The Mountain of Fears — Themes and Context

restive, to such an extent that I finally paused, annoyed, for nothing is so irritating as lack of attention to a solicited reply.

“Ach! but those cases are in the line of the ordinary!” he exclaimed.

“Pardon me,” I replied, “but the last case I have given was distinctly _out_ of the ordinary.”

“I am awkward, Doctor,” said Leyden, apologetically. “I mean that the relations of cause and effect follow the usual course—the histological changes in the cell produced impaired function of the organ and these primary changes were the result of trauma. But have you ever had occasion to observe the reverse of this condition—the action of the organ on the center—like a nightmare, where one has the liver poisoning the central cells——”

I interrupted in my turn. Leyden was no doubt a skilled naturalist, a close observer and a man of deep power of thought and analysis, but he was not a physician, had never made a regular study of physiological chemistry, and was, therefore, scarcely in a position to argue with a person who had.

“Such cases are not infrequent,” I answered. “The ancient Greeks understood that much, as we see from their terms. ‘Hypochondria’; under the ribs—the liver probably poisoning the brain, if you like; then there is the condition of hysteria often accompanying a movable kidney; the action of certain drugs on special centers——”

“Such as _cannabis indica_?” interrupted Leyden, “which affects the sense of elapsed time and makes the subject happy—or—what is that principle, Doctor, which produces xanthopsia, or yellow vision, and makes one sluggish and depressed?”

“Xanthopsia is an early symptom of _santonin_ poisoning,” I answered. “The alkaloid is obtained from the unexpanded flower-heads of the——”

“Artemisia maritima—yes—I know the plant—but the active principle might occur elsewhere?”

“It is wonderful,” mused Leyden, in the self-communicative tone that was often difficult to follow—“the microscopic filament that makes or unmakes a man; the minute neurons which carry such a potent impulse—like the flash crossing a continent on a tiny wire to send two great nations to war. The wire is short-circuited, the nation disgraced; the neuron short-circuited, the individual disgraced. Such a thing once happened to me, Doctor.

“This was in Papua, an awesome country which holds in its dark recesses many of the things one wants—and most of those which one does not. I had gone there with two other white men to look for gold. It is a marvelous country, Doctor; I do not think there is any other like it; such a country as was pictured in the old imaginative school of painting; a valley, through which winds a mist river flowing intangibly from a mirage through a canyon bridged by a rainbow; travelers’ palms, tree-ferns, lianas, dream-trees heavy with strange fruits and brilliant blossoms, in the distance mystic mountains rising as they recede, green yet forbidding, the homes of genii; their summits fantastic—the whole a beautiful, impossible, frightfully fascinating fairyland. This was that place where we went to look for gold.

“My two companions were failures—most gold-seekers are. I was not old enough to be a failure myself. No matter what the faults of these others, one did not deny their virtues. One was a Hollander, Vinckers, an engineer, a brilliant man, but one ready to step over the edge of heaven in sheer restlessness and a desire to see what was held by the abyss; the other was a Scotchman, disagreeable, morose, taciturn, harsh of speech and visage. Both held hearts of steel; they were the most quietly courageous men that I have ever known. I ask you to remember this, Doctor, in consideration of what came later. Their courage had been tried and proved in many desperate situations.... Ach!”—Leyden began to mutter again, shaping his thoughts with his tongue until I could with difficulty catch this thought—“the filament—the neuron—cut the sympathetic nerve in the neck of a horse and the animal begins to sweat upon the affected side; puncture the floor of the fourth ventricle of a dog—diabetes.” He raised his voice. “There is a little center of thermogenesis, is there not, Doctor, the irritation of which will raise the temperature——

“We wandered through this shadow-land, this illusory place of promise whose inhabitants were ofttimes starving. Cannibals?—yes; many white men have been that through acute starvation; chronic only tends to confirm the vice. They were a strange, shy, kindly people—to us, who understood such. The ‘Barbary Coast’ in San Francisco, the parks in Melbourne, or the water-front in Hong Kong, are all more dangerous than Papua. We wandered through these people, accompanied by kindness, a whole tribe sometimes bearing our burdens until they reached a district dangerous to them, but where we made new friends. We wandered through this dreamland unmolested, walked with its fantastic peoples, black and brown and piebald; strayed in and out to the click-click-click of our little hammers, meeting dangers, it is true—the dangers which might confront a child walking blindfolded through a botanical garden filled with perils to its ignorance—and we tap-tap-tapped with our little hammers—right up to the slopes of the _Malang-o-mor_—the ‘Mountain of Fears’—and we tap-tap-tapped on its slopes of quartz and basalt, little thinking that we knocked at the door of an evil spirit.”

