Part 13

The fact that my camera was not on board when we took our premature flight into the unknown is a matter of deep regret to me, for I would fain preserve some more permanent impressions of these placid and beautiful shores.

But we have reached the Prince’s palace. It is a succession of wonderful terraces, beginning at the river front, and extending back to the hills behind it. Each terrace is supported by a row of slender columns, and on the outer edge of each a carved railing leads to a graceful outside stairway that ascends from one step of flowers to the next. At the summit, on a level with the hills, the last step forms a round colonnaded eyrie, on the top of which the sun still lingers. Along the terraces are groups of waiting people who, as we approach, wave tranquilly their white arms to the Prince. Their dress and attitudes suggest some dim, forgotten land of the East. Us they regard with placid curiosity, yet with a gentle friendliness evident in their faces.

Now, from the wide portal of the lower story, come many down the broad, white steps to greet us. Young are they all, and beautiful—creatures of an unknown world, while from either side troop bare-armed boys and girls, chanting a low, rhythmic melody of welcome.

So are we come at last to the land of my fancy. And a land of fancy indeed it seems to us. A harbor for vanished argosies and forgotten dreams. A port for lost rhymes and strayed melodies—for discarded magic and alchemies long dead. And it is in this enchanted vale that we find once more the shelter of human habitation.

We shall rest to-night with the Prince of the Purple Fields.

XXIX. A LAND OF THE HEART’S DESIRE.

Oct. 12. This is the land of harmony. Here, shut in from the outer world by the crystal walls of the ages, rhythmic vibrations of the universe have blossomed in a fair, frail, almost supernatural life. Here the ideals of Ferratoni are the realities of the daily round, while the dreams of Edith Gale are but as the play language of little children.

Here, shut away from the greed and struggle of the life we know—few in numbers and simple in their material needs, fragile and brief in their span of physical existence and plunged for half the year into a sunless period of contemplation—the lives of the people have linked themselves with the sun and stars, with the woods and fields, with the winds and waters, and with each other, in one rare, universal chord.

It is the natural result of the long periods of sun and darkness. The polar night binds them in closer sympathy, even as it did those of the Billowcrest, while during the long sunny day they have only to bask in the sun and dream, and let the fecund soil provide amply for their wants. There is no need of struggle—no effort, save to retain life, if I may apply that term to this languorous melody of existence wherein greed, jealousy, vanity and the other elements of discord find no place.

There is no old age here—our most frequent excuse for greed. No necessity for a life of heavy toil to provide for a ghastly period when all save physical want has perished.

Indeed, there is little effort here of any sort. They are not even obliged to talk, for their minds are as open books, and there is not, as with us, the need of many words to cloud and diffuse a few poor thoughts, that in the beginning were hardly worth while.

Truth here is not a luxury—a thing produced with difficulty and therefore conserved for special occasions—but an abounding necessity, like air and water. Concealment, ever the first step toward sorrow, is impossible.

Love flowers naturally and where all may see. Marriage is union, and separation unknown. Joy to one is answered in the bosom of many, and grief is the minor chord that stirs mournfully the heart of a multitude. Verily is it a “Land of the Heart’s Desire,”

“Where nobody ever grows old, and crafty and wise— Where nobody ever grows false and bitter of tongue.”

If I seem to have waxed poetic in speaking of these people, it is because poetry is the language and breath of their race. Even Chauncey Gale has imbibed something of the pervading spirit, and adapted his phraseology to the conditions.

“The chant of the trolley and the song of the lawn-mower are heard not nor needed,” he said to me this morning, as we looked from our high terrace down on the dream world below.

I speak of it as morning, but there is no morning now. It is always afternoon—the afternoon of a June day, before the gray dust and the withering heat of summer have begun their blight. We have been here a week and we would roam no farther. The world, the vessel, the crew—even Edith Gale—all seem as a page of some half-forgotten tale—something of another and long-ago existence in which we have no further part. The spell of the lotus is upon us. The lives of the lotus-eaters have become our lives.

We have laid off our travel-stained dress, shaved our beards, and become in appearance even as those about us. Ferratoni is as one to the manor born. Mr. Sturritt might have been a seer and a high priest from childhood. His (to them) extreme age has commanded their wonder and reverence, and his pink dessert lozenges are highly regarded as a new and most delightful confection. Altogether he is in high favor, ranking next, it would seem, to Ferratoni, who, as the favorite of the Prince, and interpreter for the rest of us, is exalted somewhat unduly. As for Gale, whose physical and facial lines are perhaps most at variance with those about us, he has put himself on low diet in order to train down to a poetic basis, and goes about reciting verses, remembered from childhood, to slender youths and fair, reclining women, who listen drowsily as they bathe in the life-giving rays of the returning sun. Yesterday I heard him repeating “Mary’s Little Lamb” to a group of languid listeners. It did not matter—they do not understand his words, and his thought vibrations are, I suspect, altogether too highly tensioned for this deliberate race.

