, I thought,
+intentionally humorous sallies, so puzzling coming from a man of
+Castleton's intellectual attainments, and the mental _primum mobile_ of
+which I had already been much interested in trying to determine.
+
+"Well, gentlemen," he continued, "it was about fourteen years ago,
+during the dark days of The War"--he referred to the great rebellion in
+the United States, which began in 1861, and which it required the
+existing government about four years to suppress. "It was during the
+period when our great President was most worried. I had thought the
+matter over--as I always do think over vast questions, from the
+standpoint of true greatness. 'Why not,' I mentally soliloquized, 'why
+not end this matter at a blow? 'As I drove about through our retired
+roads and lanes, I gave the subject my very best attention. I thought to
+myself how the present system of the universe depends upon what we term
+the luminiferous ether; of the perfect elasticity and inexpansibility of
+that ether; of what its nature must be. I concluded that no ultimate
+particle of it--as with matter no atom--is ever added to or removed from
+the universe. Now, if we could succeed in removing from this
+inexpansible, universal ocean of ether even the most ultimate portion,
+there would be a literal vacuum with nothing to fill it, and the
+equilibrium of the universe would be destroyed. Now, gentlemen, is or is
+not this supposition logical?"
+
+We admitted our inability to deny its truth.
+
+"'Well, then,' I reasoned, looking at the subject on the reverse side,
+'could an additional portion of ether be created, there would be in
+space no place to receive it; the universe in its present state--a state
+in which what we term matter or substance exists--would just simply
+cease to exist--instantly, and within the compass of every star and
+planet.'
+
+"But how to create that particle of ether--that was what occupied my
+mind for weeks. I would seem to grasp the hint that came and went within
+the recesses of a brain which--so say my friends--has perhaps never had
+its equal for variety of conception and rapid response to the slightest
+external or internal stimulus. Now, many physicists suppose matter to be
+simply a form of ether--plainly, that matter originated out of
+ether--was made from ether; so that, after all, the universe was created
+from nothing--that is, nothing if we correctly define matter. It was but
+a step for me, then, to the end: remove all radiant energy from a fixed
+gas--a gas without the property of condensation to another form of
+matter, _i.e._, to a fluid or a solid--and the thing, I said to myself,
+is done. I am positive that I know of such a gas, and within a few years
+all physicists will recognize it. At present the method of procuring it
+is my secret, as I may still wish to experiment with what is now but a
+theoretical discovery, though certain to unfold in practice exactly as I
+have explained it. You understand, of course, that I remove from my gas,
+by artificial cold and compression, the last vestige of heat, my gas
+becomes ether, there is no place for it in the universal ocean of
+inexpansible ether, the balance of the universe as it now exists is
+destroyed, all matter instantly ceases to exist, and we just sit back
+and wait for a few billions of trillions of cycles of time, until
+another system of nature is formed."
+
+For a time we all kept silence: Doctor Bainbridge, I suppose, like
+myself, marvelling at the peculiarities of our strange companion. At
+last I said:
+
+"And how about the war, doctor?"
+
+"Now comes the humiliation!" he replied. "Oh, must genius ever grovel at
+the feet of mere physical power--insolent official power! Why are great
+men so difficult of access! Why, in 1453, did not Constantine in his day
+of trouble listen to your brainy countryman, and save Europe from the
+inroads of the Turk? Well, I hastened to Washington City, determined
+that no ear other than the President's own should hear the secret; and
+that no power on earth should draw it from me. I went to the White
+House. I admit that war-times are busy times--but those infernal White
+House flunkies kept me waiting in the reception-rooms for four hours! I
+told my plans to the ushers, to a waiting soldier or two, and to a
+foreign diplomat with whom I struck up a talk. All of them acted
+suspiciously, and I believe were jealous of my wisdom. When, for the
+third time, an usher took my card--or pretended to take my card--to the
+President, his secretary came down to me. At first I told him that my
+secret was for the President's ear alone; but at last I gave him a clew
+to the nature of my business. He left me, but he did not return. Such is
+reflected political power. But I thought of my power--aye, and physical
+power, too--the only real power. I never blamed the President--I to this
+day believe that that fellow H---- never told Lincoln of my visit to the
+White House."
+
+After an appreciative murmur and movement on the part of Bainbridge and
+myself--for we felt like laughing, and yet sighs of wonderment were
+expected by Castleton--and after a grunt from Arthur in his corner, I
+asked, for want of something better to say,
+
+"Were you ever in the army, doctor?"
+
+"Well--ah--no--yes--no, sir; not exactly," Castleton replied. "But I had
+a younger brother who beat the drum for a whole week in an
+enlisting-office tent in Chicago. Poor boy! he died of brain fever in
+1869--always a genius--great brain.--And this talk reminds me that I am
+getting no pension from the United States Government on that poor,
+neglected, sacrificed boy. Curse my thoughtlessness! Yes, and--but no: I
+belong to the old school of patriots--I will not curse my country."
+
+As Castleton uttered the last sentence, he approached the door of exit
+to the hall. He had as usual been pacing the floor; and with the closing
+word he shot into the hall and was gone. And as the sound of his
+footsteps rang through the corridors of the hotel, Arthur remarked, from
+his corner:
+
+"It's a pity he didn't sit down on his boomerang infernal-machine, and
+then set it a-going: he might a been on the moon by this time, where the
+fool belongs, with the other lunatics. If he ever comes into my new
+ice-cream parlor--(twelve by sixteen, gas-lights, three tables, and six
+chairs; two spoons furnished with one saucer if desired, and a napkin
+for your lady free; ten cents a saucer, and ginger-bread thrown in)--why
+out he goes, too quick. Oh, he's a daisy, he is! If you ever want to
+remind me of him, anybody, ask me to lend you a dime; and when I shake
+my head and my teeth rattle, I'll remember the lunkhead, sure enough."
+
+I frowned down the youngster, for he had promised not to obtrude his
+opinion in the presence of Bainbridge. But as his words did not refer in
+any manner to the story that Bainbridge was telling us, I should not
+have objected to them, but that with Arthur it was necessary to be
+cautious in creating precedents, which, as I have intimated, in his case
+almost immediately congealed into vested rights; and our agreement had
+obligated him to observe complete silence on the subject of Peters'
+story, and, if I correctly remember--though Arthur denied this
+latter--on all other subjects, in the presence of Doctor Bainbridge.
+
+As Bainbridge appeared to have nothing further to say, and was making
+those slight occasional movements which I knew presaged his departure, I
+began to talk of Peters' leap; and in the most guarded manner--for with
+Bainbridge any question of the facts of his narrative required tact and
+delicacy to avoid the giving of offence--to discuss the subject of
+leaping in general, the facts and probabilities relating to distance,
+and the laws and conditions that might govern and regulate the
+running-leap.
+
+"Do you not think," I finally asked, "that Peters somewhat overestimates
+the distance of his marvelous leap? I am aware that Peters was, both in
+strength and in agility, almost preterhuman; but fifty feet or
+thereabouts! That seems scarcely possible. Our best athletes, I believe,
+have never, on level ground, made a running leap of much more than half
+that distance. Now forty feet, under all the circumstances, would not
+strike me as impossible, though thirty-five would better chime with my
+ideas of the probable, and thirty would remove all possibility of any
+draft on my credulity."
+
+"It is not a question of ideas or of credulity," answered Bainbridge,
+"but one of fact. However, we will look at the incident from the
+stand-point of reason and experience. Now let us assume that a running
+leap of twenty-five feet on level ground would not be beyond the ability
+of a trained athlete. I think you will allow to Peters a natural
+advantage of seven feet over an ordinary athlete, when you consider the
+superiority of his form, so well adapted to leaping--a form that gives
+to him the advantage of an orang-outang, without the disadvantage of
+hand-like feet, so poorly suited to flat surfaces. From the fullest
+information I could obtain from Peters, I believe that in leaping he
+obtains more impetus from his arms than from his legs; but even with his
+preternatural strength he does not get quite as much impulse-force from
+his legs as would an ordinary athlete. I myself think that the use of
+his arms in making this leap gave him an advantage of one-third over
+another man of equal strength. However, I ask you to allow him from all
+advantage of form, in the leap alone, seven feet, or twenty-eight per
+cent."
+
+To this proposition I assented.
+
+"Then," continued Bainbridge, "it must be remembered that so far as the
+actual leap is concerned, he missed the opposite edge of the abyss--for
+he did miss it, and any other man would have gone to the bottom of the
+chasm. It was only the length of his arm, with its excessive strength,
+and the iron grip of that enormous hand, which prevented complete
+failure. As a matter of fact, the walls of the abyss being fifty feet
+apart, Peters leaped only forty-seven feet. Am I correct?"
+
+Again I assented.
+
+"Then," said Bainbridge, "we have brought within the limits of reason
+thirty-five of the fifty feet, and fifteen feet remain to be accounted
+for. Now let us recall to your memory the fact that the edge of the
+abyss toward which he leaped was twelve feet lower than the edge from
+which he sprung; and that, in his progress across the chasm he fell, in
+addition to this twelve feet, his own height--which, according to Pym's
+diary was, at that period, four feet and eight inches. If Peters could
+have covered thirty-five feet on level ground, could he have covered
+fifty feet with the advantage of a drop of nearly seventeen feet?
+Assuming a certain weight for Peters, we could calculate the number of
+foot-pounds of energy, or the initial velocity, necessary to make a leap
+of thirty-five feet on level ground, and how many foot-pounds it would
+require to make a leap of fifty feet with a drop of sixteen feet and
+eight inches taken into the conditions. But as most of the equations in
+our calculation are approximative, I prefer that the element of
+gravitation should be handled in a general way. If a leaper were to
+impel himself horizontally only, he would, in the shortest leap, fall
+below a level. This fall may be met to the extent of about two feet, by
+drawing up the legs--that is, by 'hunkering' as the leap progresses, and
+alighting on his feet with the body to that extent lower than when the
+spring began. In a leap of twenty-five feet, however, the leaper is
+compelled to project himself upward as well as forward; and an
+instinctive sense of just how little energy may be expended in raising
+himself, and how much may be left for the forward impulse, is one of the
+chief elements of his proficiency. Peters did not have to raise his body
+at all."
+
+"I begin to comprehend," said I.
+
+"Yes," replied Bainbridge, "the more you think of it, the more convinced
+will you become that Peters made the leap as he states. Of course he
+could not have sprung fifty feet, or even forty feet, on a level; for,
+in a leap of only forty feet, one would have to raise himself more than
+twelve feet into the air, and (except for a possible small advantage of
+position in leaping) it requires the same amount of force to raise a
+body ten feet on an incline, as it does to raise the same body ten feet
+perpendicularly into space--an impossible feat, even to Peters at
+twenty-eight or thirty years of age."
+
+"I quite believe that he did it," I said, "and when we consider that he
+claims to have measured the distance only mentally, and that he might
+therefore honestly have mistaken it to the extent of a few feet, I am
+willing to say that my confidence in his intended veracity is
+unshaken--even if he is an old sailor."
+
+"Yes," said Bainbridge, "and we must not overlook the fact that a man's
+mental state at the time of performing a physical feat is a very
+important determining factor in the result of the performance. A
+powerful but lackadaisical fellow might, with only a few dollars at
+stake, make a very poor showing; yet to preserve his life he might make
+a really wonderful leap. What effect, then, did mental condition exert
+on a man like Peters under the circumstances attending this unparalleled
+leap? Think of the enormous muscular power developed by the message
+received through the nerves from a mind thus affected! His own life, and
+that of another, if not of two others, depended upon the success of his
+effort. Under such circumstances muscular power would either be
+paralyzed, or else intensified beyond our common conception of such
+force. Peters positively asserts, that when a boy of sixteen he
+frequently leaped from the flat upper deck of a boat--that is, from a
+height of twenty feet--into the surrounding water, habitually covering a
+distance of from forty to forty-five feet; whilst other boys, under the
+same conditions, rarely covered twenty-five feet, and never thirty."
