rthwick had a
fantastic sense of his own minuteness and remoteness. He thought of the
photograph of a lunar landscape that he had once seen greatly magnified,
and of a fly that happened to traverse the expanse of plaster-like white
between the ranges of extinct volcanoes.

At times the cliffs rose from the river too sheer for the snow to lodge
on; then their rocky faces shone harsh and stern; and sometimes the
springs that gushed from them in summer were frozen in long streams of
ice, like the tears bursting from the source of some Titanic grief.
These monstrous icicles, blearing the visage of the rock, which he
figured as nothing but icicles, affected Northwick with an awe that he
nowhere felt except when his driver slowed his carriole in front of the
great Capes Trinity and Eternity, and silently pointed at them with his
whip. He had no need to name them, the fugitive would have known them in
another planet. It was growing late; the lonely day was waning to the
lonely night. While they halted, the scream of a catamount broke from
the woods skirting the bay between the capes, and repeated itself in the
echo that wandered from depth to depth of the frozen wilderness, and
seemed to die wailing away at the point where it first tore the silence.

Here and there, at long intervals, they passed a point or a recess where
a saw-mill stood, with a few log houses about it, and with signs of
human life in the smoke that rose weakly on the thin, dry air from their
chimneys, or in the figures that appeared at the doorways as the
carriole passed. At the next of these beyond the capes, the driver
proposed to stop and pass the night, and Northwick consented. He felt
worn out by his day's journey; his nerves were spent as if by a lateral
pressure of the lifeless desert he had been travelling through, and by
the stress of his thoughts, the intensity of his reveries. His mind ran
back against his will, and dwelt with his children. By this time, long
before this time, they must be wild with anxiety about him; by this time
their shame must have come to poison their grief. He realized it all,
and he realized that he could not, must not help them. He must not go
back to them if ever he was to live for them again. But at last he asked
why he should live, why he should not die. There was laudanum enough in
that bottle to kill him.

As he walked up from the carriole at the river's edge to the door of the
saw-miller's cabin, he drew the cork o