Now that there is no more night the people live out of doors. There are no regular hours for sleep or food. Soft-footed, bare-limbed boys bring viands at call, while æolian harps, yielding pillows, and the perfume of flowers everywhere woo to somnolence and repose. Our food consists mainly of preserved fruits, also the meat of a curious, silken-haired goat which these people possess, and sometimes that of the strange, leaping rabbit creature—these being their only animals. The flesh of birds and fishes, however, is plentiful, and to these things are added many preparations of their chief cereal, a sort of rice, which yields abundantly each year, without planting. Our sweets are from the sap of a tree, even finer and more delicate of flavor than our northern maple. Wine we have from the wild grapes that ripen later in great abundance.

Within the palace I find many curious little lamps and torches,—their provision against the long night. The walls and floors are draped with yielding fabrics, woven from the silken fleece of the goat, and from the long hair of the “skipteroon.” Of feather work, too, I have seen some delicate examples. Their looms for weaving, their implements for harvesting, their utensils for preparing food, are all of the simplest and most primitive form, such as our earliest ancestors might have employed, and as may be in use to-day in lands where mechanism has made little or no progress. Their one attempt in this direction is their invention for dispelling darkness, and this has not yet been shown to us, for the complaisant Prince has been quiescent since our arrival, and we have fallen into the way of it all, and are willing to procrastinate, and to keep on procrastinating while the circling sun dispenses the anodyne of eternal afternoon.

It is not strange that like the nations of the Incas these people should be worshippers of the sun. To them comes the fullest realization of its life-giving glory, and the joyless stagnation of the death-breathing dark. We who sleep through much of the sun’s absence come naturally to regard it somewhat as a useful and not always agreeable adjunct to our lives. Yet even we, after days of dull weather—black nights and murky mornings—welcome joyously the return of the life-giver, while to these people it would be strange indeed if the great luminary had not become at least the shining symbol of Infinity. The terrace form of their dwelling is, I think, suggested by the sun’s gradual circling ascent and descent of the sky, and from the topmost step or story they assemble to bid it joyous welcome and reverential farewell. The world itself here appears to be a sort of terrace, the first step of which we ascended when we reached the Violet Fields. The next is the approach to the land ruled over by the Prince’s serene sister, whom we are soon to see, for though we are loth to depart from this pleasant vale, we are daily required by a mental message from her to proceed farther on our journey.

To-morrow, therefore, or the next day, or the day after, we must ascend still higher this enchanted river and “pause not unduly, nor idly linger”—so her august message runs—until we shall arrive at the palace of the Lady of the Lilied Hills.

XXX. THE LADY OF THE LILIES.

And now, indeed, we are in the land of anodyne and oblivion. Once more we dream and forget, and the palace of the Prince dims out and fades, even as the barges that brought us drift back down the tide and disappear in the distant blue. Here is the world’s enchanted and perfumed casket, and here within it lies the world’s rarest jewel of sorcery—the Princess of the Lilied Hills.

We have been here but a brief time—I no longer keep a record of the days—and we are bound hand and foot, as it were, by the spell of this Circe of the South. In the first moment that we were ushered into her presence, and beheld her in her white robe of state, embroidered with the pale yellow flower of her kingdom, whatever remained to us of the past slipped away like water through the fingers. Chauncey Gale forgot that he had a yacht, and both of us that he had a daughter. Mr. Sturritt forgot everything but his packages of pink lozenges, which he reverentially laid at her feet, thereby earning her cordial acknowledgments and our bitter jealousy.

Ferratoni, however, was not long at a loss. He could converse with her, and it became evident almost from the start that he did not care to translate either fully or literally. He cut out, and revised, and stumbled. She detected his difficulty, of course, and seemed to reprove him. Then he gave up translating altogether, and the rest of us sat there, simply staring at her, until Gale got himself together and recited the “Burning Deck,” while I suffered in spirit because reciting did not seem to be quite what I wanted to do, and I could remember no other tricks to perform.

I finally prevailed upon Ferratoni to tell her that it was I who had conceived the expedition, whereupon Gale hastily claimed credit for having made it possible, while Mr. Sturritt—Sturritt the timid and unassuming—boldly stated that without him and his tablets we should have perished by the wayside. It was altogether distressing to hear them.

When we were through, she looked fondly at Ferratoni, and then, still tenderly regarding him, expressed thanks to all of us with a fervency that was gratifying to him no doubt, but that to the rest of us seemed a poor reward.

