C Ihe Ladies c cu. V'VVAN - History and Classics, Department of

101(tii Check to ourPro essThat night was a very short one, for we had not settled down to sleepuntil 2 and at 8 we crawled out, into a busy world of mosquitoes, to waken ourguides. It had rained heavily during the night, the sky was an unrelieved gray andat intervals it was still raining as we breakfasted on fried bacon, bread and jam,and black tea. We ate standing in the smoke of the bonfire. A green range ofmountains seemed to slope up from a point immediately ahead into the melancholysky, but in reality it was only the precursor of that height of land which heldthe source of the Rat River. As we munched our bacon, scraping away with forksthe mosquitoes that had settled on the fat and become embedded in it, we lookedaround for some sign of the tragic event that gave Destruction City its name.In the 18g8 gold rush, certain pioneers tried to reach the Klondike via the RatRiver. Most of them failed and then, exhausted by their struggles with thecurrent, retraced their steps to this place where they camped in despair and satdown to face their ruined hopes. They were broken men, having staked their allon the Klondike venture. There was no stone monument set up to commemoratethis tragedy; all that misery, disappointment and despair had vanished. Sooneror later, nature will always cover up the traces of broken human hearts andhuman lives.It took us a couple of hours to breakfast, strike camp and get away from that sadplace and then, for a few hundred yards only, we had the exhilarating experienceof being paddled upriver by our guides. Our easeful moments, however, werenumbered and after the third or fourth bend Lazarus told us in his brokenEnglish that he must put us ashore. We soon discovered why. From now onwards