THE BEAUTY AND MARVELS OF AN ICE-CAVE
“Oh, what a shame!” cried Walt, impatiently. “We did expect to see
something real splendid.”
Ingomar laughed.
“You are snow-blind, boys, just for the moment. If you’d come when I
told you, when the sun was still above the horizon, you would have had a
daylight view.
“The sun can’t be expected to stay for you. He has to rise and shine on
other seas, if not on other lands.”
But when their eyes became more accustomed to the twilight, they could
see that they were in a vast vaulted cave, solid ice and snow beneath
them, and strange uncanny shapes sparkling in the semi-darkness beyond.
Three men had accompanied Ingomar and the boys, and one was carrying a
bag.
“Be cautious how you move, lads, else one of you may go through into the
sea, and never be seen again.”
“But the ice feels very strong.”
“Yes; it is perhaps a foot thick, and that is strong enough for
anything. But there are ‘pussy-holes’ here and there, up through which
seals crawl to sleep, and on these the ice is very thin.”
Just as he spoke, there was a sudden and angry roar heard ahead of them,
where something black and big reared itself, and two fierce eyes glared
at the intruders.
The boys clutched each other in superstitious fear, and stepped quickly
back.
It was only a large seal, however, but so quickly did it retreat that
Ingomar had not the slightest idea what species it was.
I may say for the seals here in the Antarctic, which number four or five
species, that though in the breeding season they have certain habitats,
after that happy time is over they are free to wander where they please,
and often turn up in strange places. It is the same with Arctic seals.
An eared seal, whose fur has been much sought after, is now, I think,
almost extinct, owing to the murderous greed of the sealer. I think it
would be well if there were a close season for all species. But this is
a digression. Let us return to the cave.
The somewhat mysterious bag carried into the cave was now opened, and
Ingomar, bending down, extracted some of what he termed theatrical
properties therefrom.
Next moment, on the touch of a button, the whole of this cave was filled
with dazzling light.
What a sight!
“Oh--h--h!”
That was all our boys could say for a moment or two.
No stalactite cave probably ever rivalled the beauty of this.
And here were stalactites, too, in the form of depending icicles,
dozens, scores, hundreds of them, and, seen by the electric light, they
emitted all the colours of the rainbow.
They walked cautiously on and on a long way into the bowels of this
mighty cavern, watching the floor for pussy-holes.
No one could even guess where the seal had gone.
“Well,” said Charlie, as they came at last to the end of the
ocean-hollowed cave, “I should really have expected to find mermaids
here.”
“Now,” said Ingomar, “one more transformation scene, or perhaps two, and
then the pantomime is over.”
As he spoke he touched a spring, and, wonderful to say, the cave was
illuminated with brightest crimson, then with orange and red again. So
on to the pure white light, and in this they found their way to the
mouth of the cave, and made their exit and presently their way to the
boats.
“We’ve seen a sight,” said Ingomar, “that is surely worth coming to the
Antarctic to look upon.”
“Yes,” said Charlie, thoughtfully.
“Oh,” cried Walt, “will you do it again some time?”
Ingomar laughed.
“It all depends,” he said.
A beautiful night now. They must have been a full hour in that cave and
didn’t mark time.
The moon had arisen, stars were bright and sparkled in the sea.
It was a night for thought more than talking, and no one did talk.
Nothing indeed was heard, save the chunk-chunk, chunkitty-chunk of oars
in rowlocks, until the boat grated against the ship’s side.
“Wherever have you been, boys?” said Mayne Brace. “I was just going to
sound the syren to say supper was ready.”
“Ah, Captain Brace, we’ve had a wonderful time of it, all among the
mermaids, though at first we saw a terrible apparition.
“But really, sir, the shriek of your hooter would have dispelled all the
romance and mystery. Only I’m hungry now. Aren’t you, lads?”
“Rather,” said Charlie; and Walter nodded and smiled.
Come to think of it, there is no country in the world like the Antarctic
for making people hungry. If we could send off our dyspeptic millions
there, they would all come back with appetites which would speedily put
up the price of meat.
* * * * *
I think it really was very good of Ingomar to put himself about in
pleasing the boys, which he did in every way he could and at every
opportunity.
Older people than he would say that he was not much past his own
boyhood, being only about three and twenty. But listen, lads, I myself
and many others are believers in young blood. Youth has spirit, dash,
and go.
