To Adams the death of
McKinley and the advent of Roosevelt were not wholly void of
personal emotion, but this was little in comparison with his
depth of wonder at hearing hourly reports from his most intimate
friends, sent to him far within the realm of night, not to please
him, but to correct the faults of the solar system. The
electro-dynamo-social universe worked better than the sun.
No such strange chance had ever happened to a historian before,
and it upset for the moment his whole philosophy of conservative
anarchy. The acceleration was marvellous, and wholly in the lines
of unity. To recover his grasp of chaos, he must look back across
the gulf to Russia, and the gap seemed to have suddenly become an
abyss. Russia was infinitely distant. Yet the nightmare of the
glacial ice-cap still pressed down on him from the hills, in full
vision, and no one could look out on the dusky and oily sea that
lapped these spectral islands without consciousness that only a
day's steaming to the northward would bring him to the
ice-barrier, ready at any moment to advance, which obliged
tourists to stop where Laps and reindeer and Norse fishermen had
stopped so long ago that memory of their very origin was lost.
Adams had never before met a ne plus ultra, and knew not what to
make of it; but he felt at least the emotion of his Norwegian
fishermen ancestors, doubtless numbering hundreds of thousands,
jammed with their faces to the sea, the ice on the north, the
ice-cap of Russian inertia pressing from behind, and the ice a
trifling danger compared with the inertia.
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