The greatest adventure
put Miss Lane up to any foolishness. She will do the thinking for both
of you."
"Ole can take the pictures and theorize," Edith promised consolingly.
"And mend the motor when you bust it," Ole added with a touch of
vindictiveness. It is one thing to call a man a masterbuilder of
theories and quite another to say he theorizes. Ole sensed the
distinction.
The Doctor was finally routed. And so it happened that Edith and Ole
took not one reconnoitering flight, while the men and gods toiled
fifteen hours a day at the caches, but several.
That afternoon they proceeded upstream to within fifty miles of their
projected goal. For twelve days of perfect calm they anchored in the
narrow channel, ready at a second's notice to race from the deluge of
hot mud which they half expected but which never came. The stout ship
was to leave her timbers in that desolate spot to the end of time, but
it was not mud or lava which held her fast.
The powerful airplane had been unshipped without difficulty. A level
stretch of hard packed snow made an ideal landing ground. When tanked
to capacity the plane carried enough petrol for a thousand mile flight.
Taking no chances, the explorers carried the full complement on each
trip.
"Au revoir," Edith said as she climbed in for her first flight. "We'll
be back before midnight. I promise."
"How far are you going?" Drake asked.
"To Hades."
Edith's answer had been given merely to shock Ole. Yet it contained
an unsuspected element of truth. That was precisely where she landed
before the end of her explorations.
11
HOT WATER
Edith's intention was to fly due south. She wished if possible to
discover the source of the eruption which Anderson had observed on his
first trip. The account of the gigantic smoke ring, visible at over
two hundred and fifty miles, "teetering crazily up the sky" had taken
her imagination by storm. She wished to see for herself what sort of a
monster blew such delightful rings. Ole's burning oil well theory did
not seem entirely satisfactory. Edith rather expected to find a crater
pursed up through the ice like a smoker's lips, lazily generating smoke
for the next puff.
So far the party had seen no sign of the distant disturbance from the
ship. The cordial gush of hot water which had first welcomed them,
however, they regarded as highly significant.
If there was hot water in the vicinity Edith longed to be in it. Her
rather inactive part in the expedition so far had made her feel young
and unimportant. She now wished, as she said to herself, to return
from her trip distinguished or busted. Giving the engine more gas she
let it out to seventy miles an hour, humming through the zero air in
a bee-line for her hive. If Anderson's estimate had been correct she
should reach it in less than an hour.
Ole set himself with stolid perseverance to photograph the Antarctic
continent as seen from above. With the results of his labors it would
be possible, he hoped, for subsequent explorers to find their way
blindfolded to the South Pole.
Forty freezing minutes flew behind them before they noticed any feature
of interest on the desolate, icebound landscape rolling up from the
south to meet them. The jagged black crests of what appeared as an
almost perpendicular rock barrier pricked the horizon.
Nearing this barrier at the rate of a mile a minute they saw it rise
by leaps above the white wilderness. Ole had charge of the navigating
instruments. By a rough calculation, half guess and half arithmetic,
he estimated the barren cliffs to be not over three hundred feet high.
A glance vertically down showed an undulating ice plain thickly dotted
with huge fragments of black rock. Occasionally one of these jagged
fragments, having fallen with the flat side uppermost, presented a
thatch of last winter's snow to the observers, but for the most part
their stark pinnacles were bare and black.
Presently Ole gave a shout that was audible above the droning of the
propeller.
"Blowholes," he bellowed, handing Edith his binoculars.
Peering over the side Edith beheld a pockmarked expanse of blue ice,
pitted with bottomless wells and littered with huge fragments of rock.
Putting her trust in Providence not to "blow" the wells until she had
flown over them, she gave the engine more gas and spun toward the low
barrier at a hundred mile clip.
Coming directly over the barrier they saw that the apparent wall was
tumbled desolation of huge rock masses at least five miles broad. It
would be impossible to traverse that jumble with dog teams. If the goal
of the expedition lay beyond that chaos they must traverse it painfully
on foot with packs on their backs.
Edith flew on. The speedometer showed eighty miles an hour.
Some minutes later they saw the black mass beneath them curving
precipitously down like the slope of a steep mountain.
Determined to ascertain the extent of the vast crater--for such they
judged it to be--Edith continued to fly due south with one eye on the
speedometer. The walls of the huge depression below them were soon
no longer visible. Only a sheer void with slowly heaving sooty black
clouds at the bottom, apparently several miles below them, met their
awed gaze.
That deep expanse of inky billows seemed never ending. On they flew at
eighty miles an hour until seventy minutes lay between them and their
starting point at the lip of the gigantic crater, and the precipitous
slopes of the farther side soared suddenly up out of the black smoke
to meet them. The crater, they inferred, must be ninety miles across.
Vast as this estimate made it, they could not be sure that it was
adequate, as they had no means of judging whether they had flown above
a diameter.
When they finally cleared the last of the shattered buttress and level
ice stretched unbroken for miles beneath them, Ole signified his urgent
wish to descend. They landed without mishap.