The bluff bows of our little ship smashed the short seas into a flat track of phosphoresence, and against the pale background I saw a tremor of some sort shake Leyden’s square shoulders, and it seemed to me that his voice was slightly breathless.

“‘The Mountain of Fears,’ so our Papuans called it, and threw down their burdens at the edge of the stream and refused point-blank to stir another step; more than that, they implored us to go no farther ourselves, and a girl given to MacFarlane by a chief threw her arms around the knees of the rough old Gael and wailed like a stricken soul. An odd thing, that, Doctor, this cannibal girl given to the Scotchman a month before by this chief, to whom MacFarlane had given a harmonica on which he had first rendered ‘The Bonnie, Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond’ in a manner which should, by right, have got him speared. The girl had fancied him, slaved for him, followed him everywhere like a dog, and had ended by _softening_ him—to such an extent that he ceased to curse and his manner was less harsh—the elevating effect of a cannibal upon a Covenanter!—another inversion in this hallucinating country where the only actuality seemed the rapping of our little hammers.

“This girl, as I say, implored MacFarlane not to go on; for Vinckers and me she did not care; none of the women had much fancied us, while MacFarlane’s lack of comeliness was almost bizarre; they were _obedient_, of course—but that was about all.

“MacFarlane leered up at the great forbidding mountain as it thrust against the dome of the sky its summit of snowy quartz, a-glisten in the bright sunlight thirteen thousand feet above the level of the sea.

“‘A cauld slope yon—too cauld for a lass in naething but a kiltie. Ye’d best bide here ’til I come.’ He spoke to her in the vernacular, with which we were all three familiar, and told her to await his return.

“It was hot in that valley—a stewpan, withering, stifling with the equatorial reek which wilts one to the bone; the nights stunk of fever. It was the southeast slope of the mountain which presented to us; and as we gazed up toward it from the little nest of trees where we had made our camp, the late sun blazed against its worn flank, and suddenly the broad, barren belt between the forest and the formation of quartz above the timber belt seemed to burst into flame and shone and sparkled and glittered as if flecked with scales of gold.

“‘An omen!’ cried Vinckers. ‘The Mountain of Hope—not the Mountain of Fears! Something tells me that we shall find gold there—veins of it, knuckles of it—perhaps the bones of the mountain are solid gold; why not, in such a country as this?’

“The sun dropped behind the high hills to the westward, swiftly, as it does on the equator, and even more swiftly the gray shadow ran from the foot to the summit of the great mountain. It was as if one saw the color fade in the face of a dying man, and it seemed to me that a cold draught struck down from the heights.

“‘The Mountain of Fears,’ said I—‘the Mountain of Fears,’ and as I stared at the monster on whose bristling hide we planned to crawl, parasites, searching for a spot to lodge our stings, the first shadow of foreboding swept over my spirits, just as the swift shadow had risen to throw its cold, blue light across the snowy quartz-field.

“In the valley we found the first signs of plenty; there were fruit and game and a sort of wild yam in abundance; and here we decided to rest for several days on the edge of the stream, for MacFarlane had a suppurating heel where he had trod upon a thorn, and Vinckers was suffering from a great nettle-rash upon his body. All three of us were hungry and our blood ran too thin to encounter the cold nights higher up the slope.

“We camped in a grove of trees which looked like the _papaya_ and bore a fruit unlike any I have ever seen. It was shaped like an _avocado_, had a pulp like wax, or bone-marrow, which was greasy to the touch, oily, and held a faint flavor of sandal-wood. At first we tried it with caution, for our native friends would not eat anything which grew in the shadow of the _Malang-o-mor_; neither would they sleep in the narrow valley, but retired each evening to the edge of the forest on the farther slope.

