I skip the coronation and enthronement of King Hlmath Bjornsen of Krocker Land in Radiumopolis, because the King asked me to do so in my last interview with him. He wishes to reserve its features for his great book. He thinks that the ceremonies, taken in connection with many other considerations prove that the Krocker Land culture ties together a number of ancestral ethnic cults, and that there is good reason to believe that the mixture of semi-savage practices, the archaic or nepionic status of society, the advanced language, the peculiar acquisitions of the patrician class, their specialized though limited knowledge, the vitality of the serpent-monster worship taken in connection with the biological fact of a partial, at any rate, survival of Mesozoic conditions in limited topographic basins, as seen in the Saurian Sea, in the chain of swamps beyond the Pool of Oblation, and especially in the undeniable and formidable fact of the existence of the Crocodilo-Python, an animal quite unlike any known saurian, indicate what he terms the concatenated debris of a series of overlaid civilizations and that its complete interpretation will carry us back to the probable origin of Homo sapiens and the Garden of Eden, restricted of course to a purely naturalistic conception. (Erickson took a long breath, and then—he was off again.)

The geological features of this polar pit, its stepped or terraced conformation, the extraordinary igneous activity revealed beneath it and the disclosure herein of immense endomorphic radium deposits, combined with unparalleled meteorological phenomena are also reserved by the Professor, the King, for personal and elaborate treatment. With the especial opportunities now available the Prof—the King (It’s difficult for me to be consistent in alluding to my old friend) will prosecute inquiry, so far as his official duties permit, but through me, Mr. Link, he most fervently implores scientific recognition of the facts so far recorded in this narrative, and immediate scientific interposition in his behalf and cooperation for his assistance. (Erickson again paused and allowed the full meaning of his elongated statements to penetrate my purely secular mind.)

However, this in passing, Mr. Link. I will recur to it. Let me resume my story, omitting under the foregoing stipulations any description of the Professor’s enthronement. I am indeed approaching the moment of my own hazardous dash from Krocker Land for the outer world.

Goritz, I said, had disappeared. It seems he had not been seen for many settas—setta is equivalent to about twelve hours. Hopkins and I had been away scouring the countryside, and knew nothing of Goritz’s whereabouts. I have already hinted at his restlessness, moodiness, and his unceasing hunt for gold. Latterly this had become changed into an intense eagerness to revisit the radium country with Oolagah to collect radium.

We had not yet seen the process of transmutation, certain as we were as to its accomplishment and knowledge of the same among the Radiumopolites, a knowledge probably limited to the doctors. Goritz had a theory as to the illimitable power of radium to effect this conversion. He was mistaken. He was dissatisfied with the pieces we had been given—oxidized lumps holding the unchanged metal in their centers—and was always teasing Oogalah to take him again to the radium valley or chasm. Oogalah refused. I think he did not relish Goritz’s company. Now Hopkins and I believed Goritz harbored the intention to gather his belongings at a favorable moment, mostly the gold objects and the radium, and, trusting blindly in his great strength, experience, and resources, to force his way back to the Krocker Land Rim, regain the coast, hunt up the naphtha launch and possibly make some attempt to sail back to Point Barrow. It was sheer madness. We had had few occasions to argue it with him, as he rather avoided us, and his secretiveness and stealthy activity strengthened our suspicions. Hopkins half feared the unfortunate man was losing his mind.

But when we learned of his absence—we were all rather marked men now in Radiumopolis and our goings and comings were minutely noticed—I suspected at once he had tried to get to the radium fields alone and had been lost or destroyed there. Taking Oogalah, now acting under orders, Hopkins and I started out. We reached the peridotite hills which afforded us such welcome relief against the inordinate misery of our heads, that arose from the powerful emanations of the region of the granite ledges. No traces of our missing friend appeared. Oogalah left us, passing through the gateway between the sulphur patches, and made straight for the edge of the cliffside that broke down into the unapproachable and impossible crevice. Beyond the farthest point he dared to penetrate lay the prostrate body of Antoine Goritz, our former leader, dead. Oogalah could see him plainly, but he hesitated to try to reach him, and it would have been impossible for him alone to have carried this youthful giant back. Goritz’s head was towards Oogalah coming from the east. He had fallen headlong, a little crumpled up, as if in convulsions when he fell, and in his hands, still clutched in an irretractable deathgrip, were two lumps of radium.