+
+A moment later Bainbridge arose to depart; but he lingered for a moment,
+standing, and with his left hand resting on the centre table, began to
+speak in a general way of the great antarctic crater and its surrounding
+wonders. It was my habit to make full notes of the actual facts stated
+by him in the more formal parts of these evening recitals, and sometimes
+even of his comments; and I regret that I did not do so at the
+particular moment to which I am now alluding. It was not until the
+following morning that I made a few memoranda of the closing incident of
+the evening. With the help of these notes and a fairly good memory, I
+hope to be able at this late day to describe for the reader an episode
+that I should dislike entirely to omit from this narrative.
+
+He spoke for several minutes of the wonderful power of nature to
+accomplish certain ends--the force that accomplishes which, he termed a
+_purpose_ in nature; and he made some remarks along the line of a
+contention, that the development of all matter into higher forms was
+what he called an unconscious intention, explaining that there was no
+paradox in the expression "unconscious intention"; for, he said, even
+men, individual men, are constantly performing a thousand acts that have
+an unconscious purpose or intention--as, for instance, the automatic
+action of winding a watch without the slightest exercise of will, and
+without remembering the action. This unconscious motive-force, he said,
+is inherent in vegetables as well as in animals, and that in fact it
+exists, though relatively of very slow and feeble action, in all matter,
+the power being an attribute of all molecules, and even of elemental
+atoms. He, however, claimed no originality for any of the views which he
+expressed.
+
+"To my consciousness," he said, "the conviction of individual
+immortality is so clear that, if I were not perfectly aware of the cause
+of their doubt or disbelief, I should wonder at intelligent persons
+questioning the fact. Like everything else taught by Christ, that we are
+immortal is a fact; and it is not in a billion years that we shall live
+again under new conditions, but, as He intimated, 'to-morrow.' And I
+surmise that we shall not do so in any absurdly physical way, nor yet in
+a manner so deeply abstruse that it would require a logician and a
+professional physicist, were it explained, to comprehend it. As with all
+that God has given us, we shall find the conditions of the next life
+very simple. Educated men--nearly all highly educated men, and
+particularly educated theologians--when they touch this subject remind
+me of the cuttle-fish. There is nothing around them that is not
+perfectly transparent until, by their own act, everything is obscured to
+themselves and to their neighbors. But whilst the cuttle-fish swims out
+of the zone of opacity created by himself, the theologian remains in
+his, fighting the obscurity with logic--for that purpose the poorest of
+all devices. You cannot guide an emotional boat with an intellectual
+rudder. Something to me much more convincing than reason, tells me that
+our bodies will not be long in their graves before we shall again begin
+to live; and my feeling is, that, though consciousness will at the death
+of this body be obscured for a time, it will not be lost for a _long_
+time. I feel that almost at once after death the mystery of conscious
+individuality will again assert itself. Refined by this life, as the
+molecular construction of inorganic matter is refined by passing through
+organic life, so the consciousness lately within the molecules of your
+discarded body, will not be as the consciousness within like molecules
+of mineral or of vegetable matter; for it will be your consciousness
+--_your_ consciousness, created by God and developed by His edict
+--developed after slumbering for ages within the mineral; awakening
+to quicker action in the vegetable world; touching the domain of
+conscious memory in lower animals; aroused to keener moral and
+intellectual existence in your late body, and at last made ready for a
+new mystery--what, we know not--in another world, possibly in the
+direction of what we might call a 'fourth dimension' of consciousness.
+Oh, no; there should not be anything to prevent us from knowing now that
+we shall continue to exist, and to go ever upward, upward, upward.
+Nature permits us, in each sphere of being, to catch a glimpse of the
+succeeding one, if only we will not ourselves obstruct the view."
+
+A moment later he dropped into an animated, almost rhapsodical, running
+comment on some of the scenic beauties surrounding Hili-li.
+
+"Imagine," he said, "what the scenic effects must have been, everywhere
+within the illumination of that great lake of fire, covering an area of
+nearly two hundred square miles--that great lake of white, boiling,
+earthy matter, brilliantly lighting the long antarctic night. Think of
+those mountains, with the Olympian offshoot six miles in height; and of
+the peak called Mount Olympus, looming up ten thousand feet above even
+that great mountain-range. Try to picture the valleys, the chasms, the
+overhanging cliffs, the many smaller active craters, like mammoth
+watch-fires lighted on the mountain-tops in all directions; and the
+masses of glistening salt, thrown by upheavals of the earth high upon
+the mountain-side. Cannot you almost behold the scene? May we not, with
+the brush of fancy, paint for our mental vision many a strange, weird
+picture? Here we see, high on the mountain-front, a mass of crystal
+salt--many millions of tons--thrown, by a mere fillip of terrestrial
+power, thirty thousand feet above the ocean level, to rest and sparkle
+like a gem on the bosom of that old mountain-god, Olympus. Then, still
+higher, on the very summit--for even here, in the glare of this great
+crater, where evaporation rains upward from the sea, all vapor is
+quickly condensed and frozen on the higher peaks--we see, like the
+tresses of the aged, the pearly snow and ice overhanging the Olympian
+brow. Aye, may we not even--"
+
+Well, dear reader, I expect to be censured. As Bainbridge drew toward
+what I suppose would, under any circumstances, have been his close, I
+was sitting with my face toward Arthur, and the actions of that
+unpolished gem told me that the catastrophe was at hand. Those who say
+that "the expected never happens" misinform us; for the expected very
+frequently does happen. The wretched boy did not--would not--look at me,
+and I could not, of course, interrupt the flow of eloquence that poured
+from the lips of Bainbridge. What could I have done? Even at this late
+day, I cannot see what I could have done, though I did know the nature
+of what was coming. It was the words "snow and ice" that added the last
+straw which broke the camel's back, and let fall the load of annoyance;
+and as Bainbridge uttered the words, "Aye, may we not even----," Arthur,
+that miserable factotum, whom I had so rashly trusted, shot from his
+chair into the air; and, with arms waving, and eyes glistening with
+excitement, he fairly yelled:
+
+"Great geewhilikin! Think of that ice, and that salt, and that climate!
+Now if a fellow only had a drove of Giganticus cows, with old Olympus
+for 'em to run over free, where would the other ice-cream fellows be?
+Free ice, free salt, free cream, free fodder, and no end of 'em all,
+too! Why, in that hot hole a man 'ud be a ice-cream king in no time.
+Well, now! doesn't that make your windows bulge? You're a shoutin', Doc.
+Please don't speak again in the same language till I rest my mind, if
+you love me!"
+
+I could not stop him. Frowning had no effect, and toward the end of his
+outburst I even protested in words. But it was no use. He spoke quickly,
+and he spoke very loudly, and not a word was lost on Bainbridge.
+Bainbridge had a fine sense of humor; but like many other humorists, he
+did not relish jocosities of which he was the subject. Any levity in any
+manner connected with Hili-li, I knew would be to him unendurable. He
+had from the beginning taken the Peters disclosures, and even the old
+sailor himself, very seriously. Little happenings during our stay at the
+old sailor's home, which had brought a smile to my own face, had never
+for a moment altered the countenance of Bainbridge from the stern
+seriousness becoming that of one who is gathering facts of the most
+solemn import. I am positive that he would have taken with a poor grace
+the slightest levity from even myself on the subject of Hili-li. But
+from the bell-boy of a hotel! Olympus to become a pasture field for
+mastodon cows! Its ice and its saline wonders to be employed in the
+making of ice-cream!
+
+Well, I just sat, and said nothing, and blamed myself. The thing was
+done, as it is said, and could not be undone. Doctor Bainbridge looked
+at me, with an injured but resigned expression, which seemed to say.
+"Well, you see you've done it; you _would_ allow the creature to drink
+in the nectar of refined literary production, and one of the natural
+results has followed." He took up his hat, and more in grief than in
+anger, he made his adieux, and quietly walked out of the doorway,
+through the hallway, down the stairs, and out of the house. And a moment
+later I said:
+
+"Now, young man, you probably see what you have done! We may, or we may
+not hear more of Lilama, of Pym, of Ahpilus, and the others. I am
+anxious to know what became of the poor fellow, Ahpilus; and I intend to
+find out, if I have to go to Peters for the information." Then, as I saw
+the boy was really repentant; and when I began to consider the fact that
+he could not comprehend why Bainbridge should be offended, when no
+offence had been intended, I mentally threw all the blame upon myself,
+and added:
+
+"But never mind; it does not amount to much. Doctor Bainbridge will
+probably be here to-morrow evening, and will, no doubt, have forgotten,
+or at least buried the incident. But after this, Arthur, you may come to
+me each morning, and as I dress I will tell you all about what the
+evening before I shall learn from the doctor. So, goodnight to you, and
+here is a dollar to help you start the ice-cream parlor."
+
+
+
+
+The SIXTEENTH Chapter
+
+
+On the following evening, at his usual hour, Bainbridge entered my
+apartment; and after the customary greeting, seated himself. No mention
+was made of Arthur's hapless interruption of the evening before,
+Bainbridge acting as if that miserable incident had not occurred.
+
+"If I remember rightly," he said, "we left Ahpilus lying with a broken
+back, and Peters standing by him, with Lilama crouching near; whilst on
+the opposite side of the chasm or canyon stood Pym, Diregus, and the
+boatman, who had accompanied the rescue party in their ascent of the
+mountain.
+
+"After a moment of astonishment, Diregus inquired concerning the
+condition of Ahpilus; and Peters replied that the maniac not only lived,
+but was not in danger of dying; that he was scarcely conscious, however,
+and that even if fully aroused would in all probability not be able to
+walk--Peters knowing from personal experience with similar 'accidents'
+what the results were likely to be.
+
+"When Lilama heard Peters' statement, she approached the injured
+man--the friend of her childhood and her girlhood--and did what little
+she could to make his position at least appear more comfortable.
+
+"There was no possible way for the divided party to unite, other than by
+returning several miles down the mountain-side. Now that Lilama was
+safe, and Ahpilus not only mentally alienated from his people but also
+physically helpless, a kindly feeling came to the party for their old
+friend thus reduced to a condition doubly lamentable, and very pitiable
+to persons so refined and sensitive as were the Hili-lites. There was
+some discussion on the subject of Ahpilus's future; and then Peters said
+that he could easily carry the injured man down the mountain-side. This
+he at once began to do; and in the course of four or five hours, during
+which he stopped for a rest a number of times, he reached a point in the
+descent at which the canyon narrowed to a width of not more than ten
+feet, and across which a rude foot-bridge of logs had been constructed.
+Lilama, as well as those on the opposite side of the chasm, had kept
+pace with Peters; and the divided party now came together.
+
+"Ahpilus was gently placed on the ground; and as his old friends
+gathered about him it was observed that not only had consciousness
+returned, but that the helpless man looked quite the Ahpilus of former
+and happier days. As his old friends looked into his eyes, those windows
+of the mind, they saw a soul unruffled, and at peace with nature.
+
+"Then Diregus addressed to Ahpilus some words of inquiry; but it was
+soon apparent that the stricken man could answer no question relating to
+recent days, or even to the past year or two. In fact, Diregus soon
+recognized that Ahpilus knew nothing of his own past from a period
+antedating his exile to the present time. It appears that the nervous
+shock which accompanied the breaking of his spine had, in some way,
+dispelled his madness, and also those less maniacal, comparatively mild
+delusions which for several years had clouded and perverted his
+otherwise brilliant mind; so that he was again the same loving and
+lovable Ahpilus of former times; but in all the sixty or seventy years
+that he might yet live, he never again would be able to walk, or even to
+stand, unaided.
+
+"The party of five, carrying the helpless man, sadly and silently
+continued on their way to Volcano Bay, which in the course of an hour
+they reached. There they found the other boatmen waiting for them, and,
+also, standing here and there in groups, a number of the exiles, among
+them Medosus. It had gone forth among these pariahs of Hili-liland, that
+something unusual was astir; and, fearing something, they knew not what,
+they had determined to observe the movements of the invading party.
