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I should have supposed myself to be in the region of the magnetic pole of the sphere, if I did not know that I had long since left it behind me. My pocket-compass had become entirely useless, and every scrap of metal that I had about me had become a loadstone. The very ice, as if it were congealed from water that held large quantities of iron in solution; iron escaping from whatever solid land there was beneath or around, the Plutonic rock that such a region could have alone veined and seamed with metal. The very ice appeared to have a magnetic quality; it held me so that I changed my position upon it with difficulty, and, as if it established a battery by the aid of the singular atmosphere above it, frequently sent thrills quivering through and through me till my flesh seemed about to resolve into all the jarring atoms of its original constitution; and again soothed me, with a velvet touch, into a state which, if it were not sleep, was at least haunted by visions that I dare not believe to have been realities, and from which I always awoke with a start to find myself still floating, floating. My watch had long since ceased to beat. I felt an odd persuasion that I had died when that stood still, and only this slavery of the magnet, of the cold, this power that locked every thing in invisible fetters and let nothing loose again, held my soul still in the bonds of my body. Another idea, also, took possession of me, for my mind was open to whatever visitant chose to enter, since utter despair of safety or release had left it vacant of a hope or fear. These enortuous days and nights, swinging in their arc six months long, were the pendulum that dealt time in another measure than that dealt by the sunlight of lower zones; they told the time of what interminable years, the years of what vast generations far beyond the span that covered the age of the primeval men of Scripture—they measured time on this gigantic and enduring scale for what wonderful and mighty beings, old as the everlasting hills, as destitute as they of mortal sympathy, cold and inscrutable, handling the two-edged javelins of frost and magnetism, and served by all the unknown polar agencies I fancied that I saw their far-reaching cohorts, marshaling and maneuvring at times in the field of an horizon that was boundless, the glitter of their spears aad easques, the sheen f their white banners; and again, sitting in fearful circle with their phantasmagoria they shut and hemmed me in and watched me writhe like a worm before them.

I had a fancy that the perpetual play of magnetic impulses here gradually disintegrated the expanse of ice, as sunbeams might have done. If it succeeded in unseating me from my cold station I should drown, and there would be an end of me; it would be all one; for though I clung to life I did not cling to suffering. Something of the wild beast seemed to spring up in my nature; that ignorance of any moment but the present. I felt a certain kinship to the bear in her comfortable snowiness whom I had left in the parallels far below this unreal tract of horrors. I remembered traditions of such metempsychoses; the thought gave me a pang that none of these fierce and subtle elements had known how to give before. But all the time my groaning, cracking ice was moving with me, splitting now through all its leagues of length along the darkness, with an explosion like a cannon’s shot, that echoed again and again in every gap and chasm of its depth, and seemed to be caught up and repeated by a thousand airy sprites, and snatched on from one to another till it fell dead through the frozen thickness of the air.

