CHAPTER XIV
THE VALLEY OF DREAMS
Steve's dream of triumph was brief. Born at the moment of his firstsight of the burning heart of Unaga it lived to provide a stimulant forjaded mind and body at a time of need. Then he awoke to realities suchas he had never contemplated.
For once experience and imagination failed him. He was entering a landof wonder in the belief that he was prepared for everything monstrous inNature. He believed that with the stupendous vision of Unaga he hadwitnessed Nature's most sublime effort. So, out of his confidence he wastrapped as easily as a man of no experience at all.
At his bidding dogs and men moved to the assault of the glacial barrier.The thing that they contemplated was by no means new. A hundred timeshad the broken surface of glacier formed some part of their long wintertrail. It was never without danger, but it was never a sufficientbarrier to give them pause.
The surface of the glacier appeared to be that which they all knew. Theonly feature for disquiet were the thunderous detonations, the deeprumbling groans that rose up out of its far-off heart, and found ahundred echoes amongst the surrounding hills. For the rest, it was abroken surface, bearing every feature of a summer thaw frozen down againby the icy breath of winter, and adorned with a patchwork of driftsnow.
Half a mile from the grey headland which was their starting point,confidence received its first check. It was Oolak who made discovery.The watchful, silent creature was unerring in his instincts, unerring inhis scent of a treachery he always anticipated. He had halted his dogs,and stood in the half light, peering out this way and that at thelegions of ice spectres surrounding them. Then, quite suddenly, hehailed the white man to his side, and indicated the ice on which theywere standing.
"It all him move," he said, with his peculiarly significant brevity.
Steve stood for a moment without reply. He was less sensitive toindications than the Indian. In fact he failed to realize the thing theother had discovered. He shook his head.
"Guess you're----"
But his denial remained uncompleted. It was interrupted by a sharp cryfrom Julyman some distance away with the rear sled. The two men turnedin his direction. They beheld his lean figure busy amongst his dogs,plying his club impartially, as though in an effort to quell some caninedispute.
But that was not all. As they gazed they saw the iron-shod tail of thesled rise up. It seemed to be flung up with great force. For a moment itremained poised. Then it crashed over on its side to the accompanimentof a cracking, splitting roar, like the bombardment of massed artillery.
Steve waited for nothing. Even with the roar of sub-glacial thundershammering on his ear drums, he rushed to the man's assistance. Oolakturned to his own dogs.
The din subsided almost in a moment. Steve reached the sled whereJulyman had beaten the dogs to the required condition. In a moment theywere at work setting things to rights. After that the dogs were strungout afresh, and Julyman "mushed" them on, and brought them abreast ofthe train of the waiting Oolak.
The dogs crouched down on the rough surface of the inhospitable ice.Their great limbs were shaking under heavy coats of fur, and theywhimpered plaintively, stirred by some unspeakable apprehension. The menwere standing by, gazing back over the ghostly field of ice, with wonderand disquiet in their eyes.
Again it was Oolak who spoke. He pointed at the headland from which theyhad started. It was dim, shadowy, half lost in the grey twilight.
"Him all go back," he said, as though he were making the most ordinaryannouncement.
Then he pointed at something nearer. It was just beyond where the sledhad been overturned.
"Him all break up. So."
His tone had changed. There was that in his harsh voice which wasutterly new to it.
It was the moment of Steve's awakening from the dream of triumph he haddreamed. It was the moment of the shattering of the confidence of years.A wide fissure, of the proportions of a chasm, had opened up just beyondwhere the mishap had occurred. It was as Oolak said. The grey headlandlooked to be moving backwards, vanishing in the shadows of the Arcticnight.
The approach to the heart of Unaga was yielding a reality that had beenentirely uncalculated.
The widening chasm, stretching far as the eye could see on either hand,had completely cut off all retreat. Steve and his men were standing on abelt of ice that was moving. It was slipping away from the parent body,gliding ponderously almost without tangible motion, down the greatglacial slope. They were trapped on the bosom of a glacial field in thetitanic throes of its death agony; a melting, groaning mass ridingmonstrously to its own destruction in those far-off, mist-laden depthsof the valley below.
