The greatest adventure
was one of those brutes that boiled up when I was here before. And the
lookout saw three others."
"How close?"
"About two miles. Of course he couldn't make out exactly what they were
at that distance. But I'll bet they were not floating islands, or ice,
or dead whales. If we sight another I'll steam up close to give you a
whiff if you like."
"For mercy's sake don't," Edith begged. "My cabin is full of the last
one still."
"A mere smell proves nothing," the Doctor remarked dryly.
"Mere smell?" Drake exploded. "Great Scott! What is your idea of
full-blown reek?"
"I mean," the Doctor explained, "the smell may have come from
putrefying whale blubber. The odor is notorious and far reaching I'm
told."
"You bet it is," the Captain asserted. "Twenty years of it have made
me an expert. And I tell you straight that a ripe whale smells like a
bunch of violets beside that beauty we cut through."
Disdaining further argument the Doctor retired to his cabin, and the
others after a last look at the austere grandeur of the icy night
turned in to their warm bunks.
About nine o'clock the next morning the breeze veered and blew from
the icebound land far to the southeast. It was still a mere sigh. The
Captain and Ole anticipated a safe and early arrival at their goal.
That afternoon would bring them to the mouth of the volcanic inlet.
No spot on the oceans of the earth could have been more coldly serene,
more vastly mysterious. The water, almost black in the mass, curled
over in hard glassy waves intensely green as they broke, and far to
the south the airy peaks and pinnacles of huge bergs swam like dreams
athwart the taut horizon. Then the offshore breeze freshening brought
with it the first faint hint of an indescribable pollution.
"Dead whales," the Captain laconically remarked to Lane.
"Undoubtedly," replied the Doctor through his handkerchief.
Edith gazed longingly at the high-powered airplane under its tarpaulins.
"We must have run over another of them," she sighed.
Anderson laughed. "Did you feel a jar, Edith? No? Well, neither did I,
and my sea legs are more sensitive than yours. We're not running over
the rotten brutes; we're running into them."
And with that comforting assurance he swung below to see if the
engineer could crowd on more steam. He was tremendously eager.
Lunch time passed unobserved. Those of the crew who were off duty
followed the example of the passengers and sought seclusion below
decks. But the ever increasing stench found them out like a forgotten
sin. Every mile less between them and the land multiplied their misery
tenfold. To the inexperienced passengers this penetrating torment which
prostrated hardened whalers became unendurable. At last Lane, reaching
his limit, went in search of medical relief.
He had no definite idea of what he wanted, trusting blindly to the
stores for inspiration. And he found it. Presently he returned with
three improvised gas masks of surgical gauze soaked in spirits of
camphor.
"Who ever would have guessed that we should need gas masks in the
Antarctic," he laughed ruefully as he adjusted Drake's. "Edith, get out
your needles and thread and make nosebags for all hands."
Under her father's supervision Edith labored diligently at a new style
of mask designed to filter the tainted air through finely sifted ashes.
If the temperature kept up the ashes might be soaked in deodorizer.
Otherwise the sufferers would have to put up with the lesser efficiency
of the dry material.
Ole, coming in to see how the greenhorns were bearing up, found Edith
at her task. The poor fellow was the sickly hue of cheesy white
phosphorus. Some of the men, he reported, were on the point of mutiny.
"Order them to make masks for themselves," Edith advised. "They can all
sew. Here, take this one as a pattern."
His rotundity drooping from his shoulders in soggy folds, Ole
departed. Although his faith in the vanity of nosebags was slight,
yet in the true scientific spirit he would test any theory before
condemning it as useless. The men, therefore, were soon in the throes
of a sewing bee. And it may be said here that the masks later made
endurable a labor which without them might well have proved impossible.
Land was sighted at two thirty-five. Due south along the horizon
stretched the great barrier cliff of black rock and sheer ice, shadowy
in the distance and unsubstantial as a vision. Anderson joined the
three at the rail and passed Lane his binoculars.
"Look about two points east of south and you will see the opening of
the inlet."
"Ah, I get it. Not very wide, is it?"
"No. Just a twenty mile crack in the Antarctic continent that wasn't
there two years ago. I imagine it narrows down fast after it gets
farther inland."
He turned and left them to go about his business. They stood watching
the distant shadow assume definite outline. Presently Lane hailed the
Captain on the bridge.
"We're getting off our course, aren't we?"
"No. Dead on it."
"But we are going thirty degrees east of the inlet."
"Thirty-three, Doctor. There's an eight mile stony beach over there
that I want to have a look at first. It might give the men fresh seal
meat if there's any way of landing. We have plenty of time to make the
inlet before dark if we decide to go on."
"Oh, all right. You're the captain."
Although their changed course drifted them across the breeze instead of
directly into it, the stench became more terrific. Without their masks
they could not have faced it. Presently the Captain called Lane up on
the bridge and handed him his glasses.
"There's the beach, Doctor. Now if smelling isn't believing perhaps
seeing is. Take a close look at your whales."
Lane almost dropped the Captain's best glasses.
