SHAGUN
Facing a storm, a vessel at sea would have reefed sails and laid low for
the blow. But on this great elongated gas bag, there was nothing to
reef. She could only turn tail and race the wind for her life.
Telegraph orders, rushed from control-room to engine quarters, brought
the huge dirigible up short, rearing and plunging like a frightened
steed. At touch of the engineers, the marvelous mechanism of drive-shaft
and bevel gear tilted each propeller on its axis to throw the ship into
reverse and back it around. For so huge a bulk, she wheeled in her
tracks with amazing speed.
There was need of speed!
Even in that short time while receiving the wirelessed warning out of
the air and plunging into retreat, great banks of cloud had reared
themselves on the horizon, looming black and sinister. With every
passing moment they rolled up, darker, heavier. With awful menace, a
great droning roar filled the air.
The Nardak was turning back on the very fringes of an onrushing storm
that seemed to leap out of the nowhere.
With a rumble the wind-clouds loosed their first furious gusts in a rage
that tore the clouds themselves into a jagged pattern. Ragged openings
gave vistas into the still more fearful storm that they had masked!
Through the barrage of thunderheads burst a three-headed tornado, three
huge twisting wind-spouts that seemed to reach from earth to sky.
Writhing, speeding, twisting across the sky, they pursued the Nardak
like great devouring serpents. Devourers they were! Terrific wind
velocity within those whirling storms could pluck the hair from the
human head, could tear a man limb from limb, could wrench a great
airship into shreds and splinters.
With a rush and a roar, forerunners of the storm seemed to burst upon
the Nardak from all quarters, seemed bound to beat the great hulk into
submission.
Gone was the smooth, swift gliding with which the Nardak had swept
northward for more than a thousand miles. In the fury of the gale, the
huge ship of the air rocked and plunged. Everything not built in or
lashed into place was flung crashing about the hull. Lee Renaud and
Captain Jan were careened together and then dashed to the floor and
flung hither and yon in a welter of broken furnishings.
"Is it the--the end? Will she capsize?" Lee managed to shout to Captain
Jan.
"Heavy ballast--can't turn over. This pounding within, without, that's
the danger." Even as Captain Jan spoke, came a thunderous crash of
falling objects within the hull. "The struts--if they break, they'll
slash the bags like knives!"
Like some hunted wild animal, the Nardak plunged on her way, riding the
constantly changing air currents, sweeping on the edges of the storm,
dodging between gales, by a miracle of maneuvering never letting herself
be completely swallowed in the maw of the storm monster.
Behind her, three snaky wind-spouts came together with a concussion that
rocked sky and earth. In the twinkling of an eye, the face of the land
was changed. Trees, boulders, a whole cliff were swept upward and
reduced to powder in the grinding crush of the winds. A great air wave,
like some tidal wave of the sea, flung the huge Nardak high as though it
were a bit of chaff, sucked it earthward to almost scrape the ground.
Then, as swiftly as it had roared into being, the tempest died away. The
wind muttered and rumbled low, and dropped into a strange calm.
For a little space the airship hung in this calm, quivering and
trembling like some spent runner that has barely survived a terrific
race.
By degrees, the apathy of exhaustion passed from the crew. Battered and
bruised, with strained, white faces, the men rallied from their
terrifying experience and began to take up their tasks.
With apparent serenity, the Nardak went on her way. But in many and
varied places, men labored to repair the damages of the storm. The
thrashings of a broken strut had ripped the tough cloth-and-membrane
lining of one gas bag. It was a total loss--a loss that reduced the
lifting power of the dirigible, but did not cripple the ship to any
appreciable extent. The builders had allowed an overplus of helium to
meet such an emergency. Much more alarming was the discovery of a defect
in the propeller shaft and the flapping of wind-torn fabric on the port
stabilizer fin.
Because Lee Renaud was cool-headed, as well as young and active, he took
his part in the emergency repair work that now must be done.
There was no halting of the great dirigible on her flight. She simply
went into reverse, pointed her nose to the northwest, and took up her
storm-broken course once more. If possible, she must keep to her
scheduled time of going into the Arctic. For the Arctic summer might
last two months, and it might last only a week or so. Arctic summer
means a slight melting of snow in wind-swept valleys, means black
up-thrust of rock and cliff here and there where the snow-cap has
slipped. It is in this brief period, the only time when the contour of
the terrain of this ice-locked land is even slightly exposed, that
geologist and scientist and gold prospector must make their swift search
for the treasure held in Arctic rocks.
So without ever slowing down, much less landing, the Nardak held to her
course, while men, like tiny midgets, crawled perilously over her hull,
within and without. In the crowded quarters of a motor gondola,
mechanics repaired and replaced a propeller, all in the space of four
hours. That was a hot and heavy task. But the real danger came to those
workers suspended in a sort of harness against the outside of the great
dirigible to repair its dismantled fin, while the giant ship held to her
speed and to her height of a thousand meters in the air.
Young Renaud was one of those who let themselves be swung in a net of
ropes between heaven and earth, while they plied great needles in the
latest thing in "dressmaking," seamstering for a new garment for the
stabilizer fin. The tattered condition of the fabric of the port fin was
evidence of the suck and pull of the storm she had grazed. More than a
third of it hung in shreds. Armed with a huge needle and a cord thread
that billowed in the wind, Lee did his share of sewing blankets into
place as patching material on the exposed framework. This would have to
do till the dirigible made her landing at that last outpost of
civilization, Shagun Post on Hudson Bay.
