Part 2

“Vinckers observed this thing,” continued Leyden. “Vinckers was an unimaginative man, and consequently the impression on him was as it would have been upon a dry plate, or the tracings of a seismograph, or any other machine which records automatically without contributing anything of its own. Vinckers was rather low in the animal scale—by low I mean primitive; as a man he was a splendid specimen, but he was animal enough to get rather more from his instincts than from his reasoning—like most women. He watched this thing, this yellow light coming through the mist and touching with its sickly yellow tinge all of the fantastic objects in the picture that belonged to the imaginative school of painting. He looked quite steadily at the dream-trees, too symmetrical to be real; the fantastic rock shapes, too fancifully grotesque to be the work of nature; he observed the yellow light upon the sluggish stream, which flowed like molasses, and looked rather like it, too; the fringe of the forest—in fact, all of the component parts of the picture just as some morbid painting genius would have placed them—and Vinckers growled like a dog who sees something moving about the camp-fire invisible to his master.”

Leyden turned to me insistently, claiming my corroboration of all this that he had worked out through hypertrophied recollection. “Is it not true, Doctor, that logic supplants instinct; that as soon as we learned how to tell by deduction where the person we sought had gone we were no longer able to lay our noses to the ground and decide the matter?” He began to maunder again—his auto-philosophy which was so hard to follow. “There are plenty of plants in nature which would poison the animals of the section if instinct did not prompt them to avoid these; a man will often eat of something and subsequently wonder at the cause of his derangement; the animal will know and avoid this thing. At that time I was conscious of a morbid physical condition, but was unable to trace its source. Vinckers, lacking imagination, knew at once. ‘Heaven,’ I heard him mutter, ‘was there ever such a mockery! We come to look for gold and we land in—quarantine!’ It struck me as a new idea and I almost laughed. Gold and death, sickness and disease! How appropriate that they should be unichromatic! But it was Vinckers’ next words which struck me. ‘It is that accursed corpse-wax!’ he muttered, ‘that greasy stuff that we have been growing fat on!’ _Ugh!_ You see, Doctor, he was able to link physically cause and effect.

“MacFarlane began to mutter. Tomba brought him some water and he drank thirstily, swallowing with the audible gulps of a horse.

“‘I’m feverish,’ he said, panting from the long draught, ‘verra nervous and feverish. ’Tis a feverish place, this.’

“‘It’s rotten with fever!’ growled Vinckers, who, like myself, spoke English better than the Scotchman. ‘It stinks of fever—smell it! We were fools to stay here so long.’

“‘We are a pack of lotus-eaters,’ said I. ‘You are right, Vinckers; it is this accursed stuff we have been eating—this adiposcere! We will get out of here to-morrow.’

“‘Do you feel as if your inside was filled with lead, Leyden?’ asked Vinckers.

“‘It is worse than that,’ said I—‘molten lead.’

“You see, Doctor, we had been living on this rich, fatty stuff, which certainly contained a great deal of oil and I do not know what else besides—narcotics, no doubt. You know the richness of an _avocado_? They will tell you in some places that this fruit produces biliousness, but I have never heard that it had a soporific effect, as undoubtedly had the _myela_ fruit. Then we had taken no exercise.

“I think that night was hotter than most; we could not sleep, so up we got and smoked and discussed our plans for the future—at least, we started to discuss them, but even as we argued a lethargy came over us, and one by one we fell asleep, though dreading to do so and striving to keep awake through fear of another nightmare. An odd condition, Doctor, this drowsy fearsomeness; no doubt like a patient narcotized before an operation; dread fighting a drug until the latter triumphs and the patient whimpers off into fear-filled somnolence.

“The sun came to suck away the fever-mist and with it much of our dread. We laughed at the fears of the night and awaited the coming of the Papuans, but awaited in vain. I think, Doctor, that Tomba’s scream had floated across the valley, telephonic beneath the mist to reach the listeners in the hills. At any rate, no human thing came near us that day. Later, when the shadows began to lengthen again, we wandered out, Vinckers and I, prospecting towards the native camp—I with a rifle, watchful for game, Vinckers humming to himself an old Dutch tune, careless in the full force of the sunlight, wandering behind me and clicking on the rocks with his little hammer.