Sorrowfully Hopkins and I turned back, followed by the mute but wondering Eskimo. We could not possibly have recovered the body then, but we hoped to later. We had already heard that the workers in radium, the Gold Makers, were like Oogalah immunized or less sensitive to its paralyzing influence, and with some of these men we hoped the recovery could be made. We noticed on this sad errand that our own susceptibility had changed, that it deterred us less, just as for months past the irritation of the eyes from the peculiar light of the land had passed away, which before, in the Deer Fels, even in the Pine Tree Gredin, had afflicted us. So, reluctantly we returned, fully assured by Oogalah that with assistance from some of the gold makers the body could be withdrawn. And that, sir, partially led to our second visit to the village of the Gold Makers.

That gold was made by some miraculous power, aided by some peculiar skill in the Radiumopolites, we had convinced ourselves, before we reached that city. Since then the spectacle of the Capitol, the apparent extravagance of the use of gold in decoration and in apparel, and even in the appurtenances of the rooms and homes of the officers of the city, the shockingly hideous Crocodilo-Python effigies on the palace, and that impossible, realistic creation of the Serpent-Throne in which the Professor sat at the time of his triumphant coronation, and Ziliah’s story and the equally credible narrations of Oogalah confirmed specifically our suspicions. But we had never seen it made, nor even found in the industries of the city any trace of its manufacture. That the odd encounter of ours with the sphalerite in the limestone cave of the Deer Fels, when the convocation of little men drifted down from the sky, borne by those incommensurable balloons (and, by the way, we had never since seen a balloon in use or idle) had something to do with gold making, we were positive.

Since our arrival and establishment in the city we had heard of the Gold Makers. It was for them that Oogalah explored the radium fields near the Crater of Everlasting Light. Oogalah told us most of what we learned about them. They were a different people again from either the Eskimo or the Hebrew type in the city of Radiumopolis, and the Valley of Rasselas. They lived in a secluded community many miles away from Radiumopolis, and seldom visited the city, though they occasionally intermarried with the comely Eskimo girls or the larger women of the small race. When we inquired the cause of their isolation Oogalah said the mines were where they were to be found, and the burial grounds.

The last named excited our wonder, but Oogalah was vague on the subject and seemingly uninterested. He did exhibit some enthusiasm over his recollections of the wildness and beauty of the country where the Gold Makers lived and worked, and mentioned a mighty river there. This was the river that issued from the Canon of Promise, the effluent from the Saurian Sea, which, as I have said, again turned westward and through another savage defile entered the Kara Sea. That river I named “Homeward Bound,” for by it I came out.

Well, the Professor, after his accession, expressed the strongest desire to see the Gold Makers and their country, and said that we all must accompany him. For the Professor had acquired a little knowledge of the language, and with me as interpreter he got on famously, and told the Council of wise men that he was writing a book about them, and after they had mastered the idea, for among their other trivialities they had no books, no writings of any sort, they took to it immensely. This appeal to their vanity—megalomania literally and figuratively—was a great stroke. Bjornsen will find out all their knowledge before he abdicates.

So it very soon materialized that we should be shown the Gold Makers. (This was some time before Goritz’s death.) It was a picturesque trip. I shall never forget it, and for good reasons. It started me on my way home.

The Professor, Goritz, Hopkins, myself, and the chief men of the Senate, Javan, Put, Hul, Peleg and Hadad, made up the party with the guard, drivers and a few attendants. We went in their odd wooden-wheeled jaunting cars, pulled by the very lively and entertaining rams.

It would form an appealing and pleasant study for me to describe the Junta of Radiumopolis—those thirty humorous little figures, with the sedate, old, and variously featured faces, a galaxy of physiognomies that embraced good nature, cunning, sullenness, querulous self importance, feebleness, gravity, benevolence (more in the seeming than in the reality, I take it) spitefulness, apathy, fussiness, dullness, alertness, sympathy, cruelty, perhaps sternness, and above all a mannerism of profundity unspeakably amusing. Their physique is hopeless, for they have pin bodies and have pin heads, as Hopkins described them, and their off-the-center look with their top-heavy heads and bowed shoulders make a mannikin effect, ludicrous and grotesque. All are dark.

But while we are on our way to the Gold Makers, through the open flowering meads and broad pastures and arable acres of the Rasselas Valley, I will try very briefly—in staccato—to put before you Javan, Put, Hul, Peleg and Hadad.

Javan, the father of Ziliah, was by far the best looking, and generally the best formed. His face was really handsome, and his beard made no false claim to being one. It was full and flowing. His eyes were large, glowing and passionate. He smiled too much, and a “few crowns and bridges made from home material would have benefited his mouth organ,” said Hopkins. His cheeks were hollow and pale, but the positive beauty of the broad white brow seemed to compensate for all other defects.