+Diregus soon explained what had brought them to Olympus, and the results
+of their search. The exiles were at first quite unable to believe that
+Peters had crossed the chasm at the point stated, though lying was in
+Hili-li a lost art, the history of that country stating positively that
+but three adult liars (visitors excepted) had existed in Hili-li for
+five hundred years, the last of whom had, two centuries before, died.
+When the Olympians (as the exiles were generally in derision called)
+learned of Ahpilus's condition, and of its cause, it appeared for a few
+moments that Peters would be attacked; but the soothing words of Pym and
+Diregus, and the presence of Lilama, whom they knew had been in extreme
+danger, as well as the expression on the face of Peters when he first
+grasped the idea that an attack upon him was imminent--all of these
+things together prevented trouble.
+
+"When the party had made Ahpilus as comfortable as possible in the
+bottom of the boat, and had seated themselves preparatory to their
+return, Medosus stepped down to the shore, and asked Diregus if he would
+convey for the exiles a message to the King and Councillors of Hili-li,
+and also to the aged mystic, Masusælili, who, though not an official,
+was in reality the chief adviser of those who did control the kingdom.
+Diregus, whose father was perhaps second only to the King--it was
+supposed by many that the Duke was the real power behind the throne, and
+it was within the range of reasonable possibility that his son, Diregus,
+might some day reign--replied that he must hear the message before
+making any promise. Then Medosus, knowing that his former friend and
+schoolmate was at heart in sympathy with the exiles, and did not really
+believe them to be in any way vicious (Diregus himself had twice
+offended, as had a majority of all Hili-lite youths, past and present;
+but he had not offended for a third time), spoke as follows:
+
+"'Say for us to His Majesty, and to the Honorable Councillors, that we,
+the so-called Exiles of Olympus, request our release, and also
+permission to return to Hili-li. In making this request we are not
+willing to say that we have ever in the past done to the State any
+serious wrong. We have, however, reached a time of life when we are
+willing to abjure the delights and benefits of wrestling, of
+ground-ball, of bat-ball, and of other athletic sports. We are willing
+to promise not again to visit the savages of surrounding islands--a rare
+sport. We regret the broken neck of young Selimus, which occurred during
+a game of ground-ball some three years ago, and we regret the accidental
+breaking of a few other bones; but we think these accidents no more
+deplorable than the death of Testube the scholar, or the blinding of the
+chemist, Amurosus--accidents which occurred whilst they were in their
+own laboratories, performing experiments of no material benefit, so far
+as we know, to the people of Hili-li. I might also allude to the
+lamentable death of Solarsistus, who some four years ago fell from his
+tower whilst observing the noted shower of falling meteors. And we ask
+these wise men--particularly Masusælili, whose mind is as cultivated as
+his body is neglected--what they think would become of the people of
+Hili-li if, at some future time, even so few as one thousand such men as
+these two strangers standing there should make war upon us, assuming
+that the decrees of those in power shall have been for a single
+generation faithfully observed. When the barbarian of the north overcame
+our ancestors in ancient Rome, it was only after indolent habits had
+sapped the physical power of the patrician; and when we here repelled
+with ease many times our number of barbarians, it was whilst yet our
+race was hardy from its combat with adverse forces in this then new
+land. We have not forgotten the strange power which Masusælili is able
+to exert over a limited number of persons at one time. We are not
+unaware of the beneficent results of those laws and customs that compel
+the most of our people, between the ages of eighteen and fifty, to
+perform physical labor during twelve hours of each week; but we maintain
+that the elements of contest and danger are necessary concomitants of
+physical exertion, if we are to acquire and retain the manly quality of
+physical bravery, and that other quality so frequently wanting in him
+who is only a scholar--fortitude.
+
+"'Look,' he continued, pointing to Peters. 'There stands a man inured to
+physical danger. A few hours ago he was placed where prompt resolution
+was demanded to decide the fate of one of the loveliest creatures upon
+whom the light of yonder crater-fire ever shone--perhaps upon whom the
+sun ever shone; he had scarcely sixty seconds of time in which to
+determine whether she should die, or he should take the chance of a
+terrible death, with a hand-to-hand conflict, a powerful madman for an
+adversary, certain to confront him should his leap by a miracle prove
+successful. To have leaped over an abyss of half the width of that one,
+and then to have met an ordinary adversary, would have been a
+wonderfully brave deed. He decided promptly--and, too, he succeeded. No
+man in Hili-li could have done half as much, even had he dared attempt
+the feat.
+
+"'That, I think, is all,' continued Medosus. 'We have rarely found our
+rulers deaf to reasonable petitions, and we believe that they will, upon
+mature deliberation, annul our sentences of ten years' banishment. If I
+do not overtax your time and your patience, I should like to ask you,
+Diregus, to suggest to your father and to Masusælili this thought: Since
+the termination of those extended surveys which the State inaugurated
+and terminated after the departure of that ship which visited us about
+two hundred and fifty years ago, we have been aware that Hili-li is
+situated in a great inland sea, about twelve hundred miles in diameter,
+which sea contains from two hundred to three hundred islands, and in
+which our main island occupies a position some three hundred miles from
+the nearest mainland in one direction, and some nine hundred miles from
+the nearest mainland in another direction. We are also aware that the
+sailing vessel which came to us found an entrance through this vast
+ring-like continent, which entrance-way is only three hundred miles in
+width, and is the only means of access to this inland sea, except a
+narrower channel diametrically opposite to the broader one. The broader
+opening, in its main part, is traversed by warm currents outward, which
+remain warm until the continent is passed; and by one broad central warm
+current inward, which is very swift, and the source of the great warmth
+of which we have never been able to determine. The narrower passage,
+generally completely frozen, or choked with ice, conveys to the central
+sea only water at nearly the freezing temperature. The mainland consists
+chiefly of volcanic mountains, is apparently covered with ice, and is
+wholly impassable. Now, we have long thought ourselves safe from the
+outer world, as we really are from the savages of the other islands
+within this great sea. We know that in the first thousand years of our
+history there came to us once two wrecked sailors, and at another time a
+single sailor; then came the ship; and since then every ten to thirty
+years we have had some token, animate or inanimate, from the great
+beyond. But none that came, save the ship-load of two hundred and fifty
+years ago, ever left us; and those who sailed that vessel could not
+again have found us, had they tried during the remainder of their lives.
+Hence, our Councillors appear to think that we shall forever remain
+secreted here in safety. Now I only wish to suggest to those who are
+wiser, but whose minds are not like ours sharpened by hardship and
+solitude, that some great event in the vast outer world must have
+occurred preceding the visit of that ship. The conditions of the world
+have in some manner changed. Yet, whilst the vast ring-like continent of
+ice-covered volcanoes will long protect us, the warm strait will be
+discovered and mapped, and then design will carry to us many, over the
+same course by which chance has conveyed a few. As usual, I suppose,
+these two men will not be allowed to leave us. But in some way the
+outside world will learn of us and of our exhaustless supplies of these
+pebbles' (he pointed to nuggets of gold lying on the shore of the bay),
+'which we know are the same as others in our museum, that our ancestors
+brought from Rome, and of which--so says our ancient history--one pebble
+the size of a fingerend would purchase a human captive! Some chance will
+carry to those people (no doubt the descendants of those barbarians who
+almost exterminated our Roman ancestors) a knowledge of this.' Here
+Medosus picked from the ground a nugget of gold about the size of a
+large orange, and threw it carelessly from him into the bay. 'Aurum,' he
+said, disdainfully; 'aurum, the curse of our ancestors! What would not
+the outer world endure to gain the ship-loads of this stuff that lie
+scattered over our volcanic islands? Stuff which we use only in building
+and for pavements, because it is easily worked, and bright, and lasting.
+What will our people do when ship-loads of men like these two strangers
+come to us? And, come, too, not almost starved and without weapons, but
+with spears, and practised arms to use their spears. Astuteness is a
+poor weapon, when it is the only weapon, against men who are maddened
+with avarice: bravery, physical power, fortitude; the strong arm, backed
+by the quick eye, and the mind inured to danger--these, in such a time
+of need, will alone avail to protect our lives, our land, and our homes
+from a ruthless foe.
+
+"'Pardon my prolixity; but, as I talked, I became more interested in the
+fate of my countrymen, even than in that of my fellow-exiles and myself.
+You understand me, my old friend? I know that you will speak for us.
+Good-by.'
+
+"And then wishing the exiles good-by, the party in the boat moved from
+the shore--at first by paddle-power; but on reaching the outlet of
+Volcano Bay the sails of their boat were spread for the run across the
+open sea."
+
+Here Doctor Bainbridge paused for a moment in his narration, lighted a
+cigar, took a whiff or two, and then continued:
+
+"You must pardon me for entering so fully into the affairs of Medosus
+and his fellow-exiles. It was only by tact and patience that, little by
+little, I gathered from Peters the facts. My excuse for this verbosity
+is, that from the speech of Medosus--whose words show that he supposed
+Pym and Peters would never be allowed to leave Hili-li--we obtain,
+better than from all other sources of information which were opened to
+Peters, an insight of the geographical knowledge, and of many of the
+peculiarities, of a strange, isolated people--a people which, beyond all
+doubt, I think, is descended from the pure imperial Roman stock; and
+also because it explains the means by which the exiles afterward
+obtained their liberty, and were thus enabled to assist their relatives
+and friends in the City of Hili-li, at a time when, though of brief
+duration, the islands of Hili-li were threatened with depopulation. It
+seems that the message of Medosus, joined with the lesson of Lilama's
+abduction, carrying as it did a suggestion of future possibilities
+should the exiles continue to increase in number whilst growing more
+reckless, and at the same time no strangers be at hand to assist in
+overcoming them--these considerations, and the influence of Pym, who
+described the quality of English, German, French, and American soldiers
+that were produced in lands where, he said, sports and games similar to
+those of Hili-li (he explained the nature of sparring, cricket, etc.)
+were in no manner restricted by law. (This, you will remember, was in
+the year 1828.)
+
+"The rescue party were met at the Duke's landing by all the residents of
+the palace, and by many relatives and friends of Lilama, who had
+gathered to receive her. As soon as Peters' wonderful feat was
+explained, he became the hero of the island.
+
+"The Hili-lites showed themselves in one respect much like other races.
+They had no sooner decided to rescind the interdict against the hitherto
+obnoxious athletic games, than all classes began to patronize these
+sports, and immediately they became very popular; and to the other games
+was added that of contests at leaping. Some of the feats performed at
+this time by Peters were certainly astonishing. One of his performances
+which took place during an exhibition in the presence of the élite of
+Hili-li, was to leap from an improvised platform, placed eighty feet
+above the ground, grasp the limb of a tree which projected about thirty
+feet beneath and several feet away from the platform, instantly drop to
+another limb, twenty-five feet lower, and then to the ground. To an
+observer he appeared to jump from the platform, to strike one limb and
+then another in his descent, and to fall, a mass of bruised flesh and
+broken bones, upon the earth; the real climax being when, instead, he
+fell lightly on his feet, and walked away to prepare for his next act in
+this public display.
+
+"But we must hasten on. And before proceeding to subjects of greater
+interest, I will tell at once what was the future of Ahpilus. He had
+when a boy been noted for a love of study, and now when he could no
+longer walk, he turned his attention to literary pursuits. Masusælili
+took an interest in the unfortunate young man, and allowed him at first
+to be brought occasionally to the studio which the reader has already
+visited, and later to become an assistant in his researches. Peters and
+Pym felt very kindly to the poor fellow, and evinced their regard by
+inventing and making for him a sort of chair on two main wheels and a
+small third wheel, upon which he could sit and guide himself with ease
+and comfort from place to place in the city, and that, too, with quite
+as great speed as he had in the past been able to attain by walking. The
+last thing heard of him by Peters was, that he had begun a history of
+the Hili-lite people, from the settlement of Hili-li to 1828. And this
+reminds me to say that, to Pym and Peters, one of the strangest things
+in Hili-li was their count of time, which appeared the same as our own.