“I was strangely lacking in breath as I climbed the hillside; as for Vinckers, he halted at the end of a hundred steps and would go up no further. Back at our camp MacFarlane lay smoking, with his head in the lap of the girl. I alone toiled up the slope, soft in heart and fibre, the sweat pouring from me in streams, sodden, with the spring gone out of my ankles and everything about me of a strange, sickly yellow hue which darkened as my breath came faster.

“I found the Papuans departed, so back I went, blubbering with breathlessness, muttering, fatigued, depressed, sluggish with sleep. Vinckers I found with his back against a rock, sleeping heavily. As I bent to rouse him my eyes fell upon a specimen which lay between his knees, and I saw that the little hammer had cleft it open to lay bare a thick band of virgin gold. Vinckers had tapped at the door of Fortune and she had opened, and Vinckers had looked within and—fallen asleep! Had the goddess ever a more loutish lover? He was sweating, too, in his sleep, and I saw where the sweat had left a yellow stain upon his neckerchief, and as the late sun struck him it seemed to me that his skin also was of a chromish tint. You know the flabby pallor of the clay-eater? It was like that, fat and flabby, but yellow rather than pale.

“Back we went to the camp, where MacFarlane still lay and smoked or slept with his ugly, shaggy head in the lap of Tomba.

“‘Gold!’ I said, ‘the mountain is full of it. It lies about loose here on the hillside, think of what it must be yonder where the mountain springs have done our hydraulic mining and washing in the same formation!’ I pointed above us to the flank of the _Malang-o-mor_; the late sun struck it aslant, throwing sharp, purple shadows into the numberless seams and fissures eroded in the crumbling crust; it flashed as it had each evening and glowed redly; high above, as the sun sank lower, the quartz beds threw back the deepening azure of the sky.

“‘Perhaps it is gold,’ said I, ‘that bright stuff which glitters so; at any rate there is gold to be had for the taking, while we lie here and bloat and rot and waken screaming in the night. To-morrow we must go up.’

“‘I’m no fit mysel’, lad,’ said MacFarlane. ‘I hae the fever; I maun rest.’

“‘You will rest here through eternity,’ said I, ‘if you do not come away at once. You are yellow as a Chinaman and there’s not a line left in your face.’ And with the aid of the girl I set about preparing a meal.”

Leyden sucked in his breath sharply—filled his deep lungs like a man coming out of the dense, polluted atmosphere of a crowded car or clinic.

“That night I awoke thrice, and each time a cold terror was clamping my heart, until I seemed to shrivel in the utter obliteration of all else. The dread was featureless; there was no dream, only this crushing, numbing, withering fear which froze sound and motion; and I lay and listened to the quick, faint _tick-tick-tick_ of my heart-beats and waited to die—and, instead, I slept again, even while sweating with fear. The last time I remained awake; and as conscience dawned fuller this fear sat upon the distorted objects of the place, the swinging bulks of my companions, the dark roof, and as I looked out into the lambent, mellow-lighted valley fear walked beneath the vague, symmetrical palms and the shimmering umbrella-trees and lurked in the recesses of the fantastic rocks. Fear walked on the water of the oily, sluggish river that flowed with the sheen of molten gold through raw, eroded banks where the lips of the rocks protruded like the ragged edge of an ulcer.

“I lay inert, paralyzed, and presently heard a faint, shuddering sigh; presently a moan, deep, hopeless, almost expiring.

“‘Are you awake, Vinckers?’ I managed to whisper, and my tongue could hardly articulate the words.

“‘Yes—are you, MacFarlane?’

“‘Ou aye, ou aye—what is it—oh, what is it, man?’

“‘Have you had the nightmare?’ I asked.

“‘Yes—without the dream—only the fear—what _is_ it?’

“‘Ou, lads, we maun leave this place as soon as ’tis light——’

“‘Hush!—ah, hush!’ whispered Vinckers. ‘I am burning up—come over here, Leyden—I am afraid to move—I was never afraid before—never in my life—ah—what was that!’

“‘Ah, tush, man!’ MacFarlane’s rough voice choked. ‘D’ye want to drive the heart of a man from his body? Tomba, lass, Tomba!’ There was no reply.