It was at about this time that I noticed another species of motion than that which had hitherto governed it seizing this journeying ice. It bent and bent, as a glacier does in its viscous flow between mountains; it crowded, and loosened, and rent apart, and at last it broke in every direction, and every fragment was crushed and jammed together again; and the whole mass was following, as I divined, the curve of some enormous whirlpool that swept it from beneath. It might have been a day and night, it might have been an hour, that we traveled on this vast curve—I had no more means of knowing than if I had veritably done with time. We were one expanse of shadow; not a star above us, only a sky of impenetrable gloom received the shimmering that now and again the circling ice cast off. It was a strange slow motion, yet with such a steadiness and strength about it that it had the effect of swiftness. It was long since any water, or the suspicion of any, had been visible; we might have been grinding through some gigantic hollow for all I could have told; snow had never fallen here; the mass moved you knew as if you felt the prodigious hand that grasped and impelled it from beneath. Whither was it tending, in the eddy of what huge stream that went, with the smoke of its fall hovering on the brink, to plunge a tremendous cataract over the limits of the earth into the unknown abyss of space? Far in advance there was a faint glimmering, a sort of powdery light glancing here and there. As we approached it—the ice and I—it grew fainter, and was, by-and-by, lost in a vast twilight that surrounded us on all sides; at the same time it became evident that we had passed under a roof, an immense and vaulted roof. As crowding, stretching, rending, we passed on, uncanny gleams were playing distantly above us and around us, now and then overlaying all things with a sheeted illumination as deathly as a grave-light, now and then shooting up in spires of blood-red radiance that disclosed the terrible aurora. I was in a cavern of ice, as wide and as high as the heavens; these flashes of glory, alternated with equal flashes of darkness, as you might say, taught me to perceive. Perhaps tremendous tide after tide had hollowed it with all its fantastic recesses; or had that Titanic race of the interminable years built it as a palace for their monarch, a temple for their deity, with its domes that sprung far up immeasurable heights and hung palely shining like mock heavens of hazy stars; its aisles that stretched away down colonnades of crystal columns into unguessed darkness; its high-heaved arches,its pierced and open sides? Now an aurora burned up like a blue-light, and went skimming under all the vaults far off into far and farther hollows, revealing, as it went, still loftier heights and colder answering radiances. Then these great arches glowed like blocks of beryl. Wondrous tracery of delicate vines and leaves, greener than the greenest moss,
wandered over them, wreathed the great pillars, and spread round them in capitals of flowers; roses crimson as a carbuncle; hyacinths like bedded cubes of amethyst; violets bluer than sapphires—all as if the flowers had been turned to flame, yet all so cruelly cold, as if the power that wrought such wonders could simulate a sparkle beyond even the lustre of light, but could not giye it heat, that principle of life, that fountain of first being. Yonder a stalactite of clustered ruby—that kept the aurora and glinted faintly, and more faintly, till the thing came again, when it grasped a whole body-full of splendor —hung downward and dropped a thread-like stem and a blossom of palest pink, like a transfigured Linnæa, to meet the snow-drop in its sheath of green that shot up from a spire of aqua marine below. Here living rainbows flew from buttress to buttress and frolicked in the domes—the only things that dared to live and sport where beauty was frozen into horror. It seemed as if that shifting death-light of the aurora photographed all these things upon my memory, for I noted none of them at the time. I only wondered idly whither we were tending as we drove in deeper and deeper under that ice-roof, and curved more and more cirelingly upon our course while the silent flashes sped on overhead. Now we were in the dark again crashing onward; now a cold blue radiance burst from every icicle, from every crevice, and I saw that the whole enormous mass of our motion beat and swept around a single point—a dark yet glittering form that sat as if upon the apex of the world. Was it one of those mightier than the Anakim, more than the sons of God, to whom all the currents of this frozen world converged? Sooth I know not—for presently I imagined that my vision made only an exaggeration of some brown Esquimaux sealed up and left in his snow-house to die. A thin sheathing of ice appeared to clothe him and give the glister to his duskiness. Insensible as I had thought myself to any further fear, I cowered beneath It was useless; the current that carried us was the stare of those dead and icy eyes. Slowly growing invincible, the gaping gulfs of the outer we rounded, and ever rounded; the inside, on seas were sucking us toward them. I fell; I which my place was, moving less slowly than scrambled to my feet; I would still have gone the outer circle of the sheeted mass in its viscid hack, but, as I attempted