+It was not in fact the same, however, though Peters insists that it was;
+for whilst we, of course, count time according to the Gregorian
+calendar, the Hili-lites must have counted time according to the Julian
+calendar. This would have placed the Hili-lites about eleven days in
+arrear of Pym's count--a difference which, under the circumstances,
+Peters might easily have overlooked.
+
+"Not many weeks after the rescue of Lilania, she and Pym were married
+according to the usual form of Hili-li. The wedding ceremony was a very
+quiet one. I have thought that perhaps the customs of Hili-li might
+account for the lack of any festivity; and, again, that the Ahpilus
+incident may have precluded all social gaiety at such a time, the
+injured man being still in a precarious condition."
+
+Here Bainbridge paused for a moment, took a turn or two across the
+floor, relit the long-neglected cigar that he held in his fingers,
+seated himself, and continued:
+
+
+
+
+The SEVENTEENTH Chapter
+
+
+It is pleasant to dwell on this period in the life of young Pym. We
+think of his home on the far-away island of Nantucket, with the loving
+mother, the proud father, the doting old grandfather--all cast aside,
+and probably forever, by the momentary folly of a boy; then of his
+connection with the ship-mutiny--unquestionably one of the most horrible
+positions in which it is ever the fate of man to stand; the death of his
+friend and his friend's father; the shipwreck, and the long, lonely days
+of watching, in hunger and thirst, for a sail; the final loss of all
+companions save a gorilla-like half-breed, whose animal instinct of love
+and fidelity fell about the poor boy like a protecting garment. Then
+comes this bright spot in his life away in Hili-liland, like a momentary
+rift in the clouds of a stormy day. For Pym the sun shone with a
+heavenly effulgence, whilst the obstructions of a dire destiny were for
+a time removed; but when again the clouds closed between him and the
+brightness of existence, they closed forevermore. Yet this mere boy,
+into whose life hardship and danger had introduced more than the
+experience of most old men, enjoyed, too, what many very aged men never
+have possessed--what Alexander the Great never possessed--that of which
+wealth or other source of power seems actually to deprive many men. He
+enjoyed what was worth more than all that ambition backed by wealth and
+power can give--that is, the faithful love of a beautiful woman, loved
+truly in return. This boy was loved by one who was capable with her
+witching loveliness of satisfying every desire, enthralling the
+imagination, rousing in the heart that passion which inspires the mind
+to regions where it throbs in harmony with the Divine, and touches--as
+might some dying desert-waif with his parched lips a cooling
+fountain--the very source of love itself. But the most of human
+love--how debased and debasing, how vile! God, for purposes of His own,
+links for mankind the Aphroditic passion to the love Divine. The two are
+separable, and man assuredly separates them. True love may be witnessed
+as low in the scale of life, and as high, as consciousness is found. We
+find it in the heart of the faithful animal that dies on a loved
+master's grave, howling in anguish its life away. And we find it in the
+purity of woman's heart, where it rests ready for the contact that is to
+ignite it into illumination forever. Woman herself is divine. Man has
+placed her everywhere, sometimes behind the barred doors of a harem,
+sometimes on the throne of empire; but he has not blotted out the
+divine.
+
+"With Pym it may not have been a love that would have carried him safely
+into and through a beatific old age--or it may have been; we choose to
+think that it was a growth that would have bloomed perennially. It was,
+I think, such a love as every man of imagination feels to be a mountain
+of wealth beside which all else is dwarfed to utter nothingness--a
+concretion from the endless and eternal ocean of love--a glimpse into
+that paradise where exists the Almighty, who is Love.
+
+"I should judge from what Peters knows well enough, but which I gleaned
+by patient toil from that wicked though unsophisticated old segment of
+intelligence, that these two young persons had a most delightful, though
+extremely peculiar, wedding journey. The months had flown, until it was
+again December--the antarctic midsummer month, in which, and the greater
+part of January, there is no night.
+
+"At this, the delightful season of the antarctic year, a beautiful
+yacht-like vessel was equipped; and with Peters as captain, and four men
+under his orders; Lilama, and a lady friend, with two maids; and Pym,
+accompanied by his now close friend, Diregus, the journey began.
+
+"To Peters' mind, the most remarkable part of this pleasure excursion,
+was the extreme differences in climatic conditions which the party
+experienced within the range of a single day's, or even a single hour's
+travel. In December and January, Hili-li was so warm as scarcely to be
+habitable--certainly not comfortably habitable for natives of the
+central temperate zone of North America; yet at this same period of
+time, there was a small island on the meridian of Hili-li, and only
+thirty miles from the large surface-crater, on which the temperature was
+about 65° F. There was, just across 'The Mountain'--as the Hili-lites
+frequently spoke of the rings of mountain-ranges surrounding the central
+crater--an island of somewhat greater area, upon which ice was at all
+times to be found at a few feet above sea-level, and which, during eight
+months of the year, was so cold that no animal life could have existed
+upon it. Then, at variable distances from the crater, and in different
+directions, islands were to be found of almost any desired temperature.
+The wealthier Hili-lites owned summer residences on these out-lying
+islands, situated at sailing distances varying from an hour to six
+hours' travel from Hili-li.
+
+"The wedding-party, owing to the social position or the personal
+qualities of its members--which included official rank, hereditary
+prestige, beauty, mental culture, and preternatural prowess--was
+everywhere warmly welcomed. It was expected, received with open arms,
+and every source of entertainment was exhausted to make its visit at
+each island enjoyable.
+
+"The party visited the island owned by Lilama, where they found the
+temperature quite cold, but the island comfortably habitable. It was at
+about the same distance from the crater as was Hili-li; and was so
+situated as to be of nearly one temperature all the year round. They
+found at work there a body of men, numbering not more than fifteen or
+twenty. It seems that upon making a trial of the various islands as a
+home for the descendants of the animals brought south by the original
+settlers, it was found that upon this island conditions were the best
+for raising sheep for their wool; and from the wool raised, Lilama's
+income was much greater than from the precious stones found there later,
+though precious stones were found on no other island in Hili-liland.
+Peters knows next to nothing, either theoretically or practically, of
+geology; but he says this island looked very different from the others
+in that region, and that its mountainous central portion appeared
+altogether different from any other of the mountains in Hili-liland.
+Asked to say if he had ever seen a mountain-range which Lilama's
+mountain resembled, he replied, but could not say why he so thought,
+that it reminded him of various parts of the Appalachian range.
+
+"In strolling about the island, the party entered a small warehouse in
+which the precious stones were kept. Peters says that the gems which he
+there saw were of all sizes up to a large hen-egg, and of all colors
+except green. He particularly remembers being given several beautiful
+specimens, including blue, red, yellow, violet, gray, and white stones,
+all transparent; a black stone, and a brown-gray opaque stone. These
+were, of course, the sapphire, ruby, topaz, amethyst, and other
+varieties of corundum, the islands evidently containing no emeralds or
+diamonds. Lilama selected from a tray a stone the color of pigeon-blood,
+and about the size of an English walnut, which she handed to Pym as she
+might have handed him a beautiful rose. In Europe or America this stone
+would have purchased a fair-sized town.
+
+"Peters described a strange natural phenomenon that exists on an island
+not more than half a mile in length, which the party visited after
+leaving Lilama's island. Near the centre of this last-mentioned island,
+says Peters, is a volcanic mountain about four thousand feet in height,
+with an extinct crater reaching down through the centre of the mountain
+to within a hundred feet of the sea-level, and, at its lower part,
+communicating with the outer surface by a tunnel some ten feet in
+diameter. Upon entering, by means of the tunnel, this sunken crater, a
+gallery was found, ascending spirally by at least twenty turns to the
+extreme peak of the mountain. The diameter of the crater was about one
+hundred feet at the bottom, about two hundred feet at the top--the
+diameter widening at each complete circuit of the gallery by from eight
+to twelve feet, the breadth of the gallery varying from four feet to
+six. Looking from below at the opening above, the spot of sky, says
+Peters, looked like the full moon. The length of the gallery, as its
+gradient is about forty-five degrees, must be about a mile and a half.
+Out of the gallery, at several points in the ascent, passes a small
+side-tunnel, communicating with the exterior.
+
+"On still another island, about a hundred miles from Hili-li, but on
+about the same meridian--that is to say, in the same warm air-current,
+though the heat of the current was there much diminished by
+dilution--the party visited certain ruins which had always greatly
+puzzled the Hili-lites. The island was quite large, and was covered with
+agricultural farms, from which a single crop was taken each year. The
+ruins were quite uninjured by time; and one small stone structure was so
+complete as to be scarcely more dilapidated in appearance than would be
+any other old and neglected stone building in Hili-li. The stone of
+which the various structures were composed had never in all the
+centuries of their residence there been found by the Hili-lites
+elsewhere than in these buildings; the supposition being that it came
+from the great surrounding continent. But, after all, the real
+peculiarity of these buildings was in their architecture. The difficulty
+of obtaining from Peters any architectural facts, you will never
+appreciate unless you attempt, as I have done, to procure such
+information. He declares that in these buildings were neither columns
+nor arches; and he also declares that the absence of arches and columns
+he knows, not only from his own observation, but because that fact was
+alluded to in his presence by the Hili-lite members of the party; yet he
+is equally certain that in one of the larger of the ruins the roof was
+intact. How a roof could be supported without reasonable vertical
+resistance, and without arch resistance, I am unable to say; and it is
+wholly improbable that the walls in a building of its dimensions could,
+without an arch, support a roof. The Hellenes, you recall, were very
+artful in hiding from observation the arch, though they frequently
+employed it. I admit that I must have greatly bored old man Peters over
+this subject of architecture; and as I myself know next to nothing of
+the subject, technically, and he knows absolutely nothing of it,
+technically or otherwise, and as he took no interest in the ruins even
+when they were before his eyes, you will understand that my information
+concerning these ruins is not very clear. It was also utterly impossible
+for me to gain from the old man data upon which to base an opinion as to
+the style of architecture of these structures. The buildings generally
+were very large, very beautiful, and constructed in a style entirely
+distinct from any known ancient style--that is, for instance, they were
+not Hellenic, or Egyptian, or Assyrian, or Roman. This much the
+Hili-lites knew and said. Then, further, there were inscriptions in
+characters unknown to the world at the time of the barbarian overflow
+into the Roman Empire, and also unknown to Pym. In one of the ruins was
+a large window made of blue and yellow transparent corundum, in which
+appeared an inscription made by a setting of rubies.
+
+"What a strange world, in which entire races come and go, some of them
+leaving a ruin or two, and perhaps an odd indecipherable inscription
+here and there! The world was fortunate indeed to grasp, from the
+obliterated and forgotten past, Hebraism and Hellenism--the moral and
+the beautiful; from which man's craving for goodness has resulted in
+Christianity; and from which his impulses of sweetness and brightness
+and loveliness have developed the Renascence! Between goodness and
+beauty, why should there ever be conflict? Pure goodness is pure love,
+and love is almost synonymous with beauty.--But, pardon the digression.
+
+"The tour of the islands comprising Hili-liland continued through
+December and January. I could tell you much of the social gayeties in
+many a bright country-home during these two months; but in these Peters
+was not much interested, and I could not get from him many of the
+particulars. Thus far I have striven to keep all facts unpolluted by any
+possible alloy of my own imagination--let me continue to be, in word and
+in spirit, true to the facts. Were I to attempt a description of these
+island festivities in faraway Hili-liland, perhaps, inadvertently--the
+facts being meagre--I might say something bordering on untruth; and,
+rather than untruth--a thousand times rather--silence.
+
+"I will close for this evening by saying that the wedding-party arrived
+at the island of Hili-li about February 1st--the year being 1829. Some
+time before starting on the tour, Lilama had begun the construction of a
+new home; and by the time of her return it was completed. Her new
+residence was not large, but it was elegant. Here the happy couple
+dwelt, Peters having an apartment to himself which was enough to set a
+sailor wild with joy. Peters says that he grew to like very much what he
+calls 'volcano tobacco;' that it was 'good and strong'--to his taste all
+the better for that. The only mistake that Lilama's architect made in
+his plan for her new home was in not having Peters' apartment either on
+the roof, or else next door. Peters now smokes American tobacco; and
+even now--but let the past go; I did not sit on the edge of the old
+sailor's bed for thirty hours for nothing. Tomorrow evening I shall tell
+you of the great catastrophe which occurred on the island of Hili-li
+during the visit of Pym and Peters."