It must have been unbelievable but for the definite evidence of it all.Here, in the depths of an Arctic winter, with the whole earth shadowedunder a grey of frigid night, a glacial field, which a thousand yearscould not have built up, was melting under a heat no less than thesummer of lower latitudes.
It was a moment for panic. But Steve resisted with all his might.
The position was supremely critical. There were no means of retreat inface of that amazing fissure. There could be no standing still. Theymust go on with the dread tide of grinding ice, on and on to the end.And for the end their trust must be in the gods of fortune for suchmercies as they chose to vouchsafe.
Steve's order rang out amidst the booming of the ice. It was urgent. Itwas fierce in the need of the moment. The Indians knew. He had no needto explain. Before them lay the hideous downward slope with possiblehell at the bottom. And the demon of avalanche was hard upon theirheels.
In a frenzy the dogs leapt at their work. There was no need for club orurging. They were only too eager to quit the quaking ice and lose theirconsciousness of the thunders of the under-world in a rush of vitalmovement.
Steve warned himself there remained a fighting chance. It was the man'scourage which inspired the thought. The dogs took the only chance theyknew. They at least understood the soullessness of Nature's might whenarrayed for destruction.
Steve drove for the fringe of it all, where the ice lapped against therising walls of the valley to which they were dropping. It was his onlycourse. He felt it to be his only chance. He had no real hope. It wasinstinctive decision unsupported by reason. He knew that ahead lay thegreat valley obscured under a fog of mist, and he could only guess atthe perils that lay hidden there.
No, he did not know. He had no desire to question. Instinct alone couldserve him now, and instinct urged him to flee from the middle course ofthe glacier as he would flee from the breath of pestilence.
From the first moments of blind rush for safety all sense of time becameutterly lost. So, too, with fatigue. So, too, with the matter ofdistance. Labour became well-nigh superhuman amidst the moving icehummocks. And the speed, and the jolting, and pitching of the sledstransformed the chaotic world about them into still more utterconfusion.
The sweaty mist came up from below seeking to enshroud them in long,gauzy tentacles.
How long the struggle endured it would have been impossible to tell.There was thought only for the fissures that opened with a roar at theirfeet, for the ice driving down upon their heels, for the melting streamscoursing amongst the hummocks. And--the threat of the enveloping mists.
The dogs ran with the recklessness of a stampede, and the preciousburden of the sleds was a treasure upon the salving of which mind andbody were concentrated to the exclusion of all else. Even the securityof life and limb was a matter of far less concern.
The mist closed down. The terror of sightlessness was added to the rest.
Utter helplessness supervened. It was the final disaster. The closingdown of the fog meant the last of intelligent effort. The whole outfitwas left groping, blind, and conscious only of the terror of thedownward rush they could no longer check. Ghostly ice hummocks rose upat them out of the darkness and buffeted like frigid legions advancingto the attack. Fissures yawned agape. The booming ice roared on,deafening, maddening. It was the str
uggle of brave men doomed. It wassublimely pitiful. It was a moment for the tears of angels.
* * * * *
Out of the west the breeze had freshened. It came in little hasty gusts,like the breath of invisible giants. The inky night seemed to lighten,and, here and there, the flash of a star shone out, while a faint,silvery sheen struggled for mastery in the stirring fog which fought sodesperately to deny the eyes of the Arctic night.
A distant booming came up out of the fog. It was the softened sound offar-off thunder. There was another sound, too. It was less awesome, butno less significant. It was the steady droning of cascading watersfalling in a mighty tide. It suggested the plunge into the darkness ofan abyss, or even the lesser immensity of surging rapids in the courseof a mountain river.
Steadily the western breeze increased. It lost its patchiness andsettled to a pleasant, warming drift. Slowly the inky darkness rolledaway. The peeping stars remained, or only lost their radiance in thegossamer lightness of passing mist. The silver of the aurora shone downtriumphantly upon the _snowless earth_, and the glory of the moon litthe remoteness with its frigid smile.
On the dark monotony of an earth robbed of its winter clothing a clusterof moving figures stood out in faint relief, and presently a lightflashed out like the infinitesimal blaze of a firefly in the night. Itpassed, and then it came again. Again it passed. And again it came.This time it lived and grew. A fire had lit, and the group of figureswere crouching over it as though to protect it against the darkimmensity of the world surrounding them.