"Where are you going?" Edith demanded as Ole started on a run back to
the lip of the crater.
"I have just had a theory," he bellowed, forgetting in his enthusiasm
that he was no longer competing with the propeller. "Now I test it."
When he rejoined her forty minutes later his face bore the smug
expression of one who has looked on Truth and found her all that he
hoped.
"Just as I thought," he said. "The south sides of those rocks on the
edge of the crater are covered with lichens."
"Well," said Edith, testy from the cold, "did you expect to find
barnacles?"
"No," he replied with the bland complacency of a sunfish, "I knew I
should find lichens."
"Then it was stupid of you to waste nearly an hour looking for them,"
she retorted. "Get in. I'm going on."
"But," he expostulated, "I have proved my theory. That is no new
crater. It must be very old. Therefore Captain Anderson did not see it
erupting."
"Then what did he see?"
"An eruption within an eruption. Just the old floor of this volcano has
blown up in our times."
"And the floor was covered with inscriptions? Yours is a likely theory,
I must say. Who ever heard of people carving inscriptions on the floor
of a volcano?"
"Who ever didn't hear of it?" Ole retorted, not quite sure of his
logic. "Why shouldn't they? Perhaps those inscriptions were only
tombstones. Haven't you seen the flat ones in the churchyards? Those
ancient makers of inscriptions wished to bury something."
"So they dug a hole in the red hot lava and put a lid over it?"
"Not of course. I mean," he corrected himself, "of course not. No, that
isn't what I mean. I want to say it doesn't follow. The main eruption
may have been millions and millions of years ago." Ole grew poetical.
"When the earth was but an infant in swaddling clothes that ancient
eruption moved, and lived, and had its being."
"Colic?" Edith asked innocently. "Is that from the _Song of Solomon_?
It sounds familiar."
"No," said Ole, as stolid as a keg of soused herrings, "Solomon sang of
other things. All those rocks I photographed," he continued, "are parts
of that old cracked floor. Satan has recently been unchained again down
there"--Ole's polite way of saying that hell had broken loose again in
modern times--"and those far hurled tons of inscriptions testify to
his inordinate vehemence. We are witnessing a recrudescence of that
prehistoric calamity which rocked the Pole to its roots."
"I too have a theory," Edith announced.
"Yes?" said Ole eagerly.
"My theory is that you will be left here talking through your hat
forever if you don't climb in at once. I'm going on."
The unappreciated Ole took the hint. They were off again.
Edith decided to fly home in a wide circle, following the southern
rim of the crater until it began to turn sharply to the north. Then,
leaving it behind she hummed on due west for about a hundred miles. She
was on the point of turning north again, and home to the ship, when a
peculiar dim blue line across the western horizon caught her attention.
To investigate would take only half an hour. She investigated.
So did Ole. He again discovered innumerable blowholes in the ice over
which they whizzed, and called Edith's attention to the significant
detail.
"This looks promising," she said to herself, for Ole could hear
nothing. "Now if Nature knows anything at all about logic she should
have planted another big hole in the ice over behind that blue line."
Nature proved herself logical. The blue line became the sheer edge of a
tremendous ice precipice sweeping in a gradual curve round the horizon.
Fifty miles was a conservative guess at the diameter of this vast
depression. Unlike the other no jumble of black rock cluttered its edge
or the surrounding plain.
Half a mile from the edge Edith landed. In silence she and Ole hurried
over to the edge of the precipice. Reaching it they stood a few yards
back and gazed into the immense void before them. No smoke obscured the
sunlit floor of this vast amphitheatre. So far below them it lay that
it appeared only as a dim blue shadow.
"Come," said Edith, "that's too good to spoil today. We shall return
tomorrow and see it properly. Don't say anything to the others about
this. One thing at a time is enough for those doubting Thomas cats."
"I won't," Ole promised. "My theory is," he jabbered before Edith could
choke him off, "my theory is that Satan is still chained down there."
"There will be the devil to pay," she said simply, "if he breaks loose
tomorrow while you and I are exploring. I hope you are on good terms
with him."
Ole was shocked. Never before had he heard a young lady use such
language outside of a church. He registered his disapproval by climbing
into the machine without another theory.
Edith's report brought tears to the Captain's eyes.
"That fool Ole was right," he admitted generously. "What he and I saw
from the ship was a burning oil well. Now you have found it."
"Full of black smoke," Ole added gloomily. "Probably all the oil is
burning away."
"No, idiot," the Captain replied, "or you would have seen flames."
"I suppose it was just smouldering?" Ole suggested with a nasty touch
of irony.
"Oh, undoubtedly," the Captain sneered. "The obvious, practical
solution always escapes your colossal mind. Can't you see it? That
smoke is simply what has settled down after the fire went out."
"And burned up all the oil," the pessimist supplemented.
"Oh, shut up. If what he says is true, Doctor, isn't there likely to be
more oil under the floor of that hole in the rock?"
"I'll tell you when I see the floor."
"Well, whatever theory you and he may hatch between you I'm going to
tear up an acre or two of what's left of that floor with dynamite.