Mystery Land
It was a brilliant Arctic morning. The sun glittered on the white ice-pack, the placid grey sea and the battered hull of the Peter Saul. I was ready for my first reconnaissance flight northward. Doctor John Carrul, chief of the expedition, called down to me from the rail of the schooner.
"Don't go too far the first trip, Masters. And return at once if the weather grows threatening."
"There won't be any storms for days," I replied confidently. "I know Arctic weather."
"You'd better leave that rune key with me," Dubman shrilled. "I'd hate to lose it if you cracked up."
During the past few days, the golden cylinder hadn't been out of my thoughts. Whatever menacing force radiated from the key, it was still far beyond my science. I had tested it with electroscopes, but they registered nothing. Yet it did radiate some disturbing force. It was the same with the mental command that fought the one which tried to make me throw away the key. Apparently supernatural or not, it had to have some rational, mundane explanation.
My obsession with the mystery had made me read Dubman's books on old Norse myths. The Aesir, said the legends, inhabited the fabled city of Asgard, which was separated from the land of Midgard by a deep gulf that was spanned by a wonderful rainbow bridge. All around Midgard lay the frozen, lifeless wastes of Niffleheim.
In the great hall Valhalla reigned Odin, king of the Aesir, and his wife Frigga. And in other castles dwelt the other gods and goddesses. Once Loki had been of the Aesir, till he turned traitor and was prisoned with his two monstrous pets, the wolf Fenris and the Midgard serpent Iormungandr.
I read about the Jotuns — the giants who lived in dark Jotunheim and incessantly battled the Aesir. Then there were the dwarfs of Earth, the Alfings who dwelt in subterranean Alfheim. Hel, the wicked death-goddess whose dreaded hall was near the dark city of the Jotuns. Muspelheim, the fiery realm beneath Midgard.
One thing in these legends impressed me. They depicted the Aesir as mortal beings who possessed the secret of eternal youth in common with the giants and dwarfs. None of them grew old, but any of them could be slain. If Loki were released, bringing about Ragnarok — the twilight of the gods — the Aesir would perish.
As I delved deeper into the books of Rydberg, Anderson and Du Chaillu, I learned that ethnologists thought there was some real basis to these legends. They believed the Aesir had been real people with remarkable powers. All my reading had only intensified my interest in the enigmatic rune key from the sea. I knew it bordered on superstition, but I felt that if I were away from the influence of others, the damned thing might actually get coherent.
"I'll be back by four o'clock," I said. "It won't take me long to map a sled route."
"Be sure you take no chances," Dr. Carrul called anxiously.
Streaking across the ice, the rocket plane roared into the chill air. I circled above the schooner, climbed higher, and then headed northward across the ice-pack. Within ten minutes, I was flying over the endless expanse of the frozen Arctic Ocean, warm and snug in the oxygen-filled cabin.
A vast white plain, glittering like diamonds in the sunlight, the sea ice had jammed and split, and there were long leads of open water. My mission was to chart the easiest route toward the Pole, so the sleds would lose no time detouring around leads or scrambling over ridges. Once a weather observation camp was established, I would carry in supplies in the plane.
Hundreds of thousands of square miles of the enormous sea of ice had never been seen by man. Earth's last real home of mystery was dazzlingly beautiful — but it was murderous, terrifying, sinister…
Absorbed in keeping the plane on its course and making a map of the ice below, my sense of time was temporarily paralyzed. The rocket motor roared tirelessly, and the ice unrolled endlessly below. When my ship lurched sharply, I abruptly realized that the wind was suddenly rising. I looked around, startled. A huge dark wall was rising across the southern horizon.
"Damn it, I'll never call myself a weather prophet again," I swore. "There just couldn't be any storm. But there it is!"
I banked around sharply and flew southward, fighting to rise above the fury. But the higher I climbed, the higher the black, boiling wall of the storm seemed to rise. I knew I was caught.
"Two minutes to live," I gritted. "It'll be a fast death—"
Driving before it a cloud of stinging snow, the storm smacked my plane like a giant hand. Stunned by the impact, deafened, I swung the nose around and let the wind sweep the plane northward. There was no hope of fighting. I could only run before the gale until its fury subsided. The whole sky was dark and raging around me, filled with screaming wind and snow. Gripping the firing wheel, I battled to keep the reeling plane in the air.
But why did the rune key inside my shirt seem to throb with frantic warning? Why did that alien voice in my mind seem eager and exultant? Why did I feel there was something purposeful about this gale's direction? The storm had come up suddenly out of a clear sky as soon as my plane was well in the air. Now it was hurling me straight in one direction.
The imminent peril of death grew less unnerving than the mounting suspicion that there was something deliberate about the storm. The warning force throbbing from the rune key, and the wildly exultant alien voice in my brain, combined to demoralize me.
After nearly six hours of ceaseless storm-driven flight, I received the greatest shock. Peering ahead through the frosted cabin windows, I realized suddenly that there was a great area dead ahead — which I could not see!
