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Page 54
"Not many weeks after the rescue of Lilania, she and Pym were married
according to the usual form of Hili-li. The wedding ceremony was a very
quiet one. I have thought that perhaps the customs of Hili-li might
account for the lack of any festivity; and, again, that the Ahpilus
incident may have precluded all social gaiety at such a time, the
injured man being still in a precarious condition."
Here Bainbridge paused for a moment, took a turn or two across the
floor, relit the long-neglected cigar that he held in his fingers,
seated himself, and continued:
The SEVENTEENTH Chapter
It is pleasant to dwell on this period in the life of young Pym. We
think of his home on the far-away island of Nantucket, with the loving
mother, the proud father, the doting old grandfather--all cast aside,
and probably forever, by the momentary folly of a boy; then of his
connection with the ship-mutiny--unquestionably one of the most horrible
positions in which it is ever the fate of man to stand; the death of his
friend and his friend's father; the shipwreck, and the long, lonely days
of watching, in hunger and thirst, for a sail; the final loss of all
companions save a gorilla-like half-breed, whose animal instinct of love
and fidelity fell about the poor boy like a protecting garment. Then
comes this bright spot in his life away in Hili-liland, like a momentary
rift in the clouds of a stormy day. For Pym the sun shone with a
heavenly effulgence, whilst the obstructions of a dire destiny were for
a time removed; but when again the clouds closed between him and the
brightness of existence, they closed forevermore. Yet this mere boy,
into whose life hardship and danger had introduced more than the
experience of most old men, enjoyed, too, what many very aged men never
have possessed--what Alexander the Great never possessed--that of which
wealth or other source of power seems actually to deprive many men. He
enjoyed what was worth more than all that ambition backed by wealth and
power can give--that is, the faithful love of a beautiful woman, loved
truly in return. This boy was loved by one who was capable with her
witching loveliness of satisfying every desire, enthralling the
imagination, rousing in the heart that passion which inspires the mind
to regions where it throbs in harmony with the Divine, and touches--as
might some dying desert-waif with his parched lips a cooling
fountain--the very source of love itself. But the most of human
love--how debased and debasing, how vile! God, for purposes of His own,
links for mankind the Aphroditic passion to the love Divine. The two are
separable, and man assuredly separates them. True love may be witnessed
as low in the scale of life, and as high, as consciousness is found. We
find it in the heart of the faithful animal that dies on a loved
master's grave, howling in anguish its life away. And we find it in the
purity of woman's heart, where it rests ready for the contact that is to
ignite it into illumination forever. Woman herself is divine. Man has
placed her everywhere, sometimes behind the barred doors of a harem,
sometimes on the throne of empire; but he has not blotted out the
divine.
"With Pym it may not have been a love that would have carried him safely
into and through a beatific old age--or it may have been; we choose to
think that it was a growth that would have bloomed perennially. It was,
I think, such a love as every man of imagination feels to be a mountain
of wealth beside which all else is dwarfed to utter nothingness--a
concretion from the endless and eternal ocean of love--a glimpse into
that paradise where exists the Almighty, who is Love.
"I should judge from what Peters knows well enough, but which I gleaned
by patient toil from that wicked though unsophisticated old segment of
intelligence, that these two young persons had a most delightful, though
extremely peculiar, wedding journey. The months had flown, until it was
again December--the antarctic midsummer month, in which, and the greater
part of January, there is no night.
"At this, the delightful season of the antarctic year, a beautiful
yacht-like vessel was equipped; and with Peters as captain, and four men
under his orders; Lilama, and a lady friend, with two maids; and Pym,
accompanied by his now close friend, Diregus, the journey began.
"To Peters' mind, the most remarkable part of this pleasure excursion,
was the extreme differences in climatic conditions which the party
experienced within the range of a single day's, or even a single hour's
travel. In December and January, Hili-li was so warm as scarcely to be
habitable--certainly not comfortably habitable for natives of the
central temperate zone of North America; yet at this same period of
time, there was a small island on the meridian of Hili-li, and only
thirty miles from the large surface-crater, on which the temperature was
about 65� F. There was, just across 'The Mountain'--as the Hili-lites
frequently spoke of the rings of mountain-ranges surrounding the central
crater--an island of somewhat greater area, upon which ice was at all
times to be found at a few feet above sea-level, and which, during eight
months of the year, was so cold that no animal life could have existed
upon it. Then, at variable distances from the crater, and in different
directions, islands were to be found of almost any desired temperature.
The wealthier Hili-lites owned summer residences on these out-lying
islands, situated at sailing distances varying from an hour to six
hours' travel from Hili-li.
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