The greatest adventure
"As a practical seaman," said the Captain, "I should advise him to
go to a dentist and have sixteen pulled. It would save him a lot of
toothache on the high seas."
"That wouldn't work on this fellow. It would take a steam shovel to dig
out his eight superfluous molars."
"Perhaps," Drake suggested hopefully, "this one is a freak. Try
another. There are plenty lying about."
"Yes, but I don't see one of the same species. That's another curious
thing about all this. There are not more than a dozen specimens of any
one kind, I should judge, in the whole stew."
"Isn't that one over there the same sort as this?" Edith asked,
pointing to a huger brute that resembled the monster of too many teeth.
The Doctor surveyed its frozen death agony. "I believe you are right,"
he said. "Let's count his teeth."
The count checked. Again the monster had eight molars in excess of what
nature should have given him.
"That settles it," the Doctor muttered, sitting down on the treacherous
tail of a defunct reptile.
"Oh see what a mess you are in!" Edith cried. "Stand up. You can't come
back to the ship till you've burned your clothes."
"Clothes don't matter in a crisis like this. Science is rotting to its
foundations."
"That's no reason why you should sit down in the basement," Edith
retorted. Her mask had slipped, and naturally she was inclined to be
severe.
"If this is science," Drake remarked, "I agree. It's putrid from cellar
to attic."
"Don't play the fool. If you have guessed as much as I think you have,
you should be able to appreciate what this may mean. This is serious.
Not one of these creatures, I'll wager, is all that it should be.
Each at first glance is like its supposed type. When you look at them
closely and begin to apply scientific tests you find they are all
either deformities or new species. Off hand one would say that nature
had been practising and had forgotten her art."
"That," said Drake, "isn't your theory, however. Is it?"
"No," the Doctor admitted. "But the facts, all theories aside, can
be ascertained either to establish or to refute my contention that
these things are not as nature should have made them. Now here is a
crucial test. See that blue brute like a potbellied crocodile over
there? No, not the one with the saw ridge of three-foot spines down
its back, but the one with the red bags hanging down from its jowls.
All right. According to all we know from fossil anatomy that beast was
comparatively harmless. Its only weapons were its teeth and its claws.
I don't know what those obscene looking pouches mean--they don't show
in any fossil remains yet found. Nor do I know whether red is their
natural color, or whether it is due to faster decay owing to all the
oil having dripped down off them. So much for its supposed identity.
"Now I suspect," he continued, "from the shape of that beast's head and
snout that it was venomous when alive. The true animal, the one in the
fossil beds was as innocuous as a tame worm. I'm going over to see.
If that brute has poison glands above its evil fangs the question is
settled. It is some reptile utterly unknown to science."
Accompanying him to the grinning head they watched while he inspected
the rows of yellowish knives bared by the upward snarl of the dry,
scaled lips. The great cavern of the mouth gaped open, revealing
a single five-foot row of teeth on each side of the gums. Having
carefully selected the fang for his test, Lane picked up the largest
stone he could heft and hurled it with all his strength at the point.
The stone rebounded like a pebble from a brick wall.
"Here, Ole!" the Captain shouted. "Come and play hand-ball."
Ole with his knotted strength was more successful. Behind his
thirty-pound pebble he put the full barrel of his strength. The fang
was jarred. The deep musical boom which it emitted died gradually away
and Ole took another shot. At the fifth impact the fang was loose. The
sixth, aimed at the base, sent it crashing out of the monster's head.
Lane peered up in the gaping cavity.
"There's a sac of something up there," he said, "but it may only be a
cushion of fat. Ole, will you fetch an oar from the boat?"
When the oar arrived Lane thrust the blade far up the cavity and
prodded hard. The sac broke, and a heavy oily green liquid oozed down
like cold pitch on the decaying remnants of the reptile's tongue.
"I want some of that," the Doctor exclaimed, hastily emptying the
brandy from his pocket flask. "Ole, scoop up a ladleful on the end of
the oar. I'll hold the flask; you let the stuff pour in like molasses."
"What is the decision?" Drake asked curiously, as the Doctor carefully
tucked away his pint of supposed venom.
"We can't tell until this stuff is tried on some living creature.
Nevertheless I am willing to stake my reputation on the outcome. That
brute, when alive, was as venomous as a regiment of rattlesnakes."
"Then it is like no prehistoric monster known to science?"
"As different as a hen is from a hippopotamus. And so, I am willing
to wager, is every other creature that we have seen on this nightmare
of a beach. They are all new. For one thing the majority of them are
enormously bigger and bulkier than they should be. That in itself,
however, is not conclusive. It would be possible for such a state of
affairs to exist in, say, a herd of cattle. If all suffered from the
same disease of certain glands--those regulating growth--they might all
be enormous giants and yet not unnatural. These are abnormal in a far
more radical way."
"But," Edith protested, "several of them look very much like the
restorations in some of your books on fossils."