"It can't be real!" I gasped. "A colossal blind spot—"
My vision seemed to slide around that vast area. I could see the ice-pack beyond it, scores of miles away. I could see the ice on either side of it. But the area itself just didn't register.
"Some trick of refraction, perhaps due to the terrestrial magnetic currents that are strong here," I muttered. "Maybe it's connected with the mystery of the aurora."
My scientific reasoning didn't quiet my nerves. For the storm that bore me on was carrying me straight toward that huge blind spot. When I was almost to the edge of the enigmatic area my vision seemed to slide away to either side, almost at right angles. If this was refraction, it was a type that was completely unknown to science.
My storm-tossed plane hurtled with reckless speed toward the edge of the vast blind spot; I could see nothing whatever ahead. Everything seemed crazily twisted out of focus, distorted by that weird wall.
Abruptly the gale flung my reeling plane directly through the fantastic wall that defied my vision — and I was inside the blind spot! But now I could not see outside it.
"This — this is impossible!" I gasped with startled terror.
I could see nothing but the interior, a great space of tossing ocean, curving ominously to every sinister horizon. Black waves, black clouds … Suddenly I gasped in amazement. Far ahead loomed a long, high mass of forbidding, dark land.
The storm still howled with all its original fury, carrying me dangerously low over the foam-fanged waves toward the distant land. Through the scudding snow, I detected a faint greenish radiance. But realization of my immediate peril swept away my demoralization. I could not land in that vicious sea. Yet neither could I climb again in that gale.
The land I had glimpsed was now a mile ahead of me, its frowning eastern cliffs stretching right across my course. The gray precipices were hundreds of feet high. Above them, the land ran back into dark forests and shaggy wooded hills where no landing was possible. Then I saw a small beach strewn with boulders. Pure desperation made me head the plane toward it.
Over the boiling white hell of breakers I shot. My wheels touched the beach. Before I could brake with the forward jets, the port window smashed against a projecting boulder. But that was the only damage when I stopped out of reach of the waves.
I shut off the rocket motor and stumbled out of the ship. My knees were trembling with the reaction of prolonged tenseness. But the land and sea inside the incredible blind spot made me forget my exhaustion.
The air was keenly cold. It was the cold of an ordinary northern spring, though, not the bitter polar chill it should have been. The sky was dark with clouds, fleeing before the gale. The boom of raging surf and keen of wailing winds were loud in my ears. Stranger even than the comparative warmth was the faint green radiance that seemed to pervade the air. An eldritch glow that could barely be seen, it seemed to stream upward from the ground. It was oddly exhilarating.
"Might be gamma radiation from some unknown source," I reasoned. "That may account for the refraction that makes this whole area a blind spot. I wish I had instruments here to check. Hope it doesn't have the usual effects of gamma radiation on human tissue. But it seems invigorating."
Excitement began to rise in me. I had found a hidden land of strange warmth completely unknown to civilization, here in the polar wastes. Its strange trick of refraction had defied discovery until now. No scientist could have been dropped in that blind spot without feeling the urge to explore. Waiting for the storm to die down, flying out of the blind area and getting back to the ship for a regular exploration party would have been wiser. But like every other man, I had the desire to be first in an unknown land.
I moored the plane between two boulders and removed my flying togs to don regulation exploring clothes for Arctic weather. With a pack of food pellets and blankets on my back, I began to climb the jagged, craggy wall.
Gasping for breath, I reached the rim of the lofty cliffs. Cold sea winds buffeted me, and the boom of bursting breakers came muffledly from below. Harshly screaming sea-gulls soared and circled around me.
To my right lay the edge of the cliffs. To my left, a strip of heather ended in a forest of fir trees, bending in the wind. Beyond the dark fir forest, shaggy, wooded hills rose steeply. Toward the south lay the greater part of the land, rising into higher forested hills. It was a wild northern landscape, bleak, harsh, inhospitable. Yet somehow I relished being alone among screaming winds and gulls, and booming surf, and groaning trees.
I stared at the towering little island I had glimpsed. Its cliffs rose sheer from the green sea for a thousand feet. Its flat top was on a level with the mainland, and separated from it only by a narrow, deep chasm through which the ocean surged.
But upon the island itself rose massed gray towers — buildings! Great castles stood out boldly against the gray, tossing sky, grouped into an amazing city on the small plateau. From the island to the mainland sprang the arch of a stupendous bridge. The flying bow of stone soared up and out for hundreds of feet. Painted in brilliant red and blue and yellow, it gleamed like a fixed rainbow.
A rainbow bridge, leading to the high eyrie of great gray castles! Into my mind rushed the stupefying memory of the legends I had read so recently — Asgard, the fabled city of the Norse gods — the rainbow bridge that connected their abode with Midgard.
Was I looking upon the city of the Aesir? Impossible! Yet this place was real…