* * * * *
The distant thunders had died away. No longer was there the ominousdroning of falling waters. The utter stillness of the Arctic night wassupreme.
The steady play of the western breeze came down the highway of thevalley whose far-off slopes rose to unmeasured heights. To the westwardthe dull reflections of earthly fire lit the sky with deep, sanguinaryhues, and the starlight seemed to have lost its power behind a haze ofcloud. For the rest the night was lit by the aurora.
Steve and his Indians were standing on the moist banks of a broad,flowing river, the surface of whose waters served as a mirror to thesplendid lights above. Away behind them, where the ground rose uptowards the higher slopes, was the glimmer of the fire which markedtheir camp. They were all three gazing out at the western reflection ofearthly fires.
For the moment there was silence. For the moment each was absorbed inhis own thought. None gave a sign of the nature of that thought, but itwas an easy thing to guess since their faces were turned towards thereflection of Unaga's fires.
It was Steve who first withdrew his gaze. He seemed reluctant. He turnedand surveyed the snowless territory about them.
It was an extraordinary display of Nature's mood. They were treadingunderfoot a growth of lank grass, and the slopes of the valley were cladwith bluffs of bare-poled woodlands. The air was warm. It was warmerthan the breath of a temperate winter, and the low-growing scrub markingthe course of the river was breaking into new growth of a whitish hue.
The amazement of the discovery of these things had long since passed.Steve and his Indians had returned again to the reality of things.
Steve drew a deep breath.
"We can't make another yard with the dogs," he said. "The snow's gone.It's gone for keeps."
It was a simple statement of the facts. And Oolak and Julyman wereequally alive to them.
"Then him all mak' back?"
There was eagerness in Julyman's question. The terror of that throughwhich they had passed was still in his mind. So, too, with the fieryheart of Unaga that lay ahead. Oolak had nothing to add, so he kept tohis customary silence.
Steve shook his head.
"There's no quitting," he said simply. "Guess we've come nigh threehundred miles. We've got through a territory to break the heart of astone image. God's mercy helped us back on that darn glacier when wewere beat like dead men. It's a sort of dream I just can't remember, anddon't want to anyway. Say, do you guess a miracle was sent down to us,which kept us clear of going over that darn precipice with the ice? Wasit a miracle that carried us where there wasn't worse than a flowbanking on the slope of this valley? Was the mercy of it all sent tohave us quit now, with the end of things coming right to our hand? Ijust guess not. It's there ahead. Somewhere down this valley. We cansmell it so plain we'll need the poison masks in a day's journey.There's going to be no quitting. The sleds'll have to stop right here.And the dogs. You boys, too. Guess I'm going on afoot. When I've locatedthe stuff," he went on, his eyes lighting, and his words comingsharply, "when I locate the stuff in full growth, the harvest we'reyearning to cut, why, then I'll get right back here, and we'll go afoot,all three of us, and we'll cut it, and bale it, and portage it righthere to the sleds. And when we've got all we can haul we'll cast forthat trail the Sleepers make in summer, and just cut out all that hellof ice we came over. That's how I see it. And we're going to put itright through if it breaks us, and beats us to death."
Steve spoke with his eyes fixed upon the far-off lights of Unaga. Hiswords were the words of a man obsessed. But there was nothing in hismanner to suggest a mind weakening under its burden. It was simple, sanedetermination that looked out of his eyes.
Julyman answered him, and a world of relief was in his tone.
"Him dog. Him sled. All him Indian man him stop by camp. Oh, yes."
Steve nodded. Then he pointed out down the river.
"It's a crazy territory anyway," he said. "Those darn fires have turnedit summer when winter's freezing up the marrow of things. When summergets around I guess it's likely the next thing to hell. But the thingwe're yearning for is lying there, somewhere ahead. And I'm after it ifI never make the fort again, and the folks we've left behind. Come on.We'll get right back to camp. I need to fix things for the big chanceI'm going to take, and you boys'll wait around till I get back. Ifthings go wrong, and this thing beats me, why, just hang on till youfigger the food trucks liable to leave you short, then hit a trail overthe southern hills and work around back to the fort with word to Marceland An-ina. Guess there won't be any message."