Well, I am no fine writer. I sat down to tell a plain, unvarnished
tale, and I will not let the weird horror of that ride get into my pen.
We careened forward, I and those lost Martians, until pretty near on
midnight, by which time the great light-giving planets were up, and never
a chance did Fate give me all that time of parting company with them.
About midnight we were right into the region of snow and ice, not the
actual polar region of the planet, as I afterwards guessed, but one
of those long outliers which follow the course of the broad waterways
almost into fertile regions, and the cold, though intense, was somewhat
modified by the complete stillness of the air.

It was just then that I began to be aware of a low, rumbling sound ahead,
increasing steadily until there could not be any doubt the journey
was nearly over and we were approaching those great falls An had told
me of, over which the dead tumble to perpetual oblivion. There was
no opportunity for action, and, luckily, little time for thought.
I remember clapping my hand to my heart as I muttered an imperfect
prayer, and laughing a little as I felt in my pocket, between it and that
organ, an envelope containing some corn-plaster and a packet of unpaid
tailors' bills. Then I pulled out that locket with poor forgotten Polly's
photograph, and while I was still kissing it fervently, and the dead girl
on my right was jealously nudging my canoe with the corner of her raft, we
plunged into a narrow gully as black as hell, shot round a sharp corner at
a tremendous pace, and the moment afterwards entered a lake in the midst
of an unbroken amphitheatre of cliffs gleaming in soft light all round.

Even to this moment I can recall the blue shine of those terrible ice
crags framing the weird picture in on every hand, and the strange effect
upon my mind as we passed out of the darkness of the gully down which
we had come into the sepulchral radiance of that place. But though it