’But he laughed, for he was strong of life, and gave the dogs that were left little grub till we cut them from the harnesses one by one and fed them to their mates.  We would go home light, he said, traveling and eating from cache to cache, with neither dogs nor sleds; which was true, for our grub was very short, and the last dog died in the traces the night we came to the gold and the bones and the curses of men.

’To reach that place—­and the map spoke true—­in the heart of the great mountains, we cut ice steps against the wall of a divide.  One looked for a valley beyond, but there was no valley; the snow spread away, level as the great harvest plains, and here and there about us mighty mountains shoved their white heads among the stars.  And midway on that strange plain which should have been a valley the earth and the snow fell away, straight down toward the heart of the world.

’Had we not been sailormen our heads would have swung round with the sight, but we stood on the dizzy edge that we might see a way to get down.  And on one side, and one side only, the wall had fallen away till it was like the slope of the decks in a topsail breeze.  I do not know why this thing should be so, but it was so.  “It is the mouth of hell,” he said; “let us go down.”  And we went down.

’And on the bottom there was a cabin, built by some man, of logs which he had cast down from above.  It was a very old cabin, for men had died there alone at different times, and on pieces of birch bark which were there we read their last words and their curses.

’One had died of scurvy; another’s partner had robbed him of his last grub and powder and stolen away; a third had been mauled by a baldface grizzly; a fourth had hunted for game and starved—­and so it went, and they had been loath to leave the gold, and had died by the side of it in one way or another.  And the worthless gold they had gathered yellowed the floor of the cabin like in a dream.

’But his soul was steady, and his head clear, this man I had led thus far.  “We have nothing to eat,” he said, “and we will only look upon this gold, and see whence it comes and how much there be.  Then we will go away quick, before it gets into our eyes and steals away our judgment.  And in this way we may return in the end, with more grub, and possess it all.”  So we looked upon the great vein, which cut the wall of the pit as a true vein should, and we measured it, and traced it from above and below, and drove the stakes of the claims and blazed the trees in token of our rights.  Then, our knees shaking with lack of food, and a sickness in our bellies, and our hearts chugging close to our mouths, we climbed the mighty wall for the last time and turned our faces to the back trip.