The greatest adventure
"What is it to be, Lane?" the Captain asked. "Do we try it again up
stream or shall we take to the land?"
"How long will it take to get ready for the land journey?"
"Four hours. I saw to rationing the sledges while you and Ole were
enjoying yourselves."
"Are the dogs in fit shape?"
"They will do. The four weeks' exercise on that rotten beach wasn't all
it should have been, but it will have to do."
"Why not compromise?" Drake suggested. "Let us go by ship as far as we
can before taking to the sledges. I don't relish dragging the beastly
things over the ice. For that is what it will come to when the fool
dogs give in. Sooner or later they are bound to go. We can't pack four
months' grub for them and ourselves."
"What about it, Captain?" the Doctor asked. "Are you willing to risk
the boiling water?"
"Now that we know what to expect I see no great danger. Unless," he
added, "boiling mud comes down with the water and mires us a hundred
miles from the sea."
"We'll chance it," the Doctor decided. "If there had been no more of an
eruption than boiling water so far it seems improbable that there will
be one now just to welcome us."
"There is always the airplane as a last resort," Edith pointed out.
"Yes," said the Captain, "and who would be the happy pair to escape
while the rest stayed behind and starved?"
"Don't you see? The pilot could take off the men one at a time. In a
pinch five or six could crowd on somehow. The plane can lift the weight
of ten men easily."
"And get the last of them off the night after Judgment Day. No, Edith,
if we do get caught your plan won't work. However, I'm as game as your
father. And what I say the men will do--and be damned quick about it,
too. Now, Doctor, since we are going back I should like to ask a favor."
"Go ahead. If it's anything reasonable consider it granted."
"It is this. I want to find out what caused that glow on the clouds.
Suppose we take a side trip to find out before going on to the main
show?"
"That sounds all right to me. And it will give the dogs some real
exercise."
"To say nothing of ourselves," Drake prophesied gloomily. "I know the
brutes will be unmanageable. One tried yesterday to take a piece out of
my leg--and I have no meat to spare."
Without further discussion the ship was put about. They proceeded
upstream at full speed. By noon they reached the point where they
judged it would be wise to leave the ship and take to the sledges.
Within two hours Anderson, Ole, Drake, Lane and Edith, who refused to
be separated from her father, were on their way over the ice with a
week's provisions. Bronson was left in charge of the ship with orders
to head her downstream and keep a sharp lookout for trouble. At the
first hint he was to steam for the mouth of the inlet. Should the
party send no word to the contrary before the seventh night out, he was
to organize a relief and go in search.
9
INTO IT
The party had two sledges. Anderson and Ole, being the only members
experienced with dogs, taking charge of the sledges, instructed the
others. One who has never had the pleasure cannot appreciate how much
sport goes with the skilful manipulation of a dog team. The greenhorns
soon learned. A temperature several degrees above zero, dead calm, a
blinding glare from the undulating snowfields, and their own panting
exertions quickly brought out the perspiration. Edith bore it with
compressed lips, the Doctor grinned like a cat in pain, and Drake,
wishing he might lie down and die, contented himself with a continuous
profane commentary on the dogs, the desolate landscape and the idiot
who had dragged him into this brainless mess.
Drake's misery reached its climax when he was just on the point of
abandoning the expedition after three gruelling hours of elaborate
awkwardness. His sledge at the moment was careering sideways like a
crab down a gentle ice slope which the winds had swept clean of ice
crystals. Reaching the bottom without mishap he stubbed his toe on some
hard obstruction cunningly concealed beneath the loose drift. At the
same instant one runner of the sledge found another stumbling block.
Before Drake knew what it was all about he was sprawling on his back
like a lanky frog in the snow, his sledge was upside down, and the dear
dogs had tied themselves into a true lovers' knot.
Scrambling to his feet he forgot Edith, his surroundings, everything
in fact but his fluent vocabulary. His rhythmic denunciation of the
universe brought a blush to the ears of the sensitive Ole, who at
that moment was acting as Edith's instructor. Quitting Edith's side
with alacrity Ole hastened over to extinguish Drake. Anderson and the
Doctor, taking things easy, were some distance ahead. In that clear,
cold air every syllable carried like a bullet. They spun round as if
shot by a machine gun.
"Great Scott!" said the Doctor, "I didn't know he had that much in him.
Let us go back and see what brought it out."
Ole discovered the cause of offense before the others reached the spot.
Drake's eruption had ceased abruptly in an ominous calm. With a glare
of suppressed rage he stood regarding Ole's dangerously inviting pose.
The mate was on his knees scratching like a terrier to scoop away the
loose snow from a black object, of which the pointed cap had already
been exposed by his frantic enthusiasm.
"Ah," he puffed, "you are a born researcher, Mr. Drake. Invisible
though this was to the naked eye you found it. You have the scientific
penetration, the genius that sees through deceptive appearances to the
underlying truth."
Drake, speechless, considered. Should he give Ole a thundering kick, or
was his toe too sore? By habit he kicked only with his right foot, the
one which had 'researched' Ole's treasure. He decided for peace.