+
+Here Bainbridge closed his recital for the evening. I believe that he
+would have remained for at least a few minutes longer; but as he was
+about to reply to a question of mine, Castleton rushed into the room,
+and Bainbridge departed.
+
+Castleton, who was overflowing with joyous excitement, informed me that
+the dreaded yellow fever of the South was on its way North; and that if
+I would delay my return to England for a week or ten days I could see
+it. His remark did not much alarm me. Then I proceeded to tell him in
+outline what had become of Ahpilus, of the marriage of Lilama and Pym,
+and of the wedding-tour of the islands. As I closed, he said:
+
+"Young man, you will soon be returning to England, that lordly nation to
+whose hind-quarters the sun is kinder than to its head-quarters. When
+you get home tell your countrymen of the discoveries you have here made.
+Tell them of the wonders of Hili-li--but be careful. This fellow
+Bainbridge is a romantic youth, and he is liable to lead you astray in
+some important respects. Tell your noble countrymen of the central
+crater--that, no doubt, Peters saw; as to the Hili-lites being
+descendants of the pure stock of ancient Rome, that, too, I believe. But
+do not repeat this foolish theory about love which he introduces into
+Peters' narrative. The wise, practical, and puissant residents of that
+Corinthian Capital of Brains--I refer to London--will know better. Oh,
+yes; women are true!--very true! Better than wealth--pshaw! better than
+empire--pooh! That nonsense will pass at twenty-five; at forty a man has
+some brains. The 'constancy' of women--that gets me! Why, sir, I once
+loved three women at the same time, and not one of the three was true to
+me--yet Bainbridge talks of a woman's constancy, single-heartedness, and
+such chimerical stuff--the kind of stuff, that, with youth, takes the
+place of the recently discarded nursery fiction. I think of the hundreds
+of women that I have loved, beginning in my early boyhood, passing
+through my adolescence to the acme of my powers, and even now as I stand
+on the verge of my desuetude! Surely some one of these many women would
+have been constant, if women have any constancy in their make-up. Show
+me a woman howling out her life on _my_ grave, and then I'll believe
+Bainbridge. But I know all about Bainbridge. I know where he goes the
+evenings that he doesn't come here. Never mind--I'm silent as the grave.
+I don't need to tell a man of your superlative acumen what Bainbridge's
+talk implies. He mustn't talk to me though about woman's constancy and
+single-heartedness till he's ten years older; let him tell that stuff to
+Peters and the other mariners."
+
+After some further talk, Castleton remarked:
+
+"It seems, then, according to Bainbridge, that we moderns owe about all
+we have to the Jew and the Dago! Now, men less intelligent than you and
+I, after looking at the average Jew and Dago as seen to-day in the
+United States, would doubt this assertion. I cannot dispute it, however;
+for through the ancient Jew certainly came Christianity, and through the
+ancients in Greece and Italy our art."
+
+He paused for a moment, and then continued:
+
+"A delightfully euphonious set of names those Hili-lites possess. The
+name _Hi_li-_li_ is not bad itself: _Hi_li-_li_, _Hi_li-_lite_,
+_Hi_li-_li_land--pretty good. _Li_-la-ma, Ah-_pe_-lus, Di-_re_-gus,
+Me-_do_-sus, Ma-_su_-se-_li_-la--all pretty fair. I have no doubt that
+Bainbridge would spell them so as to produce a Latin appearance. And
+this reminds me of a certain name not Latin."
+
+I saw that the doctor was about to recount a "personal experience." He
+continued:
+
+"One day a stranger came to our town--a plain, clean-looking, blue-eyed
+sort of scientific fellow from somewhere so far out in the suburbs of
+Europe that the name of his country or province has wholly slipped my
+memory--a mighty rare thing, by the by, and it always galls me when I
+forget anything. This chap came here to look at coal, or to hammer
+rocks, or to look for curiosities. Well, he ran up against me. Don't ask
+me his name--I believe he spelled it S-c-h-w-o-j-k-h-h-j-z-y-t-y-h-o
+B-j-h-z-o-w-h-j-u-g-h-s-c-h-k-j. One day he asked me to introduce him to
+a certain Bellevue capitalist. The fellow had pleased me, and I agreed
+to do the introducing--partly, I admit, to see whether a man that
+gutteralled his words out of his stomach could swindle one of our own
+sharpers that talked through his nose. But now came the rub: how was I
+to introduce a man when I couldn't utter his name? I used to practice at
+pronouncing that name as I rode around in my buggy, but it was no go. At
+last the day came when I was to introduce the fellow with a surplus of
+knowledge, to the fellow with a surplus of cash. That morning I awoke
+with the worst sorethroat of my life. I felt as if I had two boiled
+potatoes in my throat. The passage from my nose to my windpipe was
+closed for repairs, and that from my mouth to my throat was
+seven-eighths closed. Pretty soon, just from recent habit, I began to
+practise on the scientific chap's name. Great Scott! I could pronounce
+it better than its owner could. There were certain grunts and sneezes in
+the name--particularly one syllable between a grunt and a sneeze--that I
+suppose no Anglo-Saxon had ever before or has ever since uttered
+correctly; but they were nothing to me, so long as my sorethroat
+lasted."
+
+Then Castleton rushed from the room; calling back from the head of the
+stairs, and in tones intentionally audible to every man and woman on
+that floor of the hotel:
+
+"It's coming, sir, depend upon it--the genuine yellow fever--evaded the
+New Orleans quarantine three weeks ago--three cases at Shreveport and
+two at Memphis reported--talk, too, of a case in St. Louis. Heavens! but
+I hope a beneficent Creator will not allow some other doctor to get the
+first case, when, happily, it shall have reached Bellevue."
+
+The last sentence was uttered _sotto voce_, as he descended the stairs.
+
+
+
+
+The EIGHTEENTH Chapter
+
+
+"It appears," continued Bainbridge, on the following evening, "that
+Hili-li was subject to the recurrence about once in forty-seven years of
+a strange thermic phenomenon, the mean duration of which was about fifty
+hours. This change had occurred twenty-one times in the preceding
+thousand years; its duration had once been as brief as thirty hours, and
+at another time had lasted one hundred and twenty hours. The interval
+between two of its visitations had once been somewhat less than eight
+years; whilst at the period of Pym and Peters' presence in Hili-li, it
+had not occurred for eighty-six years and some months. For some reason
+that could not be conjectured, at these times the wind-currents,
+generally varying but slightly in force and duration, changed, the wind
+coming from a point of the compass almost diametrically opposite to its
+usual direction, and increasing in velocity and force to that of a
+tempest or blizzard. The result was, that in a very few hours the
+temperature of Hili-li fell to about zero Fahrenheit, if in December or
+January; to 60° or 70° Fahrenheit below freezing, if in July or August.
+During the first few hours of the change, owing to the extremely moist
+state of the atmosphere for many miles in all directions from the crater
+of Hili-li, there occurred a heavy snowfall--which, however, diminished
+as the temperature fell, until at somewhat above the zero point it
+ceased.
+
+"The government of Hili-li, by laws and by the encouragement of custom,
+did much to prevent damage from these storms--which, as I have
+intimated, were a combination of hurricane and snow-storm, with a very
+sudden and rapid fall of temperature; and when the interval between two
+of them was not greater than twenty years, the provisions made by the
+state were ample to prevent loss of life. By the law of the land,
+residence houses had to be built in such a manner that at least one room
+in each house could be warmed by a fire. Fire for purposes of warmth was
+never in Hili-li required, except during these storms; and all cooking
+was done on a peculiar stove made chiefly of gold, the fuel of which was
+either fish oil, or another oil termed by the boatmen who sold it
+'continent oil'--or, rather, by a name corresponding in the Hili-li
+language to those words in the English. The law further provided that on
+the premises of each home wood should be kept, ready for use, in chests
+of a size convenient for two persons to carry into the room in which it
+was to be burned. By this means, the worst that could happen to a family
+was that its members might suddenly at any time be confined to a single
+room, comfortably warmed, for from thirty to a hundred hours, or
+thereabouts. Even if there should be very little food in any one home,
+or if the wood supply should be neglected, the next door neighbor could
+be relied upon for succor.
+
+"Ninety-four years prior to the summer that now concerns us, a cold
+spell had occurred after an interval of eighty-one years, which lasted a
+hundred and ten hours, and during which one-third of the inhabitants of
+Hili-li, between hunger and cold, lost their lives. Not more than one
+hundred persons remembered the last preceding storm, and they must have
+been very young children when it occurred; and even they felt no alarm
+on the subject, as the storm preceding it had happened about sixteen
+years earlier, and, though a light one, was sufficient to alarm both the
+rulers and the masses, and resulted in a state of preparedness for the
+next storm. But now, the middle-aged men knew of these cold spells only
+as matters of history, to which they gave little practical attention;
+and from the lips of their grandparents, who, as I have said, had never
+personally known one of them to cause serious distress or loss of life.
+
+"On the morning of February 17, 1829, there was not on the Island of
+Hili-li a single residence which had the wood-supply contemplated by the
+forgotten statute relating to that subject; there were few homes that
+had in store food sufficient for more than forty-eight hours use; and,
+though most families were in possession of some oil, their cook-stoves
+were not constructed for heating, and were connected with flues in
+outbuildings; and, further, there was not enough oil on the island to
+have warmed the city at such a time for twenty-four hours.
+
+"It must also be remembered that the Hili-lites were accustomed to a
+temperature, all the year through, year in and year out, of 90° to 108°
+Fahrenheit scale; and that for a resident of England, or of the United
+States above the latitude of Washington City, a temperature of ten
+degrees below zero would be quite as well borne as would a temperature
+of thirty degrees above zero by these islanders. There was little
+physical and mental inurement to cold, and the lightest of clothing was
+worn. A resident of Hili-li, when business compelled him to visit an
+island on which the temperature was cold enough to freeze water,
+prepared himself personally for the journey as would a Swede or
+Norwegian for a journey of exploration to the North Pole.
+
+"In the night between February 16th and 17th, Peters, who was in the
+habit in Hili-li of sleeping _in puris naturalibus_, awoke in a shiver.
+He arose, and closing his window-sash began to look around his room for
+bed-covering; but he found only a sheet, and a very fine wool bedspread,
+which he drew over him as he once more assumed a recumbent position. He
+again fell asleep; but in an hour awoke, shivering harder than before.
+He then dressed, and lighting his pipe, walked up and down the floor.
+Then he looked from the window, and saw that a fine snow was falling,
+the separately almost invisible flakes whirling in sharp spirals as they
+fell. The sailor instinct--the aptitude of the navigator--instantly told
+him what this thermic change meant for Hili-li. Others in the house were
+now moving about, and Peters sought them out. Pym did not seem at once
+to realize the danger; and Lilama said she had heard of these storms,
+but did not think that they lasted long. All except Peters were wrapped
+in shawl-like garments, and some of the servants had about their forms
+light rugs which they had taken from the floors. Soon, however, all
+except Pym and Peters were shivering; and every article of covering
+obtainable was in use. Lilama told a maid to bring out her dresses and
+wrappers, which she divided among the servants, each donning several
+garments. Peters, stoical, but always on the alert, called Pym aside,
+and explained to him that this change meant nothing less than the
+devastation of Hili-li--that the temperature was steadily falling, the
+wind increasing, and that the storm was only beginning. Pym could not
+but perceive that the cold was due to a pronounced alteration in the
+direction of wind-currents; and that under the circumstances the cold
+would of necessity increase to the point of normal antarctic
+temperature--no doubt below zero--unless the wind should before then
+change. Quickly his mind grasped the circumstances in which they were
+placed. They were on an island, situated in water navigable at all
+seasons and hours, with the chief food-supply on near-by islands, and
+each day brought to Hili-li for that day's consumption; they were in a
+city practically without fuel; the inhabitants were accustomed to heat,
+and wholly unused to cold; the houses were built without protection
+against cold, because, except occasionally for a few hours at a time,
+there were no climatic conditions demanding such a construction.
