The Winds of Chance | Page 7

split and shattered from the play of the elements. High up
toward the crest of one of them rides a glacier--a pallid, weeping
sentinel which stands guard for the great ice-caps beyond. Winter
snows, summer fogs and rains have washed the hillsides clean; they are

leached out and they present a lifeless, forbidding front to travelers. In
many places the granite fragments which still encumber them lie piled
one above another in such titanic chaos as to discourage man's puny
efforts to climb over them. Nevertheless, men have done so, and by the
thousands, by the tens of thousands. On this particular morning an
unending procession of human beings was straining up and over and
through the confusion. They lifted themselves by foot and by hand;
where the slope was steepest they crept on all-fours. They formed an
unbroken, threadlike stream extending from timberline to crest, each
individual being dwarfed to microscopic proportions by the size of his
surroundings. They flowed across the floor of the valley, then slowly,
very slowly, they flowed up its almost perpendicular wall. Now they
were lost to sight; again they reappeared clambering over glacier scars
or toiling up steep, rocky slides; finally they emerged away up under
the arch of the sky.
Looking down from the roof of the pass itself, the scene was doubly
impressive, for the wooded valley lay outstretched clear to the sea, and
out of it came that long, wavering line of ants. They did, indeed, appear
to be ants, those men, as they dragged themselves across the meadow
and up the ascent; they resembled nothing more than a file of those
industrious insects creeping across the bottom and up the sides of a
bath-tub, and the likeness was borne out by the fact that all carried
burdens. That was in truth the marvel of the scene, for every man on
the Chilkoot was bent beneath a back-breaking load.
Three miles down the gulch, where the upward march of the forests had
been halted, there, among scattered outposts of scrubby spruce and
wind-twisted willow, stood a village, a sprawling, formless aggregation
of flimsy tents and green logs known as Sheep Camp. Although it was
a temporary, makeshift town, already it bulked big in the minds of men
from Maine to California, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf, for it was
the last outpost of civilization, and beyond it lay a land of mystery.
Sheep Camp had become famous by reason of the fact that it was
linked with the name of that Via Dolorosa, that summit of despair, the
Chilkoot. Already it had come to stand for the weak man's ultimate
mile-post, the end of many journeys.

The approach from the sea was easy, if twelve miles of boulder and bog,
of swamp and nigger-head, of root and stump, can be called easy under
the best of circumstances; but easy it was as compared with what lay
beyond and above it. Nevertheless, many Argonauts had never
penetrated even thus far, and of those who had, a considerable
proportion had turned back at the giant pit three miles above. One look
at the towering barrier had been enough for them. The Chilkoot was
more than a mountain, more than an obstacle of nature; it was a
Presence, a tremendous and a terrifying Personality which
overshadowed the minds of men and could neither be ignored at the
time nor forgotten later. No wonder, then, that Sheep Camp, which was
a part of the Chilkoot, represented, a sort of acid test; no wonder that
those who had moved their outfits thus far were of the breed the
Northland loves--the stout of heart and of body.
Provisions were cached at frequent intervals all the way up from the sea,
but in the open meadow beneath the thousand-foot wall an immense
supply depot had sprung up. This pocket in the hills had become an
open-air commissary, stocked with every sort of provender and gear.
There were acres of sacks and bundles, of boxes and bales, of lumber
and hardware and perishable stuffs, and all day long men came and
went in relays. One relay staggered up and out of the canon and
dropped its packs, another picked up the bundles and ascended skyward.
Pound by pound, ton by ton, this vast equipment of supplies went
forward, but slowly, oh, so slowly! And at such effort! It was indeed fit
work for ants, for it arrived nowhere and it never ended. Antlike, these
burden- bearers possessed but one idea--to fetch and to carry; they
traveled back and forth along the trail until they wore it into a
bottomless bog, until every rock, every tree, every landmark along it
became hatefully familiar and their eyes grew sick from seeing them.
The character of then--labor and its monotony, even