“‘Tomba!’ said I, sharply. ‘Tomba—Tomba!’

“‘Hush!—ah, hush!’ whispered Vinckers.

“‘Why shall I hush?’ said I, and my voice was shaking. ‘Waken her, MacFarlane.’

“The Scotchman thrust out his great arm slowly, and in the faint yellow light I saw him snatch it quickly away; heard the choking rattle in his throat; felt my own heart flickering like a candle burned low.

“‘Ou—ou—ou——’

“‘Hush—hush—s’h’hh!’ whispered Vinckers.

“And then, Doctor”—Leyden’s voice had sunk until one scarce caught the bitter mockery—“I did the bravest act of my life. I slid out of my hammock.” Leyden laughed in a way that sent a chill through me.

“Can you understand, Doctor? Do you know what fear is? Did you ever awake suddenly from a dreamless sleep with a devitalizing fear crushing the very blood out of your heart? No dream—no recollection—only the fear sometimes hung like a black mantle over the nearest object, no matter how familiar. Purely reasonless—the organ acting on the cell; an inversion of effect on cause. In our own case, if one presumed that our diet, or water, or the fever, or any other extrinsic cause had deranged the organ—perhaps the liver—and thus poisoned the cell—the single center of Fear—as some drugs affect other centers—murderous—erotic—as Charcot, I believe it is, demonstrates that the odor of certain perfumes will throw the hypnotized patient into paroxysms of fear——

“I never did a thing so difficult as to get on my feet and walk to the hammock of that poor girl. She was quite dead—and the wet frost of the fear which had killed her lay moist and chill on face and breast. I did not dare to light a match to look at her; there is a limit, Doctor, to the courage of every man. I was never really frightened before; I can never remember being really frightened since; and my profession is one of countless risks to life. This was something far, far worse—the reason stampeding with the will——

“Then the lethargy crept on again. I crawled back to my hammock and, still fighting the fear, fell asleep. The others slept before I—and I could hear them whining and whimpering like young puppies taken from the litter.

“I was the first to awaken when the light came. My fear was gone and I lay drenched in perspiration, yet comfortable, unwilling to rouse myself.

“‘Oh, the awfu’ nicht!’ moaned MacFarlane, and covered his face with his gnarled hands. Vinckers did not speak, but shouldered his kit.

“‘Let us go,’ he said, and we filed away from the place without looking back at the cannibal girl in the plaited hammock, her drawn face covered with the Scotchman’s only neckerchief.

“We wandered down the valley looking for a place to ford the stream and begin the ascent. We had no carriers, no goods, no especial hopes, but these things did not trouble us. We wandered along the banks of the dream-river and beneath the symmetrical trees, and filed between the fantastic rocks, which, from habit alone, we tapped with our little hammers; and still the sun had not looked over the edge of the eastern rampart of the valley, and we journeyed in the shadow of the Mountain of Fears. The Mountain of Fears—the Mountain of Fears—and nothing but peace on every hand! Nothing of harm—no danger of man or beast, nothing of heat, nothing of cold—a misty, dreamy peace; the dreads of the night supplanted by an apathetic shame which forbade discussion of these things. As for Tomba—why, she died of fever, poor girl—what else?

“We wandered down the valley and soon we came to a ford; there we crossed and toiled on up the slope of the mountain—up, up, up, panting, sweating, breathless, not clear as to purpose, but struggling to get up because—we did not know! As we climbed we tapped at the stones, because we were used to tapping and chipping with our little hammers, and when we halted for the night we were high up on a wooded plateau, and the air was fine and thin and sweet with healthy odors of moss and fern and clean flowers. We were on the hip of the Mountain of Fears.

