ON THE WHALING BARK
It was several miles from the brink of what had once been the polar
sea to the spot where the whalers were at work. Jack Darrow, Mark
Sampson, and their friends found it a difficult way to travel too.
Naturally they had abandoned the sleds. The ice on the stream which
flowed out of this mouth of the Coleville River was so broken that
they could no longer use it as a highway. The bottom of what had once
been the ocean was only partly ice-covered. There were enormous rocks
to climb over, or to find a path around. Reefs and ledges reared their
heads fifty feet and more high. There were sinks, too, in the floor
of the old ocean; but these were mostly covered with ice.
The Arctic Ocean must have receded at the time of the upheaval which
had flung this island into the air so rapidly that many of the sea's
denizens, beside the school of whales, could not escape.
Here, in one big pool, lay frozen in the ice a monster white shark.
It had battered itself to death against the rocks in trying to escape.
Through yonder blow-hole in another pool there suddenly appeared an
enormous bewhiskered head, with great tusks like the drooping mustache
of a soldier.
"A walrus!" exclaimed Jack, recognizing the creature.
"And yonder are seals playing in the open pool," said Mark.
"These pools, or lakes, are still of salt water," said the professor,
thoughtfully. "Ah! what would I not have given to have been on that
headland yonder at the moment the ocean went out."
"Not me! Not me!" cried Phineas Roebach. "I'd gone completely off my
head then, for fair--I know I would!"
"Mr. Roebach is not quite sure now that he isn't suffering from some
form of insanity," said Jack, chuckling.
"Den it suah is too bad dat we nebber kin fin' dat chrisomela
bypunktater plant ter cure him wid," declared Washington White,
dolefully.
"But, by the piper that played before Pharaoh!" ejaculated Phineas
Roebach, at last brought to a point where he _had_ to admit that
no reasonable explanation would fit the conditions confronting them,
"tell me this: What has become of the Arctic Ocean?" "You can search
me!" drawled Jack. "I can assure you, Mr. Roebach, that I haven't seen
it. Have you got it, Mark?"
"The question of what has become of this great sea which once washed
the shore we are now leaving," said Professor Henderson, seriously,
"is a remarkably interesting one. The ocean may have merely receded
for a few miles at the time of the volcanic eruption and earthquake
which threw off this new planet."
Phineas Roebach shook his head at this, but said nothing.
"It may be," pursued Mr. Henderson, "that that part of our old world
that was shot into space did not include much of this Arctic sea. We
may find beyond here," pointing, as he spoke, ahead, "instead of the
receded ocean, no ocean at all. We cannot believe that this island in
the air is spherical like our own old earth. It is a ragged form which
will show on what we may call the _under_ side the very convolutions and
scars made by its breaking away from the old earth. Do you get my
meaning?"
"Yo' suttenly is a most liquid speaker, Perfesser," declared Washington
White. "Yo' was sayin' dat w'en disher new planet broke off de earf,
she slopped over de whole Arctic Ocean."
"Perhaps that puts it quite as simply," said Professor Henderson,
smiling grimly. "The ocean 'slopped over'. It was either left behind
to partly fill the cavity left by the departure of this torn-away world
we are living on, or it has receded into the valleys and sinks upon
the other side of this small planet."
Phineas Roebach threw up both hands and groaned.
"It's as clear as mud!" he cried. "I don't understand a thing about
it."
But the old professor went on without heeding him, knowing that his
pupils, Jack and Mark, were deeply interested in the mystery of this
torn-away world, or island in the air.
"It is a moot question whether or not the weight of the water which
lay in this vast sink, before the eruption, was not needed, and is not
needed right now, for the balancing of this tiny planet we are living
on. Nature adjusts herself to every change more quickly than human
intelligence. How much of the crust of the earth, extending up into
the polar regions, was broken away from our old world, we do not know.
But that it is now perfectly balanced we can have no doubt--that balance
is proved by the fact of the regularity of the recurrence of night and
day."
These and many other observations Professor Henderson spoke as the
party continued its rugged advance over the more or less dry bottom
of the ocean. In two hours the party was observed by the crew of the
whaler at work on the carcass of the great whale. The sailors signaled
to them, and when the boys and their friends drew near, some of the
whalemen ran forward to welcome them.
"More refugees from inland, eh?" exclaimed a rough but cordial seaman,
who proved to be the captain's harpooner and boat-steerer. "We have
some traders from Aleukan already with us."
"Ah!" said Professor Henderson, "we have been looking for them. They
have arrived in safety, then?"
"But nearly frozen," said the boat-steerer.
"And where are the people of Nigatuk?"
"We believe all those not killed or burned in the first earthquake
were taken off by the United States revenue cutter _Bear_. She sailed
for Bering Sea some time before the final earthquake."
"And where is the ocean?" demanded Phineas Roebach.
"It was sucked away in a great tidal wave and left the _Orion_ high and
dry yonder," said the sailor.
It was evident that the sailors had no appreciation of the real
happening. They did not know that they were cut off from the old earth
by thousands of miles of space. "Your bark's name is _Orion_, then?"
queried the professor.
"Aye, aye, sir," said the boat-steerer. "The _Orion_, out o' New
Bedford; the only whaler under sail in these seas, I reckon. Most o'
them that's after the ile is steam kettles," he added, thus
disrespectfully referring to the fleet of steam whalers from San
Francisco.
"But we got 'em all beat, I guarantee," he added, grinning. "We was
chasin' a school of big fellers when the sea sucked out and left us
an' them high and dry. But the skipper says the sea will come back in
good time and mean-times we gits the ile."
Just then the boat-steerer was sending off several sled loads of blubber
to his ship, and Jack and Mark, with the professor and their companions,
accompanied the cargo.
The _Orion_ was a fine big bark and was commanded by an old-fashioned
Yankee skipper of the type now almost extinct. He welcomed the travelers
aboard his ship most cordially, the ship itself all of a stench with the
trying blubber, and overshadowed by a huge cloud of black smoke, for the
fires were fed with waste bits of blubber and fat.
The skipper and crew were literally "making hay while the sun shone,"
for there were more than twenty huge leviathans within a circuit of
ten miles from the bark, and they proposed to have every one of them
before the flocks of seabirds, or the bears, should find and destroy
the stranded creatures.
"We'll fill every barrel and be ready to sail home with our hatches
battened down when the sea comes back," declared Captain Sproul.
"And you are quite sure the ocean will return and float your bark?"
queried the scientist, patiently, for he saw that it was quite as
useless to explain what had happened to this hard-headed old sea-dogas
it was to talk to Phineas Roebach.
"You can bet your last dollar it will come back, Mr. Henderson,"
declared Captain Sproul.
"Why do you think so?" asked the professor.
"Why, the ocean always _has_ been here; ain't it?"
"I expect so--within the memory of man."
"Then it will come back!" cried the skipper of the _Orion_, as though
that were an unanswerable argument.
"But what do you call that up yonder?" asked Professor Henderson,
pointing to the calm-faced earth rolling tranquilly through the heavens,
while her satellite, the moon, likewise appeared.
"We certainly are blessed with moons," said Sproul, nodding. "And
mighty glad of it I be. As the day is so short now, and the sun is so
hot, two moons to work by is a blessing indeed to us whalers."
"And you don't consider that new planet anything wonderful?" Jack
Darrow asked Captain Sproul.
"Not at all. We often see what they call sun dogs; don't we?"
"I have seen such things," admitted the youth, while he and Mark smiled
at the old skipper's simplicity.
"That double moon is like that, I reckon," said Sproul, and that ended
the discussion.