"

At the sound of my crazed cry the mountain of snow became a pillar,
towering to the clouds, and a wave of golden glory drenched the figure
to its knees! Figure? Yes--for a colossal arm shot across the sky,
then curved back in exquisite grace to a head of awful beauty--a
woman's head, with eyes like the blue lake of heaven--ay, a woman's
splendid form, upright from the sky to the earth, knee-deep in the
sea. The evening clouds drifted across her brow; her shimmering hair
lighted the world beneath with sunset. Then, shading her white brow
with one hand, she bent, and with the other hand dipped in the sea,
she sent a wave rolling at us. Straight out of the horizon it sped--a
ripple that grew to a wave, then to a furious breaker which caught us
up in a whirl of foam, bearing us onward, faster, faster, swiftly
flying through leagues of spray until consciousness ceased and all was
blank.

Yet ere my senses fled I heard again that strange cry--that sweet,
thrilling harmony rushing out over the foaming waters, filling earth
and sky with its soundless vibrations.

And I knew it was the hail of the Spirit of the North warning us back
to life again.

* * * * *

Looking back, now, over the days that passed before we staggered into
the Hudson Bay outpost at Gravel Cove, I am inclined to believe that
neither Dorothy nor I were clothed entirely in our proper minds--or,
if we were, our minds, no doubt, must have been in the same condition
as our clothing. I remember shooting ptarmigan, and that we ate them;
flashes of memory recall the steady downpour of rain through the
endless twilight of shaggy forests; dim days on the foggy tundra,
mud-holes from which the wild ducks rose in thousands; then the
stunted hemlocks, then the forest again. And I do not even recall the
moment when, at last, stumbling into the smooth path left by the
Graham Glacier, we crawled through the mountain-wall, out of the
unknown land, and once more into a world protected by the Lord
Almighty.

A hunting-party of Elbon Indians brought us in to the post, and
everybody was most kind--that I remember, just before going into
several weeks of unpleasant delirium mercifully mitigated with
unconsciousness.

Curiously enough, Professor Van Twiller was not very much battered,
physically, for I had carried her for days, pickaback. But the awful
experience had produced a shock which resulted in a nervous condition
that lasted so