"That is the strangest part of all this unearthly dream. They are like
bad copies, botched imitations if you like, of those huge brutes whose
bones we chisel out of the rocks from Wyoming to Patagonia. Nature
must have been drunk, drugged or asleep when she allowed these aborted
beasts to mature. Every last one of them is a freak. It is just like
looking at a shambles of all the deformities of a nation."
"The whole thing is inexpressibly hideous and depressing," Edith
shivered. "And these masks are becoming useless."
"Hideous? Depressing? Why this is Heaven!"
"Then I wish I were in hell," the mate remarked.
"Hadn't we better be getting back to the ship, Doctor? We shan't want
to plough our way through this in the dark."
"Perhaps we had," the Doctor reluctantly admitted, feeling like Adam
when the angel showed him the back door of paradise. "How many pictures
did you get, Ole?"
"Twenty dozen."
"You look it," said Drake with a glance at Ole's bulging sweater. "Are
you always half loaded or is part of it natural?"
"Pinhead," said Ole under his breath, beginning to pull on his oar.
Drake, who had been unusually taciturn on the beach expressed himself
before reaching the ship.
"Doctor," he said, "your conclusion that all those rotten brutes are
only half natural confirms my theory of the inscriptions."
"Mine too," said the Doctor.
"And you still want to go on with this?"
"Of course."
"Well, I don't. I'm beginning to turn back and go home right now."
"When it is just beginning to get interesting?"
"I don't believe you know what you are up against."
"Neither do you. But we both seem to have made a pretty good guess. I'm
going to see it through and find out what is at the other end of the
chain."
"Then I shall have to stick it out too. For I'm hanged if I'll let an
old man like you get the better of me."
"Old man?" Edith exclaimed indignantly. "He's only eleven years older
than you are, baby. And he's not half so frightened of the dark."
8
A SIGNIFICANT HINT
The doctor and Ole would have been deliriously happy to spend the rest
of their days among the monsters on the beach. The weather however cut
short their ecstasies in the middle of the fifth week.
It had been growing gradually colder, although the sky still retained
its crystal clarity. The wind steadily freshened. Twice the party
had been caught by a "woolly" which knocked them sprawling in the
evil-smelling brown slush. Young ice beginning to tinkle and chafe
against the ship, Anderson became anxious lest they be frozen fast for
the season over three hundred miles from their goal. He counselled an
immediate withdrawal to the inlet. Ole and the Doctor reluctantly gave
him best.
They were not ten hours too soon in their decision. All about the ship
the water curdled rapidly into a churning waste of young ice which in
another twelve hours would render the propeller useless. As it was, the
propeller several times on their short run to the inlet jammed, and the
Captain's heart descended to his boots to rise again as the desperate
expedient of full steam ahead sent the screw kicking.
If the worst came to the worst, Lane reflected, and they were caught,
they could leave the ship in charge of Bronson and make their way over
the pack to the mainland with dogs and sledges. But to be forced to
this expedient would disrupt the plan of their whole campaign.
Anderson, still obstinately trusting to his volcanic theory, expected
to find open water in the inlet. And indeed as they bucked their slow
course toward the mouth the severe cold moderated several degrees
and the pack became less dense. Lane and Ole began to regret their
precipitate flight from the heaven of their dreams.
The sudden departure from the slaughter beach had cut short the
Doctor's most ambitious project. Another day might have seen it
accomplished. With the help of Bronson and Ole he had rigged up a
tackle by which he planned to transport one of the larger horn-plated
monstrosities intact to the ship. The crew had already cleared a place
for it on deck. Over the protests of Edith, Drake and the crew, all was
ready for the reception of the huge evil-smelling brute when the sudden
necessity for getting out or being frozen in caused Lane to abandon the
beast and tackle at the water's edge.
"Never mind," Anderson consoled him, "we can hoist your lily aboard
when we come back this way. It will be no sweeter then than it is now."
With a sigh of regret Lane resigned himself to the loss of his loved
one. It was the prize of the whole filthy brood. Whatever may have been
the state of its interior the heavy armor of its enormous scales had
preserved it, outwardly at least, from the more distressing features of
dissolution. Edith rejoiced openly at her father's misfortune, and the
crew wore a smile that even the knife-edged blast from the south was
powerless to chill.
Despite his heartbreaking loss Lane did not quit the beach in absolute
poverty. Every available nook of the _Edith_ was packed with his
well-salted and pitch-soaked mummies. His collection as it stood would
be the scientific sensation of a century.
More valuable still were Ole's photographs. An able-bodied Norwegian
seaman with the most expensive cameras and an unlimited supply of films
can take an overpowering abundance of excellent photographs in five
and a half weeks. Under Lane's expert direction he had photographed
practically everything visible on that eight mile beach.
This indeed was but the minor part of Ole's Herculean labor. His
greater masterpieces had been achieved by the freehanded expenditure
of Anderson's dynamite and blasting powder. This the sagacious Captain
had stowed aboard the _Edith_ in ton lots, confident that he should
have heavy blasting to do in his oil prospecting. He expected to find
his oceans of wealth under rocks buried beneath the accumulated ice
of ages. An incautious remark to the Doctor, who was bewailing his
stupidity in not having brought crosscut saws, steam shovels and other