"What is it, idiot?"
Ole ignored the compliment. "See for yourself. Inscriptions!"
Drake was now on his knees, rooting with Ole. An exclamation from the
Captain proclaimed the discovery of the second black stone which,
buried in the snow, had wrecked the sledge. All hands now began
digging. In a few minutes two small, jagged fragments, evidently pieces
of a larger rock which had been shattered by its impact on the ground
ice, lay clean for inspection.
At first the result was deeply disappointing. One of the fragments
had been so badly scarred by its rough treatment that not a single
pictogram remained on its surface, while the other exhibited only
the broken remains of half a dozen. Neither was worth photographing.
Anderson, having set Drake's disaster to rights, suggested that they
move on.
But Drake appeared to be deaf. The more badly damaged of the two
fragments seemed to hold him hypnotized. Presently he rose to his feet
and kicked the black mass savagely with his heel.
"Fetch a sledge-hammer," he ordered Ole.
"Where in hell am I to get one?"
Edith had already located the handaxe which she now offered to Drake.
With one sharp blow he split the black fragment into two along a
plane of cleavage. The sight which met their eyes brought a cry of
astonishment from all but Anderson and Ole. One surface of the divided
rock was covered with the deeply incised pictograms of prehistoric
monsters, while the other, like a relief map, bore the raised replica
of the same inscription. Yet the whole fragment before Drake split it
into two had seemed to be an ordinary chunk of black, cement-like rock.
Drake's brain was at work.
"If you found twelve dozen of one kind, Hansen," he said, "it is
against all probability that you saw none of the other. Why didn't you
photograph some of them too?"
"I did," Ole replied like a stolid keg. "In all I took over one hundred
pictures of the raised kind of inscriptions. They are in my chest
aboard the ship."
"Then why on earth didn't you show them to me?"
"Because," Anderson informed him, "we knew what sort of men you
scientific chaps are. We didn't want to give you too much to swallow
all at once--just enough in fact to make you hungry for more."
"You win," said Lane. "I want everything you have."
"That's the lot, Doctor, honest. From now on we are as green as you
are."
"And that's saying a good deal. Does this throw any light on your
difficulties with Ole's photographs, Drake?"
"Enough to show me why the whole series doesn't hang together. No
wonder the drawings of those animals are in two different styles
belonging to two totally distinct epochs of art. It also explains a
thing you would have noticed if you had taken the trouble to examine
the pictures carefully. Even I, with my vast ignorance of natural
science, can see that the monsters represented belong to different
ages of the earth's history. Roughly they seem to be alike. But the
resemblance, although real, is no deeper than the similarity between
men and apes. They belong to the same races of creatures, but are
separated by millions of years of evolution."
"You're wrong there, Drake. I prefer to think that the differences are
merely the varying expression of a fixed idea. The minds of the artists
have evolved, not the creations of their art. I'll argue it out with
you later. For the present, does this find affect your guess as to
what's ahead of us?"
"Not materially. The struggle that I deduced from the symbolism of the
inscriptions must have been longer than I thought. That's all."
"Where did you find your inscriptions, Ole?"
"A good seventy miles north of here."
"Then there should be more in this neighborhood, because it probably
is nearer the source of the explosion. If so, we shall find enough to
write a prehistoric encyclopaedia from A to Z."
And so it proved. At intervals of half a mile to a mile they found
the vast undulating snowfields littered with colossal fragments of
black rock, many of which on their level faces were covered with the
deeply cut figures of prehistoric monsters. As many more smaller chunks
doubtless lay buried beneath the snow and ice of two winters. Not
stopping to photograph these now they hurried on to their goal, the
source of the eerie light which they had seen from the ship.
That night, without much wind, was cloudless. Although the temperature
dropped below zero none of the party experienced any serious discomfort
in their dry sleeping bags. The months of hardening in the Canadian
Rockies and Alaska had well prepared the new-comers to the Antarctic
for hardships which otherwise might have proved unendurable. The
absence of high winds on the bleak plateau was an unexpected piece of
good luck. By rare fortune they had penetrated one of those mysterious,
almost windless regions of the Antarctic continent which have puzzled
explorers.
The first day they covered only twenty miles. With the experience of a
march behind them they made a little over forty miles through the dead
calm of the second day, to creep into their bags at night exhausted.
The men took watch by turns in two-hour spells. Not a flicker of
the strange fire they were seeking stained the cloudless night sky.
Beginning to doubt the correctness of their route they were wholly
unprepared for the inferno into which they blundered at five o'clock of
the third day.
The start at five o'clock on that memorable morning was made under a
sky blazing with the icy jewels of innumerable stars. At sunrise they
found themselves ascending a sharp declivity of blue ice. Up that long
ascent the going was necessarily slow. By slogging ahead they had risen
two thousand feet shortly before ten o'clock. As nearly as they could
judge they were now climbing over a huge fold of rock running almost
due north and south. The view from the crest of the rise confirmed