Put was a rather tall man, under the restricted sense of long and short as applied to these gentlemen, and nearly bald. His nose was a more modest creation that those of most of his colleagues, but his mouth, in so small a face, was portentous. Nature by some ineptitude had almost omitted his ears, and his eyes had a glassy and fixed stare (when not concealed by the official goggles), but the forlorn remnant of some forgotten smile had become fastened in his face, which actually helped the artificial effect of his eyes to the point of making you almost believe he was of wood or plaster, and not of flesh and blood. Hopkins quoted the Bab Ballad verse, which runs,

Hull was somewhat shorter but he was a distinct analogue to Put, with most of Put’s eccentricities, softened, by no means to the point of extinction, but so far as to make him a laughable simulacrum.

Peleg was the best example of this small Semitic people in the thirty Areopagites. He was really muscular in a way, well developed, with a hawk’s eye, and a severity that would require, I surmised, very little provocation to turn it into ferocity. His head seemed less ponderous, he carried it straighter, and a deeper glow of redness in his face imparted to him a humanity denied by the parchment-like texture of his fellows. His beard too, was full and his hair really rich and luxuriant. I think he would have proven a firm friend.

Hadad was an anomaly. He was fat. Hopkins called him “the Alderman”; he was the presumably happy possessor of a so-called corporation (as Hopkins put it, “a Trust individualized as an abdomen”), and his voice and laugh were musical. Generally I don’t insist on the association, but I have found it noticeable. Hadad had pop-eyes and an incorrigible habit of spitting. He seemed loquacious, and he usually could be found in the midst of any discussion.

This conventionalized description might produce a wrong impression. These little men did not dress in coat, vest and pants. Figure them in yellow or blue tunics falling well below the knees, sometimes in a sort of violet cassock, either bound with the rococo gold belt and its conspicuous gold buckle, with leggings or buskins, with the beehive hat, and all this apparel on state occasions loaded with gold chains. You can conceive that they presented a most unusual appearance, even one of some dignity, though it must be confessed their relatively large noses undeniably depraved it with a vaudeville effect. Hopkins never could get over this impression.

“Alfred, if I could ship ’em, as they stand, on the hoof so to speak, to New York!—sign a contract as manager, and bill ’em for a tour of the States, my financial horizon would be cloudless. Eh?”

The defects of these diminutive people seemed increased by contrast with the taller race, who were well made, normal in every way, and whose women were most pleasing. And as regards the ladies of the small type, they were much bigger than the men—another fact to the disadvantage of their undersized partners—and often, as with Ziliah, they were superb. (The matrimonial question was already looming ominously prominent for King Bjornsen, and his counsellors, I knew, were solicitous for his royal appreciation of their daughters—“one, or several or all,” said Hopkins.)

And there was the great and glorious land of the Gold Makers. As we approached, its diversity and contrasts became excitingly apparent. And, as in myself dawned the scheme of making it the point of my departure, or ESCAPE, to that great outer world from which like thrown pebbles Chance—not in this case a blind goddess—had dropped us into this sealed and secluded lesser world, it assumed a veritable splendor. Far off the shimmering agitation of the broad stream that poured its accumulated flood down a long grade from the Canon of Promise, in a vast crosscut through the Pine Tree Gredin, sparkled in our view. Hills, low and sparsely wooded, rose from the floor of the Valley of Rasselas—we had already reached the latter’s northwestern limit—between them were flat and grassed interspaces, and in the foreground a savannah-like expanse, quite treeless, and then far to the right the clustering villages of the Gold Makers. Obviously the river dominated the scene, with that far distant background of indefinite elevations outlining the northern concentric bulwarks of Krocker Land, beyond which a good glass might detect the shroud of the Perpetual Nimbus, and yet farther, infinitely removed, but seen in presence if not in form, the snowy or ruddy pinnacles of Krocker Land Rim. The river before it reached the pastoral foreground had recovered its calm, and only in its full tide did the gliding patches of foam, and here and there a larger, more disquieted wave, indicate the turmoil and torture of its descent. The road drew near to its banks. Within our view it turned westward, and we could see that it again passed outward between the walls of a rugged and imposing defile. Could I trust myself to its impetuous current, and find over its boiling waters an avenue of escape? So I mused, as we jolted along and as, to me, the scenery brought back long forgotten pictures of the Vale of Llangollen in Wales.