As the repair crew made its way up dizzy aerial ladders, back to the
safety of the interior of the hull, and walked down the long catwalk
that led between rows of fuel tanks, Lee ran his hand through his
upstanding black hair and laughingly remarked, "Whew! I'm hunting a
mirror. Want to see how many gray hairs I got, swinging out there in
that hundred-mile breeze. From the way my knees still tremble, bet it's
all--"
"Ha-ooo! Ha-ooo! Ha-ooo!" A strange pitiful wail changed Lee's joking
into an astonished gasp.
It was a wail that came up from the dim, lattice-work shadows of the
ship's bottom, some sixty-odd feet below.
"Man overboard--I mean, lost in-board!" someone shouted.
"Must've gone down from the walk here, in the plunge of the storm. A
wonder he can still holler, after being hung down there all this time!"
said Olof Valchen.
"Ropes!"
"Down the ladder there!"
"We're coming!"
A jumble of shouts echoed through all parts of the ship.
Lee was one of the first men to go swinging down a long narrow ladder
into the shadowy interlacing of beams and girders. Above the catwalk
were lights, but down here was semi-darkness, and a maze of struts that
must be threaded.
The thin wailing guided him. The gleam of his pocket flashlight glinted
on a pair of eyes far below.
Then he was there, all the way to the ship's bottom, and touching his
hands to a body wedged between girders. As Lee's hands made contact, he
gasped at what he found. And Olaf Valchen, who was the next man to get
there, echoed his gasp.
Then the two of them, sung out: "We've got the rope on! Haul away!"
What the men on the planking far above hauled up to safety and a place
in the friendly glow of lights, was no man at all, but Yiggy, the little
dog. A battered and banged-up Yiggy, but all there and very much alive,
as the wagging of his stub of a tail indicated.
* * * * *
Wireless calls began coming in to the Nardak from the distant north.
"What has happened? You are overdue here already!" These calls were from
the radio operator at Shagun, the wilderness settlement that would be
the dirigible's only halting place on its way to the Arctic.
A relay of supplies had been shipped here, the end of both railroad and
civilization. The Nardak was to take them aboard so as to enter upon the
last lap of her journey as fully fueled and provisioned as possible.
Seven hours behind her schedule, the great silver Nardak drifted into
the sky above Shagun.
The boom of guns and the lighting of a line of signal fires greeted her.
These were to call together a landing-crew to lend their aid in bringing
to earth the first dirigible ever seen in these parts.
For a time, the Nardak hung motionless, then by the use of movable
planes and sliding weights, by which the center of gravity was shifted,
she slowly began to nose down towards earth.
Waiting in a spreading, wedge-shaped formation were two long lines of
nearly a hundred men. Not nearly so many were really needed. But every
husky denizen of Shagun wanted to have a hand at manning the pull ropes
of this monster visitor. Slowly the great ship of the air was drawn to
earth in the vast clearing which Lomen Larsen, the Factor of the Shagun
Post, had prepared ahead of time for the reception of the sky ship.
Here, of course, was no cement landing field and ironringed cement posts
to receive mooring ropes, but the ground had been smoothed, and trees
served as mooring posts.
As Lee stepped off the ship, he felt that he had stepped off into the
Land of Contrasts. Here at Shagun ended the shining lines of steel rails
over which traveled the mighty engines and loaded cars of the Great
Northern. And here at Shagun began primitive transportation by birchbark
canoe, shoulder-pack and dog-sled by which necessities were carried on
into the North. Bearded white men, Indians, a few slant-eyed Eskimos
with cotton garments of civilization donned incongruously atop their
native furs, moved along the trails and in and out the low-roofed log
shacks. And above these primitive folk loomed the high aerial and mighty
masts of a modern powerful radio sending station!
But not for Lee Renaud, nor for anyone else of the expedition, was there
much time to stand day-dreaming over the strangeness of the long arm of
radio reaching out to touch this primitive settlement on the Arctic
fringes. For it seemed the great Nardak landed in her open-air dock one
minute, and the next the work of loading her new cargo and of further
repairing began.
Men fell to with a vim. Men learned in geology and meteorology donned
dungarees and entered upon a brand-new career of stevedoring. A
perspiring aerial photographer and an equally perspiring slant-eyed
Eskimo tugged a huge box to the hold opening. Indian trappers and the
engineers of the latest thing in air engines labored together at the
mountain of bales and barrels and tanks to be put aboard. A dozen times
Yiggy escaped his quarters and rushed joyously underfoot to enter
battle-royal with shaggy sled huskies that could swallow him at a
mouthful--and a dozen times Yiggy had to be rescued from battle, murder
and sudden death.
Muscles ached, but men joked and bantered and worked all the harder.
Then at last it was all aboard--eight hundred pounds of oil, seven tons
of gasoline, a thousand pounds of chocolate, pemmican, coffee and hard
biscuit, which were to provision this great adventure.
Ground lines were loosed, the Nardak rose slowly. A clamorous ovation
saluted her from the watchers. Shouts rose in four different languages,
the bell of the little log mission clanged its farewell. Lomen Larsen
touched off a row of powder-flares in a final uproarious salute.
Higher and higher rose the Nardak, then sped northward on her last great
stretch of flight.
What would happen in this unexplored land? Only the future could answer.