+Further, the climate being very warm, there was not--except in the
+possession of a hundred men whose business took them on visits to
+islands lying outside of the crater-warmed air-currents--a heavy wrap of
+any kind, such as overcoat, cloak, or shawl, in the entire city. Carpets
+were not known in Hili-li, so it would be impossible for the
+hard-pressed people to retire to bed, where, covering the body with a
+few sheets and some clothing, they might add the carpets, and, in hunger
+but in safety, remain protected against those freezing blasts till the
+wind should change. Pym comprehended the terrible position in which
+Lilama and the other Hili-lites stood; the extremity of desolation which
+must soon prevail standing out before him like a vivid picture, and for
+a moment overawing even his brave, true soul. He did not doubt that
+Peters and himself could withstand the cold, though they might not be
+able to obtain more than a flimsy shelter from the biting antarctic
+winds. He scarcely thought of himself--he thought only of Lilama, and,
+in a measure, of the other residents of the beautiful, stricken city.
+Exposure to danger had made Pym in times of trouble a rapid thinker, and
+the thoughts which I have mentioned passed through his mind in less than
+a minute of time. Then he turned to Lilama, and asked if there was
+beneath the house a cellar. Fortunately there was--the house was one of
+the few in Hili-li beneath a portion of which a cellar was constructed
+as a depository, and as a protection against heat for certain articles
+of food, most of the residents not caring to construct cellars; articles
+of food easily destructible by heat being twice daily brought to the
+city and distributed to the houses, and ice costing only the expense of
+shipping it by water some six or eight hours' sailing distance.
+
+"Pym and Peters moved about the house, making certain arrangements so
+rapidly as to startle the languid Hili-lites. In ten or fifteen minutes
+they had removed to the cellar all the necessary furniture of a
+comfortable room, including a bedstead for Lilama, and another for her
+two maids. Three lamps were taken to the cellar, lighted, and oil
+sufficient for a week's consumption placed conveniently near. The house
+contained enough food to sustain Lilama, and the women servants, for
+from six to eight days. Within twenty minutes of the time Peters had
+suggested to Pym the danger of freezing to be apprehended, Lilama and
+her maids were safely placed in the cellar, and were making merry over
+their strange surroundings and attire. Then Pym and Peters hastened from
+the house, to see what could be done for others.
+
+"And now was witnessed the influence on man, of heredity and
+environment, and the insurmountable difficulties in the way, even under
+the most pressing need, of overcoming such influence. The Hili-lites in
+more than a thousand years had fought only one battle, and that five
+hundred years before; nor had they found necessary any struggle for
+food, or against rigorous climate. They were a brainy people, and were
+almost superhumanly perceptive in every sense organ and in every nerve.
+But they were wanting in that quality possessed by most European peoples
+and by Americans, which takes practical cognizance of the fact that
+prompt action and fearlessness is the true protection against danger. In
+the face of this great calamity among the Hili-lites, even the leading
+men seemed paralyzed. Not that they displayed a particle of fear--it was
+simply not in them to move rapidly, and to face joyfully great dangers.
+With them, when mental processes failed to subdue, there was not much
+left. They could have conquered a modern warship, provided they could
+have come in contact with its officers, by controlling in some strange
+way the minds of those men; but against a storm, or the course of
+inanimate nature in any other direction, they were as powerless as any
+other people, and their sense of powerlessness was paralyzing to them.
+On the other hand, Pym and Peters had sprung from races that had in the
+past thousand years gone through hundreds of struggles, amid every kind
+of danger, for existence; and Peters, on the mother's side, she being an
+American Indian, belonged to a race which had gone through what was
+infinitely worse than a barbarian invasion--namely, a 'civilized' and
+'enlightened' invasion. These two men seemed to court danger--to revel
+in it; but in reality they pursued the course which exposed them to the
+least risk of injury consistent with the performance of their full duty.
+The question was one of method in procedure to save the greatest number
+of lives; and they hastened first to the residence of Lilama's uncle and
+cousin--to the home of the Duke and Diregus."
+
+
+
+
+The NINETEENTH Chapter
+
+
+Arriving there, they found the Duke and Diregus quite actively
+engaged--for Hili-lites; still, very much valuable time was being
+wasted. Already the snow had ceased to fall, and the temperature, Peters
+thinks, must have reached ten degrees below freezing, and was rapidly
+falling. In the ducal palace there were, in two or three rooms, hearths,
+and flue-openings for carrying off smoke; but as there was no wood ready
+for burning, and as there seemed to be no dry wood in sight, the Duke
+and his son were at the end of their resources as soon as they had
+gathered together into a safe place food sufficient to last for a week
+or ten days. Fortunately the palace was unusually well stocked with
+edibles.
+
+When Pym and Peters arrived, their cool manner and prompt action
+exhaling confidence with every look and movement, the Duke and Diregus
+were soon enlivened, as in fact were all others who came in contact with
+these two active and intrepid strangers.
+
+Pym glanced about him, compassing at a look all possible resources. Then
+he issued his orders, himself working with the others, and, so to speak,
+'setting the pace.' In ten minutes a large outbuilding--similar to our
+summer-houses, or Anglo-Saxon kiosks--was razed to the ground, broken in
+pieces, and placed in the rooms, in which fires were soon glowing and
+crackling. In twenty minutes, those whom Pym and Peters had found
+half-frozen and wholly discouraged, were cheerful, comfortable, and out
+of danger.
+
+The two men hastened forth through the city, giving assistance and
+advice, and infusing confidence. The smaller residences, as well as many
+of those of medium size, were constructed of wood. Pym went rapidly
+through the city, ordering that one house in each square be demolished,
+and the wood divided--but haste! haste! The temperature was rapidly
+declining to a point at which a Hili-lite, even when actively at work,
+could not exist.
+
+Pym and Peters might, unaided, have reached one-tenth of the people of
+Hili-li, and have shown them the way to safety. As many more, possibly,
+might have found other means of saving themselves. It seems improbable
+that more than one-fourth of the people of Hili-li would have survived
+this terrible storm, had Pym and Peters not been reinforced.
+
+"Let no man, in his finite weakness, ever question the methods of
+Infinite Wisdom, which is Infinite Goodness. At the very time when every
+moment gained by Pym and Peters meant the saving of a hundred more
+lives--at the very moment when two additional men, hardy and inured to
+danger, would have doubled the life-saving force, four hundred of the
+'Exiles of Olympus' arrived in the city. They had left behind them
+warmth and safety, and sailing across thirty miles of tempestuous sea,
+had come, headed by Medosus, to try to save their fellow-countrymen.
+These four hundred men, young and vigorous, comprised the real
+enterprise and daring of Hili-li. They had been promised their liberty,
+and their visits, individually, to Hili-li had recently been not only
+allowed but even encouraged by those in authority; but the final act
+permitting them to return had been, by the formalities of state,
+delayed.
+
+"Pym, Peters, and Medosus consulted for a moment, and then the exiles
+divided into a hundred parties of four each, and systematically
+scattered through the city, doing the work of giants. Finally the exiles
+established a hundred stations, selecting for the purpose large rooms,
+in which they built hearths of lava-blocks taken from the streets, in
+most of the houses the hearths being placed in the centre of an upper
+room, and an opening directly above cut through the roof. At each of
+these stations one exile at a time took charge of the fire, whilst the
+other three of the party in charge scoured the neighborhood for persons
+that might in the first desultory search have been overlooked. Then,
+when all seemed provided for, the exiles, protecting their bodies with
+such additional clothing as those now cared for could spare, went forth
+in search of food, to the deserted houses, and to such depots of supply
+as the city possessed.
+
+"The work of rescue being thoroughly inaugurated, Pym had a moment in
+which his mind might roam from the work immediately in hand; and he
+thought of the aged mystic, Masusælili. The old man resided in a spot so
+retired that the various rescue parties might easily have overlooked
+him; and the temperature was now probably fifty degrees below freezing.
+Fortunately, at the instant he thought of the old philosopher, he and
+Peters were near the city limits, and within a third of a mile of
+Masusælili's home; and starting off at a brisk run, the two were five
+minutes later in the old man's house, standing outside his laboratory
+door. As the two had hurried along, Peters would continue to murmur
+against the project: 'What's the use,' he would growl; 'we'll only find
+the old fellow roasting himself in front of a magic fire of burning snow
+or ice. _He's_ all right, and we'd better be saving human people.'
+
+"As several raps, increasing from the gentlest to the most vigorous,
+elicited no response, Pym opened the laboratory door, and with Peters
+entered. But the old man was nowhere to be seen. Pym hastily returned to
+the hallway, and discovering a stair leading to a small cellar, he
+descended. The cellar was filled with _débris_, two small window
+casements opening to the exterior air were broken and decayed to the
+last degree of dilapidation, and the icy wind whistled through the
+rubbish of the doleful spot. He ran back to the laboratory, where Peters
+was hunting about, hoping to find Masusælili alive, yet fearing to find
+his emaciated form lying lifeless amid the mass of chemical and
+mechanical appliances which littered the room. Several of the large
+vase-like objects before alluded to stood here and there; and as the
+smaller of them might have hidden the body of a large-sized man, the
+searchers even glanced into them. Each vase sat apart upon the floor,
+flaring upward like a giant lily to a height of four or five feet; and
+from each of them projected, within an inch of the floor, a faucet of
+rude construction, through which passed a very primitive spigot. One of
+these enormous vases, large enough to have secreted two small men, stood
+inverted; and Pym, with no particular object in view, but simply because
+he could not think of anything else to do, gave the vase a push, in such
+a way as to raise for an inch or two from the floor its large rim,
+flaring out to a diameter of probably four feet.
+
+"'Put that down,' came a hollow and stridulous voice, so unexpected and
+startling to Pym that he withdrew his hand, allowing the vase to drop
+back to the floor with a resounding thud.
+
+"'If thou hast aught of importance to impart, 'continued the voice--that
+of Masusælili--still stridulous, but now having also the quality
+possessed by a voice heard through a speaking-tube, 'put thy mouth near
+to the spigot-hole, and disclose thine errand.'
+
+"Pym placed his lips within an inch of the open faucet, which was only
+an inch or two lower than his mouth as he stood beside the vase, and
+from the opening of which came a fog-like vapor, similar in appearance
+to that exhaled from the mouth and nostrils on a very cold day, and
+said:
+
+"'We came, sir, to offer our help--to procure for you wood, and, if
+possible, food; or, if you should so prefer, to remove you in safety to
+comfortable quarters.'
+
+"For a moment there was silence, during which the fog-like vapor
+continued to come from the spigot-hole of the inverted vase. Then the
+voice of the aged mystic was again heard in reply:
+
+"'Youth--and thine ape-like companion--go hence. Through three and fifty
+of these storms have I safely passed. Beneath this vase have I two
+lamps, alight; oil wherewith to supply with fuel these two lamps for a
+space of eight days, which hitherto has been the longest duration of any
+of these periodical storms; food and water have I sufficient for my
+body's wants for a week. And, too, have I mental aliment; for have I
+here a manuscript written by the youthful sage, Ægyptus, who sent it to
+me by the hand of Azza, long before the legend of Romulus started from
+its mythic source to float adown the stream of time: a manuscript which
+it delighteth my soul once in each century to peruse. Fear not for one
+who knows no fear. Go hence, and quickly go--go with humiliation in thy
+heart; for thou hast not yet begun to live, and yet thou presumest to
+think in danger one who helped to plan and to construct what thou
+callest the ancient city of Babylon. Youth, when thou didst disturb me,
+I was reading from my friend, who writes from a village called Sakkarah,
+of how a foolish Pharaoh thinks to perpetuate his memory by building a
+mighty pyramidal structure of stone, which my friend terms a device
+planned by himself to divert the fancy of his ruler, and incidentally to
+astonish those European barbarians who may happen that way; and, among
+other matters, this Azza asks for my opinion concerning the outer
+surface of his pyramid; to which request for advice I remember that I
+replied, saying that the walls should be constructed so as to ascend in
+step-like angles. Ha, ha, ha!' came from the spigot-hole a hollow,
+cracked attempt at derisive laughter--'Ye say--ha, ha!--ye say this
+Pharaoh was of the _first_ dynasty!--ha, ha!--the first! Go hence, vain
+child.'