She added, presently, that as I was interested in the central point of the kingdom—the South Pole, of course—and that as Gale was interested in the people’s homes and firesides, and Mr. Sturritt in the matter of their food, she would have us escorted about with a view to our observation of these things, but that Ferratoni, whose life and aims were not so widely different from her own, would remain with her to discuss the problems in which they were mutually interested.

Perhaps she did not put it just in this way, but Ferratoni did in his translation; then they both turned away and forgot our existence. We were conducted outside, ere long, and there was a barge at the door into which it was indicated that we should enter.

We did not do so, however. The boatmen were in no haste and neither were we. There is no haste in this land. We lay down by the shore and looked serenely to the south where rose a lofty terraced temple, the top of which we had observed from a great distance. We had been told it was their chief temple of worship, and located exactly in the center of the sun’s daily circuit. Resting thus on the earth’s axis, it became for us the outward and material symbol of our objective point—of my life’s ambition. It was the South Pole!

And now that we are here and it rises before us, the eagerness to set foot upon that magic point—to scale and stand triumphant on the apex of the pole itself, as it were, has passed.

“So that is the South Pole,” murmurs Gale. “Well, I never would have recognized it if I’d seen it any place else. Let’s don’t be in too big a hurry to get to it, Nick.”

“No,” I answer, “suppose we wait awhile. Perhaps if we wait long enough the South Pole will come to _us_.”

For there can be no eagerness in this land. It would be wholly out of place. Neither are we acutely jealous of Ferratoni. Acuteness would be out of place also.

And so we drowse in the fragrance of the lilies, and soft-eyed, soft-voiced people come and sing to us, while the barge waits and becomes a picture on the tide.

And then there falls silence, and it is as if the world and the palace slept, and so would sleep until the wakening kiss.

XXXI. THE POLE AT LAST.

November ( ). At the top of the Temple of the Sun.

I do not know the precise date, or the hour. Our watches have long since stopped, and there has been neither the desire nor the need to wind them. In a land where the sun slips round the sky, and for half a year no night cometh, the proper measure of time is of little matter.

Neither have I continued the record of these notes, for I thought each day to visit this spot, and so waited. In the light of the Lily Princess we have lingered and drowsed. From the peace of her pleasant palace we have not cared to stray. And she has smiled kindly upon us all, though from the first it has been evident that her joy lies in Ferratoni, and that, in the princess, he too has found at last the ideal—the perfect spirit vibration that completes the chord of souls.

We have become glad of this and rejoice in his happiness. That is, we have rejoiced as much as anybody ever rejoices in this halcyon land. We have been peacefully and limpidly content, and their serene bliss has been our compensation.

Yet there have been other rewards. We have mingled with the fair people of the court and found something of the bliss of their untroubled lives.

Also, we have learned somewhat of their converse—that is, we have learned to imagine that we know what they are thinking and saying, while they have learned, or imagine they have learned, about us, too; and in this land to imagine that you have learned these things is much the same as if you had really done so, for in a place where life is reduced to a few simple principles, and there is neither the reason nor the wish to plan, or discuss, or quarrel about anything, what you say and think, or what they say and think in reply, cannot be wide of the mark in any case. As with time, exactness, or the lack of it, does not matter. Indeed, nothing matters much in this balmy vale. Lingering on a lilied bank in the sun—with—with any one of these gentle people, life becomes a soothing impression which minuteness and detail would only mar.

We have learned, too, though rather vaguely, something of the customs of the race, and the life of those who dwell beyond the palace gates. They are not a numerous people and their ways are primitive. Nature provides their food, and their garments are few and simple. Only the construction of their dwellings calls for any serious outlay of toil, and in this they unite as in a festival until the labor is complete. Their harvests are conducted in the same manner, and in these things they are not widely different from our pioneer ancestors, who exchanged labors of the field, and merrily joined in their house-raisings.

Like the people of the Incas, the Antarcticans have no money and no need of it. The lands are held in common, and the harvests yield more than enough for all. Great storehouses hold the surplus, from which any one may be provided in time of need. Famine, war, and the complications of law are unknown. Indeed, the necessity of law here seems slight. For in a land where there can be no concealment, crime must languish and only such laws result as find natural and willing observance.

Although what we regarded as life is very brief here, there is no dread of that which we know as death. Death in fact appears to have no real empire in this land, for Ferratoni assures us that the disembodied intelligence still vibrates to many of those clothed in the physical life, until it passes altogether out of range in its progress toward that great central force, which they believe to be the sun. To Ferratoni this is no surprise. To the rest of us it is a matter of vague wonder, which we have accepted as we have accepted everything else of this mystic land and race.

