His imagination ran riot, till it became to him a fetish.  Sometimes he followed the path it pointed across the dismal dominions, and allowed his soul to become saturated with the Fear.  He dwelt upon the unseen and the unknown till the burden of eternity appeared to be crushing him.  Everything in the Northland had that crushing effect—­the absence of life and motion; the darkness; the infinite peace of the brooding land; the ghastly silence, which made the echo of each heartbeat a sacrilege; the solemn forest which seemed to guard an awful, inexpressible something, which neither word nor thought could compass.

The world he had so recently left, with its busy nations and great enterprises, seemed very far away.  Recollections occasionally obtruded—­recollections of marts and galleries and crowded thoroughfares, of evening dress and social functions, of good men and dear women he had known—­but they were dim memories of a life he had lived long centuries agone, on some other planet.  This phantasm was the Reality.  Standing beneath the wind-vane, his eyes fixed on the polar skies, he could not bring himself to realize that the Southland really existed, that at that very moment it was a-roar with life and action.

There was no Southland, no men being born of women, no giving and taking in marriage.

Beyond his bleak skyline there stretched vast solitudes, and beyond these still vaster solitudes.

There were no lands of sunshine, heavy with the perfume of flowers.  Such things were only old dreams of paradise.  The sunlands of the West and the spicelands of the East, the smiling Arcadias and blissful Islands of the Blest—­ha! ha!  His laughter split the void and shocked him with its unwonted sound.  There was no sun.

This was the Universe, dead and cold and dark, and he its only citizen.  Weatherbee?  At such moments Weatherbee did not count.  He was a Caliban, a monstrous phantom, fettered to him for untold ages, the penalty of some forgotten crime.

He lived with Death among the dead, emasculated by the sense of his own insignificance, crushed by the passive mastery of the slumbering ages.  The magnitude of all things appalled him.  Everything partook of the superlative save himself—­the perfect cessation of wind and motion, the immensity of the snow-covered wildness, the height of the sky and the depth of the silence.  That wind-vane—­if it would only move.  If a thunderbolt would fall, or the forest flare up in flame.

The rolling up of the heavens as a scroll, the crash of Doom—­anything, anything!  But no, nothing moved; the Silence crowded in, and the Fear of the North laid icy fingers on his heart.

Once, like another Crusoe, by the edge of the river he came upon a track—­the faint tracery of a snowshoe rabbit on the delicate snow-crust.  It was a revelation.

There was life in the Northland.  He would follow it, look upon it, gloat over it.