Adventure Magazine Cover — page 94: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

850 pulses of his body fluttered less and less determinedly, and he had frequently to crawl into the sleeping-bag to keep from freezing to death. There he invariably went to sleep—it was almost falling into a swoon, so Overpowering was the sudden unconsciousness. At times he became con- scious that though he had been talking aloud to himself he could not remember what he had said and had been practically delirious. It gave him a hideous twinge of apprehension. The dried fish was eaten to the very last shred, and so the barrier between himself and death was down. Snow-water, while one may acquire a taste for it, is not par- ticularly nourishing, nor is it in the least calculated to allay pain in the stomach. And to attack an able-bodied denizen of an animal kingdom when one’s fingers loosen their hold weakly on the unresisting stem of an empty pipe without any volition on the part of the holder is what might easily. be termed cowardly suicide. To keep track of the days when one is half the time stumbling over the snow in a delirious fever and half the time falling into a stupor of sleep is out of the question, even in a land where the sun keeps more or less respectable hours. But here where the char- iot of Phcebus was bowling along at nearly midnight it was quite impossible. Besides it made no particle of difference. Whether he died at high noon of a Sunday or in the middle of a Wednesday night, he would be dead and his grave-stone would be under him, not over him, and would never bear a date. As the days went by, the desire to keep on the heights of the coast became a mania. He could not contemplate the lower beach without a repugnance that amounted to nausea. To lie down there dead like a rat in a hole seemed far worse than to die on the summit of the great cliffs with the icy wind sweeping free across his face. Ure .° Bed portance that on a certain day, “am*"- when his knees showed a decided tendency to fold like a carpenter’s rule, he sat down on the peak of a miniature penin- sula and wondered how it was going to seem to die there. Behind him lay the ac- cursed wilderness of ice and stone whose chilling breath swept past him like a storm AND so did this frenzy grow in im- Adventure of death. Before him lay the implacable sea. The waves curled and crashed at his feet and he watched them with a dull interest. He had a feeling of being dead already. Surely his body was cold and stiff and help- less enough to suggest it, and if the divorce of life and body was to be so gradual, who could say Just when the final schism came? He felt certain that if some one were to come now to where he lay, half propped up in a sitting posture against a shoulder of rough, black rock, and were to look down at him and comment upon his being dead, he would be in no wise capable of contradiction. - They might even pick him up and carry him to the Bursting Sands and fling him in. And he could be not a whit more dead in such a grave than here with the wind of the Vatna sweeping icily across his face. 3 His eyes closed drowsily. The look of emaciation on his face was enhanced by the dropping of the lids. Eloquent of that ab- solute fatigue for which there is no rest but death, his white, half-frozen flesh seemed but a thin veil spread upon the cold, bony structure of the wornout frame. His half comprehended effort to get into his sleep- ing-bag had been unsuccessful, and it lay partly under him with its edge hanging over the cliff, the white binding of the flap wav- ing a ghoulish farewell in the wind of the Vatna Jokull. - All of the hundred threads that bound him to the earth were cut asunder, except one frail filament that Atropos seemed dis- posed to watch a bit longer as it spun out like the gossamer silk of a spider’s weaving, until perhaps it fell apart of its own wasting weight. The heart that fluttered its three feeble beats to the second could hardly have been felt by a hand on his breast. And the breath that he drew so painfully seemed not to reach his throat indeed be- fore it was as painfully and hurriedly ex- pelled. It made a sound as of the filing of a bar of iron, a determined rapid sound as if there were grave need of haste. When the last stroke of the file sounded and the bar fell apart, how very silent everything would be! Only the sound made by the glacier in the sunlight, the whistle of the wind, and the lonely cry of the eiders would break that silence, and yet leave it ever unbroken. Once again the lids of his eyes fluttered open. The sun was just coming up over COmiclbook (©