“We crouched on the edge of the precipice and peered down into the valley as the sun slipped over the crest of the opposite hills and drew after it the curtain of mist which hid the greasy river and the unreal trees and the jumping rocks, which from above looked like Titan children frozen at play. The mist hid all of these things, but now we were above instead of beneath it. Before it grew denser it formed a thin, flat pale through which one might look and see these objects, symmetrical and bizarre, fantastic and uncouth, which lay beneath, as one looks down through the thin water-line of a clear but stagnant pool and sees the fairy-like structures of an alien element. ‘To-night,’ thought I, ‘we shall not slumber in that cistern.’ It seemed to me in that thin, bracing air, that we had wriggled to the surface like the larvæ of mosquitoes, and, after incessantly gyrating up and down, had crawled clear and grown our wings in the drier medium. But even while thinking these things the sun slipped down behind the opposite hills, the mist thickened, a cold draught sucked around the side of the mountain, and I heard Vinckers let out his breath with a shudder. I had noticed that each evening we grew depressed as soon as the sun was gone.

“‘What is the matter?’ I asked.

“‘Oh, God!’ he shuddered. ‘Don’t you see that it is all getting yellow again—a nasty, greenish yellow?’

“‘Ou aye,’ said MacFarlane, ‘but it has been yellow all day!’

“It had a yellowish tinge to me, Doctor, but I had tried to persuade myself that it was something in the spectrum of that equatorial sun and the vivid greens which filled the valley. There was no denying that as the sunrays left the air the yellows came out with frightful intensity, and to my imagination it seemed as if we were cursed with the curse of Midas—a curse because we had profaned the _Malang-o-mor_, except that it was not necessary to touch a thing to turn it into gold. Of course, at that time I knew nothing of such things as xanthopsia, and my mind rebelled at aught of a superstitious character. The result was that I became worried and confused—like a dog listening at the receiver of a telephone to a sourceless voice. With Vinckers and MacFarlane it was different; they were of the unimaginative type which goes at one leap from stubborn disbelief to frenzied superstition—and just because everything was turning yellow they would not raise their voices above a whisper.

“We had practically nothing wherewith to camp; in fact, we had come to wandering through that dream-country with only dream-needs—the needs of an opium-eater or any other slave of the lamp. Of course, we had some of the fruit—the stuff that grew on the Mountain of Fears—I have never seen it anywhere else. We made a shelter and crept in to sleep.

“I suppose that it was hot enough, but for a month we had dwelt in the steam-room of a Turkish bath. Being younger and stronger, I had given my poncho to Vinckers, who had felt the chill of the higher air. Perhaps it was this circumstance which brought me through the night with my reason, for the cold wakened me before that moment of low-ebbing vitality which comes between midnight and dawn. I awoke shivering, dew-damp with the terror of the night before, and as I lay there waiting I heard the other two twitching and muttering. I suppose that I should have awakened them.

“The moonlight, which should have been clear on the mountain, was yellow as in the valley below; the moon was still high, and we lay in the shadow, but as I waited it passed the zenith and began its swift descent, and soon the lower rim was cut by the edge of our leafy roof. For an hour no sound had come from the others, no stir; they had lain like dead men; and in my abject nervelessness I was afraid to investigate, but waited until the moon should sink lower and look directly into the place. MacFarlane was nearest me, and as the moon sank lower the yellow light crept up his body, which was motionless, as if carved in stone. It reached a hand lying palm downward on his thigh, and I saw that the back glistened with moisture. The sharp, golden moon-ray crept higher, and I watched breathlessly for his face, my own still in the shadow. His straggling beard turned golden; I saw his yellow teeth gleaming, the bristling lips drawn up and the breath hissing between in quick gasps. ‘He is having the nightmare,’ I thought, and might have found courage to awaken him, but at that moment the light shone full in his face, and I saw that his eyes were wide open, fixed, staring, brimming with an anguish of dread before which my soul shrank. He was staring straight in front of him at Vinckers, who was stretched out at his side, and as I watched, the moonlight fell on _his_ face and showed _his_ eyes also wide open and staring straight into those of MacFarlane.

“For perhaps five minutes—five hours it seemed to me—these two lay inert, stricken paralytic from dread, gazing each one into the crazed eyes of the other, motionless, soundless—while I, watching from the shadow, saw the water trickle down their yellow faces in little, golden drops. Then, with a consciousness of the danger of this thing, I tried to break the spell—and did!