+
+"'But, sir,' insisted Pym, after a pause, 'have you provided for
+ventilating your--your small apartment?'
+
+"'In the floor beneath me is a knot-hole, which doth open to the outer
+air; and upon the opening is a flat stone, which, little by little, more
+or less, I remove and replace in accordance with certain laws, allowing
+just the proper amount of atmospheric air to enter from below. This oil
+maketh very little smoke, yet seest thou not some smoke emerge from the
+open faucet? Feel'st thou not with thine hand the heat escape? Again I
+say, go hence, vain youth.'
+
+"Pym stood for a moment, meditating; and then something--perhaps
+something connected with the words several months before whispered into
+his ear by Masusælili--impelled him to say:
+
+"'Good sir, we meant you no harm. Tell me, Allwise One, can you read the
+future?'
+
+"Before a reply came, there was a pause so long that, says Peters, Pym
+was about to speak again. Then came the voice of this old man who had
+investigated and pondered for thousands of years that only inexhaustible
+study in the universe, the phenomenon of consciousness--the aged mystic
+no doubt being pleasantly warmed and mollified by the appellation
+'Allwise One.'
+
+"'None but God,' said Masusælili, 'knows of a certainty the future.
+Truly wise men, and the lower animals, when they would penetrate the
+future, use not the crude instrument termed _reason_; but rather do they
+nestle close to the bosom of--what now call ye Him? Thine ancestors, the
+barbarians of Britannia, when I was with them, named Him God. Thus, and
+only thus, may the future become known to thee. Have faith, as the bird,
+the fish, the little ant, which, _feeling_ God, act, and are not
+disappointed. Think ye that the lowest of God's creatures would not have
+heard His warning voice, or seen His beckoning arm, or felt His guiding
+hand when in the air lurked this present danger? Yet reason told not
+you! God shows to us the future, when we should know His edicts in
+advance, always--always, if only we will look and hearken. But this,
+good youth, God doth permit only to those who lean with full confidence
+upon Him, as do the lower animals. To the consciousness of man it is
+given, if but the right conditions be attained, truly to know what in
+the present happeneth anywhere in the universe. _Time_ is a barrier to
+the voluntary acquisition of knowledge, but _distance_ is not an
+impediment. My body is confined to this poor vase, but certainly not my
+mind--it roams in Europe, in Asia, or amid the stars--but wait a moment.
+Poor youth! The hand on the dial of thy destiny moves rapidly. Go! Go
+now, and go in haste; for one who loves thee, at this moment sorely
+needs thee. Farewell.'
+
+"Pym scarcely heard the word 'farewell;' for he was crossing the
+threshold of the house as Masusælili uttered it, and Peters was turning
+to follow. They ran as rapidly as the snow and the cutting wind would
+permit, and had covered the necessary three miles in about half an hour.
+The air was growing intensely cold. They met a party of three exiles,
+who were helping to scour the city for any food that might have been
+left in deserted homes. These men informed Pym that, in spite of the
+promptitude and haste of the rescue parties, more than a hundred persons
+had been frozen to death; and that frozen hands and feet by the thousand
+had been reported. The Hili-lites were so extremely susceptible to cold
+that, at a temperature of 20° Fahrenheit, if they were not well
+protected by clothing, they soon became drowsy, then slept, and, if not
+found and resuscitated within a very short time, died. One case was
+reported in which a woman, only six hundred feet from one of the rescue
+stations, was frozen to death in somewhat less than an hour, though she
+must have been thoroughly chilled when last seen in an apparently
+natural condition. During the day a party of three exiles, whilst on one
+of their rounds, had visited the house of this poor woman, and had
+carried her three children to the nearest station; and the woman
+herself, who was at the time hurrying about the room gathering together
+a few articles, it was supposed had followed close behind them. In this
+way she was overlooked, until, in the somewhat crowded room to which the
+children were taken, the youngest child, a little girl of four years,
+broke into tears and began to cry out for her mother. Then two men
+hastened back, and found the woman unconscious and apparently dead. The
+usual methods of resuscitation were inaugurated, and long continued, but
+the woman could not be revived.
+
+"Peters says that he has during his life-time seen a number of persons
+who were frozen, several of them fatally; of which a part were in the
+Eastern States, others in the far north; and that these Hili-lites froze
+to death very differently from those in the northern part of the north
+temperate zone. He mentions the case of a Canadian who was exposed to
+extreme cold during a whole night. When found, the poor fellow was not
+only unconscious, but apparently dead. The arms and legs were frozen
+through and through, and the entire body was rigid. He was resuscitated,
+but afterwards lost his hands and feet. In Hili-li persons lost their
+lives from exposure to cold whose bodies were very little--a few of them
+not at all--frozen. The explanation of this difference is to be found in
+the fact that an animal dies when bodily temperature in the interior of
+the body reaches a certain degree of reduction, which point of reduction
+in the Hili-lites is much less than in persons habituated to life in a
+colder climate. In persons accustomed to a climate as warm as that of
+Hili-li, the heat-producing functions are feeble, and the heat-expelling
+functions are very active; but this does not fully explain why, in
+Peters' words, 'the people there froze to death without freezing.' Any
+person dying as a result of exposure to cold, dies long before any of
+the vital organs are frozen; and the Hili-lites no doubt ceased to live
+with a reduction of bodily temperature which would not have seriously
+inconvenienced a resident of Scotland or Canada. In the storm of which
+we speak, the people were nervously depressed as a result of fright.
+However, from all I can gather, the temperature was at times certainly
+as low as 40° Fahrenheit below freezing, at which degree almost any
+thinly clad person might freeze to death.
+
+"But the hour is late, and, though I had expected to close Peters' story
+this evening, such a conclusion is, owing to my prolixity, scarcely
+practicable. If you still expect to start for home in three days, I
+shall certainly in one more evening complete the telling of Peters'
+experiences in Hili-li. The day after tomorrow I shall be engaged during
+the entire evening, and if we delay our next meeting till the following
+evening--your last in Bellevue--it is possible that something may happen
+to prevent our meeting; so, if you are willing, my next and last visit
+to you here shall be tomorrow evening."
+
+I expressed my satisfaction with the arrangement, and he took his leave.
+
+The following morning, I gave to Arthur, in my own way, an account of
+the storm in Hili-li, meanwhile leisurely dressing--a performance which,
+except under pressure, I have never in the morning been able unaided to
+accomplish in less than an hour. I had completed my toilet, but not my
+story, when in rushed Castleton.
+
+After a little general conversation, I seemed naturally to return to the
+Peters story; and now, in a five-minute talk, I so closed it to the
+point reached by Bainbridge as to satisfy Arthur, and not weary the
+restless doctor. As I ended, Castleton said:
+
+"I didn't get in to see you yesterday. The last time I was in we were
+talking of names; and to tell you the truth, it was a matter of names
+that held me back yesterday at the very time I was going to come up. You
+see, I have an old friend here in town, ----; you've no doubt heard of
+him--ex-member of Congress, and as good as appointed Minister to
+Venezuela right now. A scholar of the deepest erudition; a speaker and
+writer of great force and nicety, and of exquisite literary taste.
+Yesterday we met, and during our talk he told me that his book, the
+result of many years of thought, was completed. Now, for my part, I
+never believed that a rose would smell as sweet as it does if we called
+it a turnip. If Poe had, instead of 'Narrative of A. Gordon Pym,' named
+his story, 'Adventures of Dirk Peters, the Half-Breed,' he would have
+sold twice as many books. My friend is about to publish his book. 'Its
+name?' I asked him. 'There can be little choice of names for a
+translation of Montesquieu's "Grandeur and Decadence of the Romans,"
+with notes by myself,' he replied. 'There can't?' said I; 'well, my
+friend, let me tell you there can. Now compare this name: "Montesquieu's
+Considerations on the Causes of the Grandeur and Decadence of the
+Romans, with illustrative notes," etc., with a name like this: "The
+Roman Aristocrats Ripped, Rooted, and Routed"; or, "How the Roman
+Plutocrats were Peppered and Pounded." Heavens and Earth! what do the
+masses know about decadence? Why not name his book (and so I said to
+him), "How the Rich Romans Rotted"? Half the people would think from
+such a title that the Romans were enemies of the United States, and that
+Montesquieu and my friend were after them hot and fast; and then the
+story would go out that the French were helping us again. "General
+Montesquieu" would be heard on all sides, associated with endless
+repetitions of Lafayette memories. Lord, Lord! I sometimes think a man
+is better under-educated than over-educated."
+
+Then after a pause he continued:
+
+"Pretty good, that talk of Masusælili's through the faucet--pretty good,
+pretty good! But, pshaw! for me there's nothing new on earth. Why, sir,
+I've always drawn my best philosophy out of a spigot-hole. The very
+sight of a spigot inspires me, and drives away my troubles. But, man
+alive! We must keep this thing secret. The fellow with an exhaustless
+stock of _elixir vitæ_ isn't half worked out in fiction yet--and
+besides, how can a person reread his 'Wandering Jew,' and his 'Last Days
+of Pompeii,' and his 'Zanoni,' with such an outlandish picture as a
+mystic under a lamp-warmed vase in mind? Why didn't Bainbridge take a
+not unusual historical license, and say that the aged philosopher was
+found warming himself before a crystal vase filled with magically
+glowing rubies?"
+
+After we had laughed a little over this, he said:
+
+"And I suppose Bainbridge tried--in fact I know by what you say that he
+did try--to air his knowledge on the subject of animal heat? No doubt
+talked for half an hour about the effects of cold on the animal economy?
+Oh, he's a rapid man! You heard, sir, how idiotically he talked that
+day, just before I cured old man Peters? If Bainbridge had had his way,
+Peters' story would have been a short one. I suppose his remedy for a
+frozen Hili-lite would be to send him to the North Pole! Now, sir, I
+instantly grasped the whole idea of the necessary effect of that cold
+wave on those Hili-lites, for I now have data in abundance for reading
+those people through and through. In a word, sir--and observe my
+sententious brevity--their thermogenistic organization being adynamic,
+and their thermolysic functions being over-active owing to their thermic
+environment, and the thermotaxic balance being habitually anomalous, the
+emergency was not successfully encountered; and this was more
+particularly the case because the nerve-centres of vital resistance to
+sudden and extreme thermal abstraction were atrophied."
+
+This was the last remark, except a few words of farewell at the time of
+my departure for home, that I ever heard from Doctor Castleton. It was
+his habit, as he was about to leave the presence of an auditor or
+interlocutor, to fire off, so to speak, a set speech, or a piece of
+surprising information, and then hastily to retreat--a habit displaying
+considerable sagacity, and one engendered by street-corner discussion,
+in which a return fire--or perhaps a troublesome question--was often to
+be avoided if a dramatic climax was not to be sacrificed. On this
+occasion, as the last words left his lips he vanished through the
+doorway, and we were alone.
+
+"Well," said Arthur, "am I allowed to speak?"
+
+"You are," I replied.
+
+"Then tell me," said he, "what it was he said? Why doesn't he, some day
+when he has time, dictate a dictionary? And isn't there any way to stop
+such talk by law? That man gets worse instead of better. He forgets
+everything except words. Says he, the other day, 'Well, Arthur, my boy,
+when are you coming in to pay your doctor bill?' Now mind, I paid him
+a'ready, and just think of my teeth! But I told him, nice and easy, how
+I paid him the two dollars. Then I told him about my teeth rattlin'
+whenever I go down the stairs, and asked him what to do for them. He
+just laughed and gave me a half-dollar, and said, 'Bone-set tea, my
+boy--drink bone-set tea, and plenty of it;' and so I do."
