Chapter 6

A certain romantic glamour attaches to all new countries, but not every man is responsive to it. To the person who finds enjoyment, preoccupation, in studying a ruin or in contemplating glories, triumphs, dramas long dead and gone, old buildings, old cities, and old worlds sound a resistless call. The past is peopled with impressive figures, to be sure; it is a tapestry into which are woven scenes of tremendous significance and events of the greatest moment, and it is quite natural, therefore, that the majority of people should experience greater fascination in studying it than in painting new scenes upon a naked canvas with colors of their own imagining. To them new countries are crude, uninteresting. But there is another type of mind which finds a more absorbing spell in the contemplation of things to come than of things long past; another temperament to which the proven and the tried possess a flat and tasteless flavor. They are restless, anticipative people; they are the ones who blaze trails. To them great cities, established order, the intricate structure of well-settled life, are both monotonous and oppressive; they do not thrive well thereunder. But put them out on the fringe of things, transplant them to wild soil, and the sap runs, they flower rankly.

To Pierce Phillips the new surroundings into which he had been projected were intensely stimulating; they excited him as he had never been excited, and each day he awoke to the sense of new adventures. Life, as he had known it, had always been good--and full, too, for that matter--and he had hugely enjoyed it; nevertheless, it had impressed upon him a sense of his own insignificance. He had been lost, submerged, in it. Here, on the threshold of a new world, he had begun to find himself, and the experience was delightful. By some magic he had been lifted to a common level with every other man, and no one had advantage over him. The momentous future was as much his as theirs and the God of Luck was in charge of things.

There was a fever in the very air he breathed, the food he ate, the water he drank. Life ran at a furious pace and it inspired in him supreme exhilaration to be swept along by it. Over all this new land was a purple haze of mystery--a sense of the Unknown right at hand. The Beyond was beckoning; it was as if great curtains had parted and he beheld vistas of tremendous promise. Keenest of all, perhaps, was his joy at discovering himself.

Appreciation of this miraculous rebirth was fullest when, at rare intervals, he came off the trail and back to Dyea, for then he renewed his touch with that other world, and the contrast became more evident.

Dyea throbbed nowadays beneath a mighty head of steam; it had grown surprisingly and it was intensely alive. Phillips never came back to it without an emotional thrill and a realization of great issues, great undertakings, in process of working out. The knowledge that he had a part in them