“‘Vinckers!’ I croaked, and before the sound of my voice had died away Vinckers screamed—a rasping, throat-splitting scream, straight into MacFarlane’s face. MacFarlane gurgled and his eyes opened and shut rapidly. Vinckers screamed again—and at this something inside me which I was striving to hold in check, some irresistible impulse, seemed suddenly to tear away—and sweep my will before it—at least, this is a nice way of putting it, Doctor——”

Into Leyden’s voice there had crept again that biting mockery which was almost jaunty in tone.

“It is so,” he continued, “that one auto-analytic—a student of psychology—his own—might refer to these subjective symptoms. The brutal stranger watching this phenomenon would spell it in five letters—P-A-N-I-C—an elemental emotion which can be the source of much learned argumentation—and stamp the lives out of women and little children—and grab all of the lifeboats—and _has_! Yet it is an emotion quite common to certain low types of humanity, the kind who do their thinking with their spinal cord—and it is one of those lovely primitive, primordial, brutal, unregenerate and degraded emotions of which certain others of its type, such as ungoverned lust and anger and revenge, are much admired by many modern devotees, the bestial primitive—to my mind all of these things sweep together through the same sluice.”

There are no words which will convey the bitterness of Leyden’s tone; mockery soared high in comparison.

“_B’r’r’rrgh_! how I loathe all such unicellular impulses in a man—a finished animal product! And that night on that mountain I yelped and howled in fear with those other two hairy animals—and I think that we fought and bit and struggled, for the next morning we were masses of minor wounds. Yet so far had we harked back on the trail of our savage forbears, driven screaming before that primitive and degraded passion of fear, that none of us was badly hurt!—which was even more shameful. I suppose, Doctor, that our terror was too elemental and reasonless to lead us to use weapons, whereas our limbs lacked the strength to enable us to kill each other with our naked hands; so that, instead of digging out each other’s hearts with our finger-nails, we suffered most from skin-scratches, upon which the flies settled. Ach!—I should like to say an obscene word, Doctor! Let’s smoke!—let’s have a drink!

“Oh, yes—we all came away the next day. Nothing happened to us—just as there was nothing to be afraid of. Please tell me that it was all due to a toxic action on the center of Fear—that is what I tell myself—and what a savant of Leipsic was good enough to tell me. Nevertheless, when I met MacFarlane in Sydney four years ago I crossed to the other side of the street—and he looked once and then away. There are some things in a man’s past difficult to face; most difficult in mine is that last night on the broad hip of the Mountain of Fears.”

OIL AND WATER

WE were skirting the Island of Margherita, which belongs to Venezuela and produces pearls of small size but excellent quality. I was smoking an after-dinner cigar with Dr. Leyden, the collector, who earns his living by supplying museums and professors with specimens from the animal, vegetable, and mineral worlds.

“Did you ever notice, Doctor,” he asked, suddenly, “how African blood is curdled by being mixed with Anglo-Saxon?”

“I had always thought,” said I, “that African blood mixes badly with any other.”

“No. With Latin blood it will combine like whisky and soda, but the Anglo-Saxon plasma exerts upon it an action like that of alcohol upon albumen——” He paused and absently followed the course of a school of flying-fish that flickered suddenly from the swash alongside and skittered away across the dancing waves.

“What suggested this topic to your mind?” I asked, curiously, for we had been discussing the relative naval strength of Germany and the United States.

“That island.” He nodded toward Margherita as it rose, rough in outline, but with the misty softness of distance, from the quiet, pink and purple sea. The sun was resting on the rim of the sky-line, and its late rays bathed the lavender slopes of the mountains, that rose in tumbling confusion, their summits blazing with high-lights and their feet already clothed in slanting shadows.

Almost as we watched, the sun slipped under the sea; a multi-colored breeze rippled the face of the water; opalescent flashes sparkled here and there from the sails of the little Portuguese men-of-war, and then the day-light began to wane, as it seemed, in rhythmic beats.

“Odd,” continued Leyden, clinging with Teutonic persistency to his theory, conscious but unaffected by his exquisite surroundings. “The popular idea is that an individual having a drop of African blood is more negro than white, even though the white predominates, as in the case of a quadroon or octoroon. This is wrong, Doctor. The white is by far the more potent strain, but, because it is more apt to color the mind than the skin, it is not recognized as such.”

“Primitive organizations are usually more virile,” I began.