“We rested and we slept, and we ate of the fruit, which I called _myela_, because I did not think that it had ever been described, and I called it so from its resemblance to marrow; also, we drank of the stream, which was a deep ruby, spring-cooled and fragrant, but of which none of the Papuans would drink excepting the girl, Tomba, given to MacFarlane by the chief. She ate and drank and shuddered and watched her lord narrowly, as if waiting for the curse to fall and wishful to avert it.

“In the early morning we hunted the game or clicked with our little hammers on the crumbling quartz through which the river gnawed its way. There was gold in the country, gold in the stream; one could pan enough dust in a light day’s work to pay highly for the labor. But we wanted more than dust—we wanted the pure metal which none doubted we should find on the virgin breast of the mountain, and our fancy saw us winding back to the sea with our native tribe deep-laden with the wealth of buccaneers—winding out through defiles of mountain and forest, heavy with the plunder of the dread _Malang-o-mor_.

“Odd, Doctor; gold and dreams and sweat and death—how they all mixed together to strike the average which maintains the trim of the world——” Leyden’s voice had sunk to muttering again, and he shivered, despite the humid warmth of the night.

“Daytimes we dwelt in Paradise and at night lay down to sleep, having first drunk of the stream, which we christened ‘Lethe,’ because on its banks we forgot the hardship and hunger of our long journey to the valley. A Lethe it must have been, because each morning, when the late sun looked over the shoulder of the mountain and whipped up the blanket of mist stretched like a tent from the slope to the hills beyond, we forgot the miasmas of the night and the fetid fever smells and spores that spawned through the hours of hot darkness, and all of the while we ate more of the fat, oily fruit and less of other and more wholesome things, for this fruit of itself appeared to satisfy all needs, and we looked at each other and laughed at the physical changes of the few days, for we were growing fat and flabby as paretics. We slept a great deal, too, days as well as nights, and the sleep was at first of that delicious kind which one enjoys in the moments between waking and rising—a conscious sleep, in which one feels the myriad renovative changes of tissue, when each little cell seems to stretch and tingle and feed against the waste of the coming day. Feed they did, for the flesh came back, full and soft, to our gaunt frames, and we looked at one another and laughed fat, gurgling laughs, and lay and smoked with our heads in the laps of the girls, and the tapping of our little hammers was heard but seldom on the flinty foot of the Mountain of Fears.

“The tribe had camped, as I have said, across the valley on the edge of the forest, but each day they came to see us, and we laughed at their surprise when they saw that all was well. We held them with beads and baubles and food and friendliness—chiefly the latter, for natives, like dogs, love to place allegiance with the higher mentality. One was puzzled that physical need had not run counter to superstition, for despite the plenty of the valley we found no trace of other inhabitants.

“Perhaps, we had been three weeks in the valley, when one night I awoke dripping with perspiration and with a sense of nameless ill. ‘A nightmare,’ thought I, ‘of which the color is lost and only the depression remains.’ It held me broad awake—and then for the first time I fully realized the nauseous reek of the fever-fog. One smelled odors which seemed to emanate from the entrails of the earth. You know, Doctor, the nauseous, charnel stench of rotting insects and vegetation, with the fetid breath of the flower that issues from the mouth of a great, carnivorous plant? You have seen these trap-like flowers, if one may call them such, which grow in the botanical gardens of Demerara? _Br’r’r’rgh!_ And as I lay, hot and cold and clammy, with a heavy weight upon my chest, and thought of how we had lain and breathed that thin effluvium, the vehicle for myriad infusoria and plasmodiæ, this hypochondriac fear became reasonable, and I marveled that we were still alive.

“Vinckers and MacFarlane slept heavily, torpidly, and their breathing was the stertorous gasping of drunkards. We lay in hammocks of plaited grass under a shelter of thatch; the girl’s hammock was beside MacFarlane; and as I lay there, broad awake and still depressed, my lungs half drowned in the dense humor of the valley and my ears ringing from the clamorous insect mob without, I heard a stifled, whimpering cry—the moan of a little child who has been whipped for inheriting nerves. It struck a chill—there was a great deal that was chill in that place of hot fears, cold passions, joyless content and light-hearted sloth—a place where one’s skin crept clammily while the bones were burning.

