mystery
as in the old chronicles which tell of these people? Besides the
Sagas there are the voyages of long-ago-forgotten navigators--Arthur
himself, the Venetian brothers Nicolo and Antonio Zeni, King Zichmni,
divers Frisian fishermen. These old records, coffee-colored with
age and frail as skeleton leaves, are yet to be found in certain
libraries, and surely would tempt any one with a soul above
newspapers. In them you shall hear how these voyagers, in their poor
barkentines of from ten to two hundred tons, entered into this region
of enormous tides, of floating hordes of mountainous icebergs, of
flaming signs in the sky--into all the horrors, in fact, of an
Arctic winter and night, darkened still deeper for them by nameless
superstitious terrors. They went down to these deeps in very much the
temper with which a living man now-a-days would adventure into hell.
The icy peaks of the far-off land they knew were glittering silver,
and the sea was full of malignant spirits which guarded it. A
mountain-magnet lay hid under the sea, dragging the ships down to it
(as late, indeed, as 1830 skilled Danish navigators declared that they
felt the stress from it, and fled in terror): the unnatural tides were
the breathing of angry Demigorgon. There were, however, other sights
and sounds not to be explained in even this reasonable fashion. On a
fair day and a calm sea panic would seize the soul of every man on
board, and the ship would turn and beat homeward, "as one who knows a
frightful fiend doth follow him behind."

It is the mystery of the lost colony, however, which ought to be
opened by some competent hand. In 1406, Queen Margaret, it will be
remembered, laid an interdict upon trade with them: for two centuries
afterward not even a passing barkentine touched upon the Greenland
shore. At the end of that time, when explorers were sent from the
civilized world in search of the long-forgotten colonists, they
had utterly vanished. There, to this day, are their dwellings and
churches, solidly built of stone in an architectural style which Graah
fifty years ago described as simple and elegant: there are even the
ruins of the monastery which the Zeni brothers declare was heated by
a magical hot sulphurous spring, the waters of which were conveyed
through the building by pipes. But the people had absolutely
disappeared. Not even a bit of pottery, a grave or a bone was left;
which last is a noteworthy circumstance, as portions of t