CHAPTER XVIII
CAMP OF THE DEAD
The sight was like a part of his own nightmares, and mingled with them. He stared at the face, dark and distorted behind a pale sheet of ice, and it dawned upon him that it was real.
In a spasm of unbearable horror and bewilderment he wheeled and stumbled away down the passage. Within a few feet he halted, collecting himself. The thing could not possibly be real. He went back, drawn by a horrible fascination.
He held up the candle and looked again. He could see the head quite distinctly through the semi-transparent ice, with the dim shadow of a body under it. It was no vision. It must be, he slowly realized, the body of some unfortunate Indian, who had perished on the glacier long ago, and became sealed into the ice.
Delicately with his hatchet he chipped a little at the ice about the head. A long flake split away. The shoulder came in sight, covered with a skin garment. The shaggy hairs clung in the frozen material. And then he thought he saw the dim loom of another form, beyond the first.
It was some irresistible fascination of horror that led him to excavate around these grim remains. He chipped away the ice from around the first body, intensely careful not to wound the flesh, and saw that there was indeed a second corpse. They were sitting, huddled close together, and a little more chopping brought to light a foot wrapped in untanned moccasins that did not belong to either of these two.
There was a whole party, and it was not hard to reconstruct the story of the tragedy. The Indians had tried to cross the glacier, probably in a winter storm. Morrison had said there was a pass at the top of the glacier. They had been caught in a blizzard, lost, snowed under, and frozen as they huddled together. The glacier had engulfed their bodies, and, in its infinitely slow progression, had brought them at last down to sea level, uncorrupted as when they had perished—how many centuries ago?
It came upon him that he might well sit down with this prehistoric company and join its sleep. It would come to that in the end, and he would be melted out of the glacier along with them. The candle flickered down. It was burned out, in spite of all his efforts to economize it. As if it had been an omen, he hurriedly lighted another, and looked again at the motionless, huddled figures in the cavern he had hollowed out.
He was not sure how many were in the party; there might be four, or perhaps more than that. Except the one which lay prostrate, they were in sitting postures, leaning together. The faces were somewhat shrunken, the eyes closed, the heads slightly bowed, the coarse black hair protruded from the fur hoods.
They looked as if they had died yesterday. Lang thought of Morrison’s archaeological enthusiasm, and imagined his excitement if he could have witnessed this find. The nearest Indian had a rude copper knife, green with incrustation, in his belt, with something like a bundle of arrows, and Lang tried gingerly to pull away the frozen furs to see these weapons.
The stiff hide would not give. He hacked it a little with the hatchet edge, cut a long gash, and pulled the frozen edges apart. He must have cut into some sack. Out of the rent came a stream of pebbles and bits of rock, that glittered with green and yellow and diamond points in the candlelight.
He picked one of them out of the litter of ice chips, curiously, not realizing what it might be. It was a rough bit of greenish crystal, six-sided, the size of a beechnut, half embedded in a brownish bit of rock. It was mostly dull surfaced, but as he turned it over a brilliant green sparkle shot out, and it was only then that he realized what he had found.
He had forgotten all about the emeralds in these last terrible hours. The memory came back to him with a shock. He gasped with confusion and amazement. He had come to the end of his quest. He had broken the glacier gate. He had found the green stones.
Forgetful of everything else for the moment, he stooped and gathered them out of the ice. There must have been a quart of the pebbles, of different sizes, of different colors, too. There were blue and green ones, crystals white like diamonds, and lumps of stone showing merely abortive flecks and veins of green—emerald matrix, he thought. It struck him that the Indians had had little knowledge, and had gathered indiscriminately everything that was crystalline.
He had indeed cut into a skin sack at the Indian’s belt, and, investigating it, he found still another handful of stones remaining. Some of these must be indubitable emeralds—splendid green crystals as large as the end of his thumb, almost clear of rock. Their possible flawing, and whether they could be cut to advantage, he was unable to guess; but they must be immensely valuable. With death all about him, and his own death impending over him, he sat by the pile of jewels and gloated, oblivious.
This was certainly the source of the emeralds that Morrison had found. There was no mine, no pocket in the glacier. These aborigines must have been messengers, burden carriers. They were taking the stones from the place where they had been found—perhaps a hundred miles away—to some other unknown point, perhaps as tribute to their chief, or destined for the Incas of far-away Peru. But how they had been washed out of the glacier he could not imagine, for there was no water, no dribble of moisture in this cavity.
Then the inevitable thought of the futility of it all came down black and crushing. He had found the treasure, and must stay trapped with it. The glacier gate would not open to let him out. He had wealth here; it represented power. It was enough to set all the wheels of Boston turning, to drive a steamer across the Atlantic. Strange that it could not lift the thirty feet of ice over his head!
Yet the mysterious suggestion of present wealth and power did provide strength to his soul. It seemed impossible that he could be going to perish beside that heap of precious stones. Luck had turned before when it was at the worst; and he could not refrain from examining the other bodies to see if they, too, carried emeralds.
The next nearest, when the skin wrappings were cut away, had a stone-headed club at its belt, and a bag indeed, but containing nothing but flint arrowheads. The prostrate figure came next, and he chipped away the ice to get at its waist. It carried no baggage at all, but a sort of spear shaft showed frozen under its body.