“‘Who is that?’ I asked, quite loudly, for I did not care if the others awoke.

“There came in answer the whimper of one too frightened to speak. Did you ever, as a child, Doctor, waken with the nightmare, afraid to cry out, afraid to move, tortured by the whimpers wrung out in reasonless terror? It was that kind of a sound.

“‘What is it?’ I asked.

“‘What is the matter with you?’ said I.

“‘And what are you afraid of?’

“She found her voice then and began to tell me, but there my limited knowledge of the dialect failed, for I had no such linguistic scope as to-day, when one dialect more or less is simply a matter of ear and comparison. There was something in her speech of devils and death, and she kept repeating this and I do not know what besides—and then, as I was trying to reassure her as one might a child or a horse, less through the reason than the senses, the soothing of primitive sounds, a startling thing occurred. MacFarlane, whose breathing had become more labored, like that of a man rapidly climbing the ladder of consciousness from deep oblivion, gasped once or twice and awoke with a scream. Vinckers, roused with the echo ringing in his ears, awoke with a muffled shout—a strangled, bleating shout such as might come from a slaughtered animal. MacFarlane, but half awake, screamed again. At this Tomba’s breathless terror found outlet in a shriek that swept out under the low mist, struck the mountain-side and quavered away in countless reverberations.

“Vinckers shouted again and leaped from his hammock.

“‘Be still, you fool!’ I cried, roughly.

“‘Wha—wha—wha——’ quavered MacFarlane.

“‘What’s the matter with you?’ I cried, impatiently. ‘Are you a couple of girls just out of a convent?’

“‘What _is_ the matter?’ asked Vinckers, thickly. Tomba was sobbing hysterically.

“‘MacFarlane wakes up with a nightmare!’ said I, ‘and sets you howling like a maniac.’ My own fright made me irritable.

“‘Odd,’ muttered Vinckers; ‘odd—I had a nightmare, too.’

“‘Ye hag-ridden fule,’ snarled MacFarlane, ‘bawlin’ and yammerin’ like a bull! I had no nightmare mysel’!’ He rolled heavily in his hammock. ‘Fetch me a drink o’ water, lass—water!’ he added, in the vernacular.

“Vinckers sat up in his hammock, let his feet hang over the side and, dropping his head between his heavy shoulders, stared down the valley. There was a moon somewhere behind the mist; this mist, diaphanous, vague, of any depth, yet lifted well above our heads, shone, not white, or colorless, as a vapor should, but a golden yellow; everything seemed golden, was becoming more golden daily the longer we stayed in that place of mockeries, and the reason of this was based on something more solid than a sentiment. What was the name of that drug, Doctor, which when ingested gives the yellow tinge to the vision? Santonica?—yes, perhaps that was it; perhaps its alkaloids were contained in that fatty fruit; perhaps it was only that the moon was one of those ripe, luscious, golden moons one sees on the equator. At any rate, the light came not pale and ghastly, as it should have been, but a luscious golden yellow; and that made it the more unearthly, as it illumined and gave a golden color to these dream objects—the fan-palms, the vague rock-heaps, the vistas between which should have been ethereal, but, because of this succulent, sickly yellow light, were too material; and the aroma, which should have been dank, no doubt, but elusive, was a physical stench. Ach! a witch-fire would have burned in that place like a fat pine torch; one would have scorched one’s hands near a _feu-follet_; there was a ponderosity to this place of ghosts. Can you conceive a _fat_ ghost, Doctor—a fat, _unclean_ ghost, who has clanked around, dragging his ball and chain until the sweat pours down his fat face—a malodorous sweat—a sweat that physically offends while it frightens? Once in my youth, in Leipsic, I went into the anatomical laboratory, and there was on the table a fat subject—a woman—and she still wore some gold-washed rings and had some baubles in her ears of too mean value to appeal to the cupidity of whoever had fetched her there. _Br’r’r’rgh!_ She was pathetic, of course, but I was not old enough to feel that then. I can never forget how much more awful she was to me than were the thin, meager, attenuated subjects who were consistent with the place. It was such a ripe, rotten ghastliness as this that was held in that valley which glimmered away at the foot of the Mountain of Fears.”