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                         THE MOUNTAIN OF FEARS




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                          BY HENRY C. ROWLAND

                             --------------

                              To Windward

                             THIRD EDITION

“Crisp and strong, full of breeziness and virile humanity.”—Brooklyn
Eagle.

“A capital story told with a spirit and go that are irresistible. A
strong and dramatic novel. Shows literary genius.”—Newark Advertiser.

                             --------------

                             The Wanderers

                             THIRD EDITION

“A little breathless toward the end, the reader enjoys every moment
spent with Brian Kinard, the roving son of an Irish earl.”—Chicago
Record-Herald.

“Full of complications and surprises which hold the reader’s attention
to the end. An unusually good story of actual life at sea.”—Boston
Transcript.

                             --------------

                  Each with frontispiece in colors, by
                           Ch. Weber-Ditzler.

                           12mo. Cloth. $1.50

                             --------------

                         A. S. BARNES & COMPANY




------------------------------------------------------------------------


  [Illustration: “I see that you go in for heads a bit yourself,” said
Lynch.––Page 99]


------------------------------------------------------------------------






                              The Mountain
                                of Fears

                                   By

                            Henry C. Rowland

                Author of “The Wanderers”, “To Windward”
                           and “Sea Scamps”.

                              Illustrated

                    [Illustration: Publisher’s Logo]




                                New York

                           A. S. Barnes & Co.

                                  1905




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                          COPYRIGHT, 1905, BY
                           A. S. BARNES & CO.

                        Published October, 1905




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                                   TO
                             DOCTOR LEYDEN

                   WHOSE ILLUMINATING PERSONALITY
                   AND STRANGE EXPERIENCES I HAVE
                   VENTURED TO INTERPRET IN THE
                   HOPE THAT WHEN HE RETURNS FROM
                   HIS QUEST IN THE “FORBIDDEN LAND”
                   HE WILL PARDON MY PRESUMPTION.




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                                CONTENTS

                                -------


                     THE MOUNTAIN OF FEARS        1
                     OIL AND WATER               46
                     THE SHEARS OF ATROPOS       80
                     ROSENTHAL THE JEW          118
                     TWO SAVAGES                158
                     TWO GENTLEMEN              199
                     THE BAMBOULA               245
                     INTO THE DARK              270




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                         THE MOUNTAIN OF FEARS




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                         THE MOUNTAIN OF FEARS


“DOCTOR,” said my shipmate, Dr. Leyden, “have you ever made any especial
study of nervous diseases—_central_ nervous diseases—morbid conditions
resulting from a derangement of the central cells?”

I told him that I had done only such work in this branch as a general
practice would require, but that I had observed some few cases of
especial interest during a military surgical service in the East, and
proceeded to cite one or two instances of mental vagaries resulting from
gunshot wounds in the head.

Leyden leaned both elbows on the taffrail and listened restlessly. Our
little ship swashed through the short sling of the Spanish Main, the
Pole star gleaming ahead, the Southern Cross blazing astern, and all
about the white, flashing crests of the phosphorescent sea. Usually
Leyden was a good listener, but this night he seemed impatient, 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?”

“Possibly——”

“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 <DW72>s of the _Malang-o-mor_—the ‘Mountain of Fears’—and we
tap-tap-tapped on its <DW72>s 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 <DW72> 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 <DW72> 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 <DW72>.

“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 <DW72>.

“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 <DW72> 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.

“‘It is Tomba.’

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

“‘I am afraid.’

“‘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,