Scarcely were we in sight of the villages than some of their occupants hurried to meet us. When they came closer, to our wonder, we found them, as Oogalah had described, of a different racial type from the rest of the Radiumopolites and very unmistakably Samoyedes, men from the vast Siberian uplands, physically distinguishable by the broad faces and pyramidal skulls of the Turanian family. These nomads of the treeless fringes of Siberia, so far as indications showed or inquiry elicited, had been in a small company, wrecked on the Arctic coast of Krocker Land in some dateless past. They had made their way into the Valley of Rasselas, had established themselves without molestation in this restricted corner, and had then—how, remained an unanswered or insoluble question—come under subjection of the Radiumopolites. When the peculiar industry which now engaged them had developed was as indefinite in its relations to what went before or followed after it as the advent of the supernatural(?) stranger who had taught Radiumopolis the process of gold manufacture itself.

It seemed however that at an early time these Samoyedes had been appropriated as workers in this singular art, because of their discovered immunity from the deleterious effects or influences of the hypostatic element.

I saw men and women fishing in the broad river, and to my amazement found their boats were literally rafts—wooden logs bound together by ropes or thongs of leather and fibre. Hardly had I perceived this before the thought and hope flashed through my mind that on some such vehicle of transit I could trust myself to the stream, and that it was most likely that these hardy highlanders could give me the information I now needed as to the channel, direction, debouchment, and navigableness of the noble water in its course to the coast.

One of the strange idiosyncracies of the Radiumopolites, in spite of their attested skill in workmanship, their intelligence and emotional liveliness, was their obtuseness in geographic matters, or better, numbness. I don’t think they ever questioned the fact of their absolute finality both in place and in existence. Outside of the distant Krocker Land Rim was nothing but that blockade of ice, of which they had heard—the gold belt found by Goritz was a token of an aeronautic (?) reconnaissance—and outside of that, if speculation in their minds suggested the query, was just nothing again. As the Professor said, “The centripetal tendency of many primitive cultures was well understood, but in this case it was pivotal on a new topographic conformation that forbade migration.” I don’t suppose it ever occurred to a Radiumopolite to even ask what might become of that river cutting across this corner of his Eden-like valley. They had become static, and what they knew and what they enjoyed never changed. In house building, in weaving, in a rude artistry of design, in agriculture, in brick and tile and pot making, in their religion, in their games, they had attained a development that gave them happiness. And that ended it. It was Inca-like, or Mayan, Toltecan, Aztecan, or any of the American cultures which inhabit one spot, flourishing within it and never exceeding it, like the phenomena of centralization in plants and animals. And yet what questions this same culture suggested to a less individualized student, that diminutive Semitic race, the tree and serpent survival, and this unique oligarchy of little magnates!

Arrived within the precincts of the Samoyedian village, there was a bustling reception from dogs and children. These were the first dogs we had seen. Then a slow emergence of women and older men from the low briquette abodes followed. Almost without noticing their salutations, Javan, Put, Hul, Peleg, Hadad, leading the way, took us through the scanty settlement to a series of barracks, also made of burned clay briquettes, and entered the first one. On long rude tables were heaped, in this armory, piles of galena (lead sulphide), and the glistening mineral was in nodules, free and clear, or enclosed in a pulverulent limestone. It was the duty here of the workmen to extract the mineral from its matrix, pound it into dust, and separate it in small wicker baskets. It was then carried away in these receptacles, by men, to other buildings. In another house or shed Sphalerite (zinc sulphide) was similarly treated. From these preparatory stages we passed to the radium storehouse. This was practically a cave dug in the side of the hill, where the material, gathered by Oogalah was kept, and which we were not permitted to enter. The radium masses were thrown into this place through an opening above, a sort of chimney, and removed below by an opening which permitted their extrication by stone hoes. As they were drawn out they were taken in baskets to the Mixing House. The critical work was effected here.

In every respect it was like the other workshops, but in it the workmen did not remain more than two hours at a time, the “shifts,” as we would say, being then changed. At one end of this building the radium nodules were cleared of their dull coatings of oxide. Instantly the metallic nuclei, which was malleable to a slight degree, but which soon developed brittleness, were pushed towards other workmen, who hammered them with stone mallets or hammers until they were broken or splintered into grains or small angular pieces. This triturated metal was pushed forward again with slate knives to the last group of workers to whom the basket of pulverized lead and zinc mineral had been brought.