it, the ice whereon I flow; and as we moved, by some fate my eye was inclined ever so slightly, tipped more boldly, was caught by the substance on which this figure sat. way, and rose in a billow, broke, and piled ure sat. It was no figure at all now, but a over on another mass beneath. Thea the cay- bare jag of rock rising in the centre of this solid era was behind us, and I comprehended that whirlpool, and carrying on its summit some- this ice-stream, having doubled its central point, thing which held a light that not one of these now in its outward movement encountered the icy freaks, pranking in the dress of gems and still incoming body, and was to pile above and flowers, had found it possible to assume. It pass over it, the whole expanse bending, crack- was a thing so real, so genuine, my breath be- ing, breaking, crowding, and compressing, till came suspended; my heart ceased to beat; my its rearing tumult made bergs more mountain- brain, that had been a lump of ice, seemed to ous than the offshot glaciers of the Greenland move in its skull; hope, that had deserted me, continent, that should ride safely down to crum- suddenly sprung up like a second life within ble in the surging seas below. As block after me; the old passion was not dead, if I was. block of the rent ice rose in the air, lighted by It rose stronger than life or death or than my- the blue and bristling aurora-points, toppled self. If I could but snatch that mass of moon- and mounted higher, it seemed to me that now stone, that inestimable wealth! It was no- indeed I was battling with those elemental agen- thing deceptive, I declared to myself. What cies in the dreadful fight I had desired—one man more natural home could it have than this re- against the might of matter. I sprang from that gion, thrown up here by the old Plutonic pow- block to another; I gained my balance on a third, ers of the planet, as the same substance in climbing, shouldering, leaping, struggling, hold- smaller shape was thrown up on the peaks of ing with my hands, catching with my feet, crawl- the Mount St. Gothard, when the Alpine ai- ing, stumbling, tottering, rising high and higher guilles first sprang into the day? There it with the mountain ever making underneath; a rested, limpid with its milky pearl, casting out power unknown to my foes coming to my aid, flakes of flame and azure, of red and leaf-green a blessed rushing warmth that glowed on all the light, and holding yet a sparkle of silver in the surface of my skin, that set the blood to racing reflections and refractions of its inner axis— in my veins, that made my heart beat with newer the splendid Turk’s-eye of the lapidaries, the hope, sink with newer despair, rise buoyant with cousin of rh~ water-opal and the girasole, the new determination. Except when the shaft of precious essence of feldspar. Could I break light pierced the shivering sky I could not see it, I would find clusters of great hemitrope crys- or guess. the height that I had gained. I was tals. Could I obtain it, I should have a jewel vaguely aware of chasms that were bottomless, in that mass of moonstone such as the world of precipices that opened on them, of pinnacles never saw! The throne of Jemschid could rising round me in aerial spires, when suddenly not cast a shadow beside it. the shelf, on which I must have stood, yielded, Then the bitterness of my fate overwhelmed as if it were pushed by great hands, swept down me. Here, with this treasure of a kingdom, a steep incline like an avalanche, stopped half- this jewel that could not be priced, this wealth way, but sent me flying on, ‘sliding, glancing, beyond an Emperor’s—and here only to die! like a shooting-star, down, down the slippery My stolid apathy vanished, old thoughts dom- side, breathless, dizzy, smitten with blistering mated once more, old habits, old desires. I pain by awful winds that whistled by me, far thought of Eleanor then in her warm, sunny out upon the level ice below that tilted up and home, the blossoms that bloomed around her, down again with the great resonant plash of the birds that sang, the cheerful evening fires, open water, and conscious for a moment that I the longing thoughts for one who never came, lay at last upon a fragment that the mass be- who never was to come. But I would! I cried, hind urged on, I knew and I remembered no- where human voice had never cried before. I thing more. would return! I would take this treasure with Faces were bending over me when I opened me! I would not be defrauded! Should not my eyes again, rough, uncouth, and bearded I, a man, conquer this inanimate blind matter? faces, but no monsters of the pole. Whalemen I reached out my hands to seize it. Slowly it rather, smelling richly of train-oil, but I could receded—slowly, and less slowly; or was the recall nothing in all my life one fraction so beau- motion of the ice still carrying me onward? tiful as they; the angels on whom I hope to Had we encircled this apex? and were we driv- open my eyes when Death has really taken me ing out into the open and uncovered North, and will scarcely seem sights more blest than did so down the seas and out to the open main of those rude whalers of the North Pacific Sea. black water again? If so — if I could live The North Pacific Sea—for it was there that I through it—I must have this thing! was found, explain it how you may—whether