There are no schools. Education appears to be absorbed through their peculiar faculty of mental communication or “silent speech,” which develops in childhood, and is now almost universal. A few appear to be unable to master it, though their number is much less in proportion to the race than is the number of those who with us are lacking in the musical sense. In fact there seems to be a close analogy, or possibly a relation between mental speech and the musical vibration—those lacking the ear for tune and melody, they tell us, being deficient in the mental perception as well. The number of these is decreasing, however, with each generation, and in a land where the whole atmosphere breathes harmony the false notes must blend out in time, and the chord at last become universal and complete. There is a written language—a sort of symbolic ideograph—but with the perfection of their mental attainments, it has fallen gradually into disuse, and is now mainly employed in ornamental decoration, and for preserving the songs and records of the people.[3]

Footnote 3:

In no place does Mr. Chase give an example of the Antarctic speech or writing. Even the native word for their deity or their country is avoided, whether by intention or oversight cannot now be ascertained.

Of the latter we know but little. They are in the keeping of the Princess, who, since our arrival, has been altogether too happy in the present to go delving back into the myths of her ancestors. We are told that the first Princess came from the sun, and in this, too, the Antarcticans somewhat resemble the people of the Incas. In fact, they have so much in common with the ancient Peruvians that we might suspect a common origin, were it not for their difference of color, and even this becomes less marked with each round of their ascending deity.

We are told further that when the first Princess came to the earth she brought so much of the sunlight with her that the great luminary was dark for three days, and that all the light there was came from the heaven-sent being. It is said she found the people a benighted and unsceptred race, even then ready to destroy the life of a gentle youth who had risen up among them as a teacher and a prophet. Overawed by her glory, they had dragged him before her for final judgment. But when the Princess had looked upon the fair youth, and searched with her great radiance his innermost heart, she had laid her arms about his shoulders and declared him her spouse, beloved of heaven, and to be honored only next to herself. And when she had wedded him there before all the people, the sun had suddenly burst forth and laid its golden blessing upon them, and they had lived and reigned and enlightened the race for many years. And their land she had called the Land of the Sloping Sun, and divided it into the Lilied Hills and the Purple Fields, and over the one the eldest daughter, and over the other the eldest son of each generation had ruled.

Two thousand long nights have elapsed, they tell us, since the coming of the first Sun Princess, and though the race has never grown numerous or hardy, it has become gentle and content, and human life has not been destroyed for many generations.

They are deeply opposed to what we know as progress,[4] believing it conducive only to discontent and evils innumerable. They regard with sorrowful distrust our various mechanical contrivances. They are not surprised to learn that men are still condemned to death in our country, for the last man so condemned here was convicted of contriving a means to propel a craft without oars—in fact, a sail. It was a poor sail at that, and of little value save as an ornament. I said we might punish a man in our country, too, for inventing such a sail, though I thought we would hardly kill him. And then we learned that this man wasn’t killed either, for the Princess of that time, being still very young and unmarried, had, in accordance with divine precedent, looked upon the inventor and loved him, and granted him her hand in marriage—for this, it appears, was their one method of royal pardon, and certainly a pleasant one for the inventor. The sail, she told them, had been sent from the sun, so that the winds of the fields might aid them, which was all very beautiful, though it seems that the sun might have sent a better sail.

Footnote 4:

In comparing Mr. Chase’s record of the customs and characteristics of the Antarctic race with those of the ancient Peruvians, we find in Prescott (The Conquest) a paragraph which reveals still further the striking similarity between the two races. Prescott says:

“Ambition, avarice, the love of change, the morbid spirit of discontent, those passions which most agitate the minds of men, found no place in the bosom of the Peruvian. The very condition of his being seemed to be at war with change. He moved on in the same unbroken circle in which his fathers had moved before him, and in which his children were to follow. It was the object of the Incas to infuse into their subjects a spirit of tranquillity, a perfect acquiescence in the established order of things.”

It was the same Princess and her consort who began this great central temple in honor of their happiness, and who established as universal throughout the nation the “Pardon of Love”—that forever after no one who truly loved, and was so beloved in return, could perish by violence, and no one has so perished for more than five hundred of their long nights. The invention of the present Princess and her brother—the dark-dispeller—has been explained to them as also a gift of the sun, to aid it in vanquishing the long night, though, as it has thus far never been made to work and is regarded by Gale as hopeless, it would seem that in this case, as in the other, the sun might have sent a better one.

This temple, however, is flawless. It stands on an island in the midst of a lake, or rather a widening of the river, and is, as before noted, located exactly at the point where the sun, during its daily circuit, appears always equidistant, above the horizon.[5] It is therefore on the earth’s southern axis, and represents, to us, the South Pole.

Footnote 5: