"Why, of course," he said, "you ought. I really think you _ought_."

"I'll go to-morrow," I answered.




CHAPTER ELEVEN


I couldn't get to sleep that night, but lay and tossed, lit my candle
and read, and so on, for ever and ever--for an eternity. I was
confoundedly excited; there were a hundred things to be thought about;
clamouring to be thought about; out-clamouring the re-current chimes of
some near clock. I began to read the article by Radet in the _Revue
Rouge_--the one I had bought of the old woman in the kiosque. It upset
me a good deal--that article. It gave away the whole Greenland show so
completely that the ecstatic bosh I had just despatched to the _Hour_
seemed impossible. I suppose the good Radet had his axe to grind--just
as I had had to grind the State Founder's, but Radet's axe didn't show.
I was reading about an inland valley, a broad, shadowy, grey thing;
immensely broad, immensely shadowy, winding away between immense,
half-invisible mountains into the silence of an unknown country. A
little band of men, microscopic figures in that immensity, in those
mists, crept slowly up it. A man among them was speaking; I seemed to
hear his voice, low, monotonous, overpowered by the wan light and the
silence and the vastness.

And how well it was done--how the man could write; how skilfully he made
his points. There was no slosh about it, no sentiment. The touch was