At the University, in which I was reared and nurtured, no student
considered himself a boy at seventeen. If you had called me a boy in
those days, you would have had to strip, and then you would have had to
depend a good deal on your muscle and science to get yourself out of the
scrape. I’m not going to preach. That isn’t my form, but if a lad of
seventeen doesn’t begin to look ahead and find out that he wasn’t put
into this world just for the fun of the thing, then, bother me, if I
think he’ll ever be a real man. So at twenty-three, the ages of both
Ingomar and Lieutenant Curtis, the mind should be fairly moulded.
As for Curtis, I never met a sailor of greater promise, from a really
scientific point of view. Naturalist, meteorologist, hydrographist
(photographist, too, if there be science in that), and any number of
other “ists” thrown in to make up the weight.
Bold and determined was he, too. He liked to get to the bottom of
things, just as with his newest dredging machines and sounding gear he
liked to get in touch with the bottom of the sea, whether it were but a
few fathoms deep, or miles.
Ingomar was a splendid setting off to him. Curtis, with his spare body,
his extreme vitality, his noble mind and grasp of soul. Ingomar, with
his splendid physique and king-like form. But Ingomar knew the rudiments
of most sciences, and he had the rare gift of picking up just the main
points of a subject. Hide a few small nuggets of gold in a gravel heap,
and Ingomar would soon have found them for you, and wouldn’t have
bothered much about the gravel. That’s the sort of man Ingomar was. With
all this there was a deal of romance in his character, and he had one
set purpose in this expedition, which, if he could but fulfil, he felt
would make his austere father proud of him.
Curtis and he were nearly always together during the thorough
exploration--from a scientist’s and surveyor’s point of view--of that
great tract of water far inside the Antarctic circle called Ross’s Sea.
The mariners of old did not take much time to study science. It was the
surface of the sea they dealt with, and the land around it.
After passing Ringgolds Knoll, _vide_ map, you will steer east and
south, and after Cape Adare is passed, south into this sea, and its
simplest exploration would take months.
It has Victoria Land on the right, a land of wondrous interest, a land
of fire in the frozen ocean, land of volcanoes, extinct and extant, of
awful icebergs, of more terrible, yet beautiful ice-barriers, and in
summer a land of birds in millions.
To explore and survey this sea was one of the chief objects of the
voyage.
And now that they had reached Cape Adare, they set about the work in
good earnest.
I think you know that Charlie was a boy of many fads--that is the low
name for his studies, perhaps--for Charlie’s fads were a step or two
above keeping rabbits and guinea-pigs. We have seen how when at sea he
used to delight to swing away aloft in the crow’s-nest, and all the
marvels he saw from that eyrie of his would, if described in print, fill
a biggish book. There was poetry and romance, too, in his life in the
nest, and I’m not sure that his thoughts did not take a nobler turn, and
that up there at night, swinging among the stars and planets, as one
might say, he did not believe himself to be nearer to God--the God of
infinity, mind you, not of this insignificant earth alone.
Anyhow, when he used to come down of a night, after a spell up yonder,
his eyes had a happier look, and his face seemed to shine, while his
thoughts seemed far away.
He was a harder student than Walter, though had you asked Captain Mayne
Brace, he would have told you straight that the latter might possibly
make the better sailor, as sailors go nowadays.
“But, bless you, sir,” Brace would have added, “your smutty, rattling
steamships, all bustle and filth, have almost frightened good old
Neptune off his own blue throne.”
Well, anyhow, now that work had begun in earnest, Charlie was never
tired of studying every new instrument used on board the ship and on
shore. That was his new fad. The more he studied geology and
meteorology, for instance, the more he wanted to. Had he possessed fifty
minds, fifty storehouses for information, Charlie would have set about
filling them.
“Look at that,” Charlie said, exultantly, to Walter one day.
“Well, what is it? A bit of black greyish stone with some spangles in
it.”
“That’s granite.”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t.”
Walter was in a teasing mood that day.
“And this?”
“Some exceedingly black and dirty clay.”
“No; but books both, or rather pages from the great Book of Nature.
“All scientists in the present age,” added Charlie, “are busy in their
own particular branch, and in writing or building chapters of that Book,
and when they have finished their works, these chapters will be pieced
together, and then we’ll have the story of the world.”
“Charlie,” cried Walt, “come down off there. I hate your giving yourself
side. I hate science as much as I hate lawyers’ musty old parchments.
Climb down off your high horse. The sunlit surface of the sea is good
enough for me; the earth’s crust is strong enough to walk on, and I
don’t want to go down in under, nor back to the realms of millions of
years ago. Are you aware we are going to have young seal’s liver and
bacon for luncheon?”
Nick and Nora came bounding up at this moment. Collie wasn’t far behind,
with his bright eyes and bonnie wise face, and next moment the whole
five were united in a daft and delightful game of romps.
And the liver and bacon were excellent.