The fourth Indian was still embedded in ice, except for the arm and shoulder nearest him. Lang began to chip and hew to clear the body, and was working around to the other side, when the hatchet crashed through a thin ice wall into an open space beyond. He broke the aperture wider, and put his head through cautiously, with the arm holding the candle.
There was another of the usual fissures, a couple of feet wide. In splitting, the parting edges had torn the Indian’s body partly asunder; in fact, one leg was sticking in the ice on the other side. But Lang, hardened to horrors, hardly noticed this gruesome circumstance. He heard the ripple of water. There was a little stream flowing down the rounded bottom of the fissure.
More than that, he saw at once that the rending ice had torn the Indian’s skin swathings; green pebbles glittered in the tattered fur, and green stones lay scattered at the bottom of the running water.
Here was surely the direct source of Morrison’s find. The water came in, no doubt, from the melting at the top of the glacier. It must go out where the emeralds had gone. He had only to follow it to the outlet.
At this positive direction and hope Lang had a shock and revolution in his soul that first dizzied him, and then changed to an almost agonizing ecstasy of joy. He had accepted death more fully than he had realized. With trembling fingers he fished up the green stones from the water, chipping them out where they were frozen into the ice bottom. He picked them out from the torn skin bag, collecting another half pint, of all sorts. He did not pick them over, but among them were two huge crystals nearly as large as small eggs, though both were rocky and flawed at the ends.
He crept back to his first position and hastily gathered up the stones he had left there. It was a problem how to carry them. He was afraid to trust his pockets; they might spill out if he tumbled. Finally he tied his trouser legs tightly around his ankles and poured the stones inside, half in each leg. They rasped and bulged uncomfortably, but he had them safe from spilling. By an afterthought he took the green-rusted copper knife, thinking of Morrison, squeezed back through the hole he had cut, and began to follow the streamlet down the ice crevice.
He was able to walk perhaps a dozen feet, and then the fissure grew too small for passage, though the rivulet slipped through uninterruptedly. Here he found another small green crystal, and now he had to hew away the ice to make way for himself.
He attacked it with energetic strength. It could not be many yards, perhaps not many feet, to the end of the glacier, he thought. At every stroke he half expected to feel the blade break through. He pushed the chips back behind him, hewing and hacking, cutting a tunnel just wide and high enough to creep through, while the little stream ran merrily between his feet.
He cut for a yard—two yards. He put out the candle lest he might have greater need later, and worked in darkness, guided by the feel of the water. The stream dropped through a fissure in the floor. Only a yard, but it terrified him lest it had gone far beyond following; and he had to hew a way down after it and pursue it again on its new level.
He sweated and panted in spite of the chill. Then his feverish energy collapsed suddenly. He got himself back out of the water and lay back, hard put to it to keep awake. Again he forced himself into the tunnel, hewed another ten feet, paused to rest, worked again and again collapsed. He half dozed into a deadly nightmare, awoke shuddering and plunged frenziedly at the work again. It seemed to him that he had driven his tunnel far enough to pierce the whole glacier.
Queer terrors beset him. He fancied that the Indians were stirring back there in the darkness—they were coming down the passageway behind him. He had to relight the candle to steady his nerves. He began to fear that he was on the wrong course after all, and the horror of this possibility almost took the heart out of him.
He stopped to rest again; again attacked the ice, and was encouraged by finding another small rivulet flowing in to increase the first. A yard farther, and his hatchet smashed through into space. He split the screen of ice apart and crawled through.
It was not the open air. It was an ice cavern; the floor was covered with chips of ice, and the farther end blocked with translucent white. For a second he thought he had come back into one of his own tunnels, but there was daylight in the place, and it was snow that blocked the opening.
He recognized it then. It was the cavern he had dug out the day before, in his attempt to follow the stream backward. He plunged at the snow. There must have been a couple of yards of it, but he wallowed through, and fell outside in a collapse of exhaustion, of nerve tension, of relief.
He awoke from a minute of dizzy oblivion. The world was veiled in the thickest fog he had ever seen. Nothing was visible. He could hear the sea and smell its freshness, but all around him was like a pressure of cold, wet steam.
By some intuition of direction he knew that his camp was out to the right of the valley. The thought of the fire, of food, roused a desire in him that was like a madness. He crawled through the snowslide that had filled the valley, came to its edge, and out upon the wet, stony earth.
His knees sank under him. He could not walk, but was reduced to creeping. He would have been an extraordinary sight for his Boston patients; wet to the skin, dirty, with a week’s growth of beard, his clothes torn and mud colored, covered with ice chips, as he crawled on all fours like a wild beast, still clutching the hatchet unconsciously, and muttering to himself.
Several times he sank in a heap, unable even to crawl. The earth seemed to heave and move under him, and strange shapes went past in the fog. He smelled, he thought, the faint sulphurous smell of his coal smoke—or was it hallucination? He crawled in that direction. An illusory voice spoke to him. He came in sight of his camp; dimly he saw his bark shelter, and beside it he saw a seated figure, a woman’s figure, wrapped in a dark poncho, with a striped scarf. It was Eva Morrison’s figure, and he knew that this, too, was an illusion which would presently dissolve.