+
+
+
+
+The TWENTIETH Chapter
+
+
+"Pym left the exiles," said Bainbridge, on the following evening, as, in
+accordance with his engagement, he continued the story of the great
+storm in Hili-li; "and hastened on toward his home. Arrived there, he
+went directly to the cellar, where he found the three large lamps
+alight, brilliantly illuminating and comfortably warming the apartment;
+but Lilama was missing, though he found there one of her maids. This
+girl told Pym that Lilama had, some four hours earlier, taken with her
+her maid Ixza, and hastened from the house. Questioned closely, she said
+that after Pym had gone, Lilama suddenly bethought her of a former
+servant, an old nurse, who for some years past had lived quite alone,
+and that Lilama had decided to have the poor old woman found, and cared
+for. It seems that when the young wife was herself in safety and had the
+mental leisure to think of others, the thought of her poor old servant
+and friend in danger grew more and more unbearable. She had waited
+almost an hour for Pym to return, and then, taking Ixza with her, had
+gone forth; but where the old nurse resided, only Lilama and Ixza knew.
+The maid knew only that Lilama had left the cellar with the intention of
+assisting, in some manner, the nurse of her babyhood.
+
+"In ten minutes Pym and Peters, going in different directions, had
+aroused many of the exiles, who hastened in all directions, to search
+thoroughly the poorer quarters of the city, and to inquire of everyone
+whom they might encounter concerning the residence of the old nurse. The
+exiles had already visited, or sent others to visit, about every house
+in the city; but in a few instances--particularly where but one person
+lived in a house--the occupant had been advised, and had consented, to
+come to a central station and there remain till the storm abated or
+passed; and then, for some purpose delaying, had been overcome by the
+cold, and, as the system of search included only one visit to each
+house, had been left to die--the fact transpiring through an accidental
+second visit, or when the city was later scoured in search of food that
+might have been overlooked.
+
+"An hour later, one of many messengers who were searching for Pym met
+him, and told him that Lilama was found. He hastened to the house in
+which they had found her--a small frame structure, the residence of her
+former nurse.
+
+"At the entrance of this house stood Peters, waiting for his young
+friend; and as Pym felt the hand of the old sailor, put forth to stop
+him in his breathless haste, and as he looked into the hard, rugged face
+of his old friend, he knew that he must nerve himself for a shock. Alas!
+His surmise was only too correct. They entered the main room of the
+house together, Peters in the rear. Drawing aside from the entrance to
+the room a portière--Peters had already visited the room--Pym passed in,
+Peters remaining on the outer side of the curtained doorway, that he
+might prevent others from following, or even from viewing the young
+friend who was now to receive one of the keenest stabs with which
+Destiny ever pierces the human heart.
+
+"For a moment Pym would wholly have mistaken the scene before him, had
+Peters not said a word of warning as the portière fell behind his young
+friend.
+
+"On the lounge which stood against the farther wall as he entered, lay
+an elderly woman, apparently asleep; and covering her were the outer
+wraps--scanty, indeed, for such a day--of Lilama. On the left, as Pym
+swept at a glance the apartment, he saw the maid Ixza, reclining in a
+large chair; she, also, to all appearances, was asleep. Then he saw his
+wife. She crouched on the floor at the foot of the lounge, only her
+wealth of light golden hair at first visible. Stepping to her side, Pym
+saw her, as many times in the ducal gardens he had seen her drop to the
+ground in her girlish fashion, to rest. Her arms were intertwined upon
+the foot of the lounge, her head resting upon them; and there the tired,
+childlike young wife had gone to sleep--forever.
+
+"How beautiful she was in death! The gentle hand that had never touched
+the person of another but in helpfulness--how fair, how pallid; the fond
+sweet eyes that knew no glance but that of love and kindness--they were
+almost hidden by the drooping lids; the tenderest, loveliest face the
+sunlight ever kissed, smiled upward at him as he gazed--his heart felt
+colder than was this dear form he dropped beside and clasped. But the
+lips--the ripe red lips--the rapturous, maidenly lips, the first touch
+of which had raised him forever from the coarse earth--the arch lips
+that had bewitched him with their own seductive smile, and could not
+shape themselves to harsher act than pouting--a fleeting pout, that
+captivated ere it vanished--he could not look at them in death--he could
+not.
+
+"Sweet child of a weird land and a strange people! She was one of those
+whose spotless souls need not the purifying fire of a long earthly life.
+For Pym, now and later, the sorrow and the yearning void; for her, only
+an earlier advancement.
+
+"Pym's mind was shocked; but behind the shock he felt the awful anguish
+of such a separation. Was this the end? Could it be the end? For him,
+truly that day his last hope for this life died. But hereafter? Surely
+this was not to be the end of all! A few more years of grovelling on the
+clay bosom of the cold, selfish earth, and then--only oblivion? No, no:
+he would not, he could not believe it.
+
+"As Pym stood there, where many, many other men have stood, and millions
+yet will stand, did his soul rise into the heavenly atmosphere, or did
+it question God's decrees and sink to rise no more? This I cannot
+answer.
+
+"After such a loss, oh, the weary weight of unutterable woe; the awful
+sense that hope is dead, whilst the mourner can only stand with
+streaming eyes and bleeding heart, forever chained to the ghastly corpse
+of every dear ambition, of every joy, and all that our universe of
+feeling builds on hope. But we should learn from such a loss a lesson,
+for the lesson if learned insures our own advancement: such losses are
+but the purposes of God unfolding for those we love and for ourselves an
+eternity of blissful harmony."
+
+Thus Doctor Bainbridge closed; and, though his words were of death, and
+the thoughts which he expressed were as old as the human race, I was
+much affected by them. Young as was the speaker, his utterances conveyed
+to me the impression that he himself had in some way learned the lesson
+of which he spoke. For several moments we sat in silence; and then,
+though I knew that he would have a few more words to say, I thought it
+an appropriate time to thank him for his long, painstaking elaboration
+of the old sailor's disclosures, which, as I knew partly from my own
+personal knowledge, had been gained only by untiring perseverance and
+inexhaustible patience. I thanked him, and complimented him as I thought
+he deserved; and he was pleased, I plainly saw, with the few words of
+commendation which he knew came from my heart.
+
+We sat, smoking our cigars and chatting on various topics, until it was
+almost the hour at which he usually said to me goodnight. Then he
+returned to the Peters' story, saying:
+
+"It only remains for me properly to dispose of Pym and Peters. Peters
+knows no more--in fact, not as much--of Pym after he returned home, as
+do we. Poe, we know, in the note to his 'Narrative,' alludes to 'the
+late sudden and distressing death of Mr. Pym.' This is all we know, and
+even this fact, when I told it to Peters, was new to him; for Pym and
+Peters parted in the month of February, 1830, at the City of Montevideo,
+Uruguay; Peters, with an old sailor chum, whom he happened to meet in
+South America, shipping to Australia; and Pym, a few days later,
+starting for the United States.
+
+"It had no doubt been the policy of the Hili-lites to prevent all
+strangers from returning to the outer world; but this policy was, it
+seems, not a firmly founded one, and many circumstances arose to modify
+and finally even to reverse it. They looked upon Pym almost as one of
+themselves. When he left them, it was with the intention of returning;
+and they exacted of him a promise to hide, even from Peters, the
+longitudes traversed during the entire journey from Hili-li until they
+should touch the land of some civilized people, or meet with a ship; to
+which promise Pym rigidly adhered. And though they were in other ways
+very kind to him, they would not allow him to take away a single grain
+of gold, of which nuggets were as plentiful in the fissures of the
+Olympian ranges as are pebbles in the beds of mountain streams; nor
+would they allow him to retain, of the many precious stones in his
+possession, even the ruby which Lilama had given him; and no amount of
+argument or pleading could move them to a different decision. The
+Hili-lites were anxious to get rid of Peters, which had much to do with
+their willingness to 'speed the parting guest.' It seems that Pym for
+months after the death of Lilama was in an extremely morbid state of
+mind. He spent most of his time with Masusælili, who allowed him to see
+Lilama's apparition or wraith many times. The aged mystic explained to
+Pym the scientific _modus operandi_ of the production, so that he was in
+no way deceived into thinking that he met Lilama in person; but we may
+presume that, as it is to each of us some gratification to look at a
+painting or a photograph of a departed friend, it must have been a still
+greater pleasure for Pym thus to have reproduced for him the living,
+moving form and features of his lost darling--reproduced or simulated in
+such a manner that he might see her, and touch her, and hear her
+voice--even though he was told that the image was only a likeness.
+During Pym's abstraction, Peters was left almost entirely to himself;
+and his worst qualities, long inactive (partly because there had not
+been opportunity for their display, and partly because of Pym's
+influence), now came prominently to the surface. He associated with the
+wildest characters on the neighboring islands, making them even wilder
+and more ungovernable than before his arrival. Finally, with revenge for
+an excuse, but in reality from sheer restlessness, he began to organize
+a raid on the outlying barbarians, more particularly, he still avers,
+because he wished 'to get even with old Too-wit' and his barbarian
+followers for having murdered his companions, as described in Pym's
+diary. This the Hili-lites thought was going too far; and as it was now
+October, the Council of State decided to allow Pym to depart for home,
+taking Peters with him.
+
+"One bright December morning these two toys of fortune said good-by to
+their kind hosts, and started on their long and perilous journey. A
+strong and handsome though small sail-boat had been provided for them. A
+number of Hili-lite youths--among them some of the former exiles--were
+to accompany them past the great antarctic continent; and for this
+piloting party a larger boat had been built. After many days, the
+continent was passed; and Pym and Peters, alone, began their wearisome
+voyage across the great Antarctic Ocean. Fortunately, in January they
+encountered a large schooner, which six weeks later, in February, landed
+them at Montevideo. Peters says that Montevideo was at that
+time--1830--little more than a walled fortress. This scarcely harmonizes
+with the fact that it was then, as now, the capital of Uruguay; but
+Peters appears to know what he is talking about. As I have said, at this
+place Pym and Peters parted, never to meet again. The younger man
+started for his home, and found an early grave; the older man sought new
+adventures, and he, at the age of eighty, still lives to tell of their
+adventures had in a country strange beyond man's credulity to believe."
+
+These were the last words spoken by Doctor Bainbridge on the subject of
+Peters' adventures. Two days later I said farewell to my American
+friends, the memory of whom has always been dear to me, and whom it has
+been my misfortune not again to meet. The day before my departure, I
+drove to Peters' home, and said to him good-by. I called on Doctor
+Bainbridge at his office; and Doctor Castleton I met on the street
+corner, where, from the window of my apartment in the Loomis House, I
+had first seen him. I hope that the later life of each of them has been
+a smooth one: I know that both were good men, and that one of them was a
+man of singular fascination.
+
+As I took my leave of Doctor Castleton, and after he had spoken of the
+death of Lilama, he said:
+
+"I trust, young man, that you are pleased with your discovery--I know
+that Bainbridge is;" and he accompanied the remark with a searching
+glance of those large black eyes, the meaning of which I could not then
+fathom, and the recollection of which has often puzzled me. Then he
+smiled, and said farewell.
+
+Doctor Bainbridge, when I had said my last words to him, spoke thus:
+
+"May you have a pleasant journey, and a loving welcome to your home. You
+will probably never return to America--or, even if you do, not to our
+little city. I wish I could think that some day we shall meet again, but
+we probably never shall. And yet," he continued, smilingly, "who knows!
+If not again in this life, or in this world, still in some new form, on
+some strange planet. It may be that on Venus the beautiful our hands
+shall once more clasp; or on some water-way of Mars the ruddy, as we
+pass in our gondolas, we may call a greeting to each other--or possibly
+to Poe, the bright unfortunate. I am sorry that you must leave us, and I
+wish you every happiness."
+
+It was at the railroad station, to which his duties called him, that I
+said to Arthur good-by; and there, as the train pulled out, through the
+car-window I caught a glimpse of two moist eyes looking after the
+departing train.
+
+And now, to the patient reader, I say farewell.
+
+
+
+
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