These operators divided the broken radium into lots and poured over each lot the contents of a single basket. The heap thus formed of the commingled radium and sulphide was then drawn to the edge of the stone and brick table and carefully scraped into a leathern or woven apron or bag and tied up. From this house these bundles were carried away to a distant upland which furnished a favorable soil for their burial; they were deposited in holes, five to ten feet deep, the variation in depth having some reference to the size of the bundles. These burials were then not disturbed for a length of time which corresponded to about a year of our time. At the expiration of that period they were exhumed and examined. Fortunately we were enabled to see this stage of the process also. The bundle being taken out of its sepulture is opened on a table and its contents spread out in a thin layer. From the granular commixture the gold particles are carefully picked out, and are then collected for welding by pressure into larger pieces.

Certainly nothing could have been more amazing than the exhibition thus offered of the transmuting power of this wizard element. The transmutation is never complete, that is, the original mass of galena or sphalerite is never wholly converted into gold. The residues are reinterred with the almost unaltered radium, and after six months are again examined. The second crop of gold grains invariably is less, and after a third trial the mixture is carefully freed from the radium and the unaffected sulphide thrown out. The radium thus used is kept apart from the fresher supplies of radium whose potency is always stronger. But the partially exhausted reagent is saved, and used over and over again with fresh ores. For, just as the radium suffers a diminution of efficacy, so does the sulphide lose its susceptibility to its influence. This necessarily involves considerable sorting, parceling, labeling and adjustment. Superintendents watch the operations of each workhouse, and the new and old supplies of the radium and of the ores are successfully recorded and mutually apportioned, as experience dictates. The lead sulphide yields the larger percentage of transmuted gold.

In all instances the crop of gold is small, and its accumulation slow, so that the rich displays at Radiumopolis must have represented the result of many years of this peculiar labor. Javan told me that the yield of gold was steadily diminishing because of the difficulty of obtaining radium, and the almost exhausted condition of the lead and zinc sulphide mines. Then he told me of a possible new replenishment of the latter from deposits far beyond the pine tree forest to the east. The Professor, Hopkins, and myself exchanged an astute smile of understanding as did also Goritz, though less intelligibly. We recalled the flying trip of the doctors, and the radium-lighted cave in the Deer Fels. The mines of sulphide in the limestone hills of the Gold Makers’ country are of the types familiar to the miners of the same mineral in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa.

With what wonder stricken faces the Professor, Hopkins, Goritz and I gazed upon the flattened piles of sulphide ore and radium, after the long-buried mixture was taken out of the ground in whose seclusion the miraculous effect had indisputably been produced. The lead-gray glint of the ore made more conspicuous the scattered dust of gold amongst it, with particles cohering to half converted lumps of galena. And our wonder transcended words when we were led into an adjoining room where the gold detritus was hammered into sizeable bits, and these again compacted into sticks or nodules, while on the shelves surrounding this apartment, the collected masses lay in bewildering confusion. Aladdin’s Lamp seemed almost less insupportably incredible.

It was on the occasion of the enforced second—but much desired—visit, when we besought the services of the Samoyedes to recover the body of our lost friend, that I again studied, more closely, the chances of the river liberating me from the increasingly unendurable imprisonment. A few of the hardened Samoyedes were brought back with us, after this errand of mercy, to Radiumopolis, and with Oogalah they recovered the body of Goritz. I think the Council would have been pleased to have instituted a special Crocodilo-Python festival, and delivered the poor fellow’s body to the horrible denizens of the neighboring swamps, but King Bjornsen forbade that sternly, and it caused some unpleasantness. It was another indication to me of the inevitable “blow-up,” as Hopkins called it, of our amicable relations with these Radiumopolites, and the increasing urgency of my effecting my escape, to bring to my friends the means of their possible extrication. Under the pretence of returning Goritz to the sky, from which (with us) he had come, we secretly buried him in the valley, and there he lies today.

It was something of a contre-temp to have Goritz die at all. It gave a rather second-hand and made-up look to our claims to have come from the heavens, and to the inquiring minds of our enemies supplied undesirable data for starting grave doubts as to our authenticity—still another danger lurking in our path, or, as Hopkins gloomily put it, “another nail in our coffins.”

Our friend was King indeed, but the enthusiasm that had carried him to that eminence lacked permanence. It could not be rooted in racial consanguinity, it was probably constantly decried by the little doctors, and the Professor, to quote the epigrammatic Hopkins, was a “poor mixer.” That last word unveiled a multitude of perils.