"Good Lord," he gasped, "hundreds and hundreds of them! Full steam
ahead, Captain!"
He ran down the steps to tell the others to keep their eyes open. As
the _Edith_ rapidly neared the long beach they saw at first only a coal
black slope littered with what looked like huge rounded lumps of black
rock. Then a blast from the whistle raised a cloud of scavengers from
the black masses and the truth leapt out before their eyes. The eight
mile beach was a refuse heap of huge oil-soaked carcasses festering in
the sun.
Piled five and six deep where the winter hurricanes had hurled them the
monsters of a forgotten age rotted in the delayed death which should
have been theirs nine million years ago. On that beach there must
have been hundreds of thousands of the gigantic brutes. The smaller
monstrosities wedged and packed between the mountainous carcasses were
without number. The Antarctic cold, their long immersion in the salt
water and their thick coating of oil had but postponed the colossal
corruption which now, at the height of a mild open season, preyed upon
their mountains of rich flesh.
A boat was already being lowered. They sprang in with Ole and the
Captain and were rapidly pulled ashore. The landing on that shelving
beach was easy. They stood up in the oozing slop of oil to gaze as in a
nightmare at the horror of the shambles surrounding them.
"Well," said the Captain, pointing to the sheer black cliffs barring
the beach from the frozen continent, "there's what is left of my oil.
The wind swabbed those rocks with some of it and blew the rest inland
or wasted it all over the ocean from here to Cape Horn. Is there any
money to make out of these carcasses, Doctor? What about blubber?
That big brute over there," he indicated a twisted dragon mailed in
triangular two-foot plates of horn, "looks pretty good to me. He's not
so ripe as some of the others."
"Money be damned!" snapped the Doctor. "This is a bigger thing than the
Standard Oil and Dutch Shell combined. It would be nothing short of an
infamous sacrilege to hack these beautiful things to pieces for the
sake of a few dirty dollars. No sir! I am financing this expedition,
and so long as you are on land you will obey my orders. Aboard ship you
are the master, but only for so long as I choose to employ you. I am
the owner. Now, is that clear?"
"All right, Doctor. Keep your shirt on."
The soft answer mollified the indignant lover of beauty.
"Do as I tell you," he said, "and I'll see that you find your precious
oil. You can go prospecting while the rest of us are discovering our
treasure. And although it isn't in our contract I'll give you gratis
all the very best expert mining and geological advice I can. To begin
now, there is not the ghost of a possibility of striking oil on a beach
like this. For your encouragement, however, I may tell you that I have
already formed a pretty rational theory where to look for the main
reservoir. Your earthquake tapped only a top bubble of it."
"So have I a theory," Ole announced with modest pride.
"Shut up, Ole. I want to hear what the Doctor thinks."
"I was only going to say," Lane continued, "that if my guess is right
all the oil you saw is only a bucketful of the big tank. Unless I'm all
wrong you will stumble into a reservoir of the highest grade oil as
big as the State of California. To settle this thing once for all, I
promise to finance another expedition for oil prospecting if you return
from this a cent poorer than you wish to be. If we don't get your oil
this time we certainly will next. There is no argument about it; I am
positive. Now let us get to something more important and inspect some
of these gorgeous jewels while the light lasts."
They followed him into the thick of the shambles.
"Ole," he continued, "I see you have brought your camera. Get busy.
Begin with the big fellows and be sure you take enough pictures of each
to show clearly the head, neck, position of the legs, pattern of the
scales, and tail--if there is one. Take in the small fry too. They're
just as important as the big fellows."
While Ole industriously clicked away at the mountains before him, the
rest of the party clambered over monsters whose horny armor still
afforded a sure footing, carefully avoiding the inviting slopes of the
colossal three hundred foot lizards. A step on those smooth, bloated
bodies meant a plunge up to the neck in corruption.
From many of the hideous skulls most of the flesh had already
disappeared, leaving only irregular patches of blackened skin above
the arsenals of sabre teeth and around the huge glasslike masses of
lustreless jelly in the eye sockets.
As they passed from monster to monster along that shambles of a beach,
Lane's expression changed gradually from reverent wonder to puzzled
incredulity. His theory was taking shape before his eyes. Yet so
strange was it that he doubted the evidence of tangible proofs. The
thing he had imagined was unbelievable when seen. What, he wondered,
lay behind this veil which his own speculations and those of Drake had
lifted ever so little? Had they guessed the whole truth, or did an
unimagined catastrophe wait for them at the end of their untrodden path
into the unknown? At this first partial confirmation of their theory
his belief in himself faltered. For once he hoped that he had been
misled by reason.
Going up to one huge head he peered into the gaping cavity of the mouth
and began to count the teeth. Their number would either confirm or
destroy Drake's theory and his. Hoping that he had made a mistake he
counted the teeth a second time. He had made no error.
"As I thought," he said, wiping the sweat from his forehead. "These
things are all wrong."
"Is an ugly brute like that ever right?" Anderson asked.
"Always, in nature. At least according to their fossil remains they are
invariably true to type. What would you think of a man with forty-eight
teeth instead of the normal thirty-two?"