"The long brass instrument," he said, "out of the case numbered four, in
the cabin."
I went and fetched the instrument, the men looking as much astounded as
I was myself to see the doctor going coolly to work examining the
structure of the ice, with its curious water-worn face. Then he seemed
to be making measurements, and he ended by coming to us, rubbing his
hands.
"Curious position, isn't it!" he said, laughing. "By the way, captain,
I should cast off those ice-anchors, in case the iceberg should make
another turn. They might be the cause of mischief."
"Cause of mischief! Hark at him!" said Abram. "When we're perched two
hundred foot up here in the air! Come on, lads."
The ice-anchors were taken out of the holes that had been cut for them,
and were got on board as we settled down for the night, no man feeling
disposed to sleep; and all this while we were drifting slowly with the
stream farther and farther south.
This went on for four days, and then, one night, I remember thinking, as
I lay on deck, that could we be sure of the ice melting slowly at the
top, and letting us down, we should be safe; but I knew that the bottom
melted faster in the warm water, then the top grew heavier, and over it
went again.
I tried very hard to keep awake in case of danger; but it was of no use,
for I was worn out with watching, and at last I went off soundly to
sleep, dreaming that I was drowned, and living in an ice cave, fish
fashion, at the bottom of the sea, when I was awakened by Scudds, who
shook me, crying, "Wake up, skipper! she's a-going to launch herself!"
I jumped to my feet, to find the doctor on deck, lecturing his nephew
about the launching of ships, and pointing out the gradual slope down of
the ice valley in which we lay.
"She's shifted two foot!" said Scudds. "I felt her move!"
"Batten down the hatches!" I roared, seeing what was coming; and as
soon as this was done, and the ship made water-tight, I gave fresh
orders for every man to lash himself fast to the shrouds and
belaying-pins, while I myself secured the doctor and his nephew, neither
of them seeing the slightest danger in what was to come.
Hardly had I done this, than there was a strange creaking, scratching
noise, as of iron passing over ice; and then we felt that the vessel was
in motion, gilding down the horrible precipice toward the sea.
At first she moved very slowly, but gathering speed, she glided faster
and faster, till, with a rush like an avalanche, she darted down the
great ice slide, stem first, till, at the bottom, where the iceberg
ended abruptly in a precipice forty or fifty feet high, she shot right
off, plunging her bowsprit the next instant in the water, and then all
was darkness.
The sensation of the slide down was not unpleasant; the rush through the
air was even agreeable; but to dart down into the depths of the ocean
like some mighty whale, was awful. There was a strange roaring and
singing in the ears; a feeling of oppression, as if miles of water were
over one's head; a sense of going down, down, down into the depths that
were like ink; and then, by degrees, all grew lighter and lighter, till,
with a dart like a diving-bird, the stout iron steamer sprang to the
surface, rolled for a minute or two with the water streaming from her
scuppers, and then floated easily on the sea, with the iceberg half a
mile astern.
"Bravo!--bravo, captain! Capitally done!" cried the doctor. "As fine a
bit of seamanship as ever I saw; but you need not have made us so wet!"
"Thanky, sir!" I said, for I was so taken aback and surprised that I
didn't know what to say, the more so that Abram Bostock, Scudds, and the
rest of them took their tone from the doctor, nodded their heads, and
said, "Very well done, indeed!"
I didn't believe it at first, till I had had the pump well sounded; but
the ship was quite right, and as sound as ever, so that half an hour
after we had made sail, and were leaving the iceberg far behind.
It was some time before I could feel sure that it wasn't all a dream;
but the cool way in which the doctor took it all served to satisfy me,
and I soon had enough to take up my attention in the management of the
ship.
For the next fortnight we were sailing or steaming on past floating ice,
with the greatest care needed to avoid collision or being run down.
Then we had foul weather, rain, and fog, and snowstorm, and the season
seeming to get colder and colder for quite another fortnight, when it
suddenly changed, and we had bright skies, constant sunshine night and
day, and steamed slowly on through the pack ice.
The doctor grew more confidential as we got on, telling me of the
jealousy with which he had watched the discoveries of other men, and
how, for years, he had determined that Curley and Pole should be linked
together. He said that there was no doubt about the open Polar Sea, and
that if we could once get through the pack ice into it, the rest of the
task was easy.
"But suppose, when we've got up there, we get frozen in, doctor?" I
said.
"Well, what then?" he answered. "We can wait, till we are thawed out."
"Perhaps all dead," I said.
"Pooh, my dear sir! No such thing. Freezing merely means a suspension
of the faculties. I will give you an example soon."
"Well, Binny," said Abram slowly, after overhearing these words, "I
don't want my faculties suspended; that's all I've got to say!"
The next day we were working our way through great canals of clear
water, that meandered among the pack ice. There were great headlands on
each side, covered with ice and snow, and the solitude seemed to grow
awful, but the doctor kept us all busy. Now it was a seal hunt; then we
were all off after a bear. Once or twice we had a reindeer hunt, and
supplied the ship with fresh meat. Bird shooting, too, and fishing had
their turn, so that it was quite a pleasure trip when the difficulties
of the navigation left us free.
Eighty degrees had long been passed, and still our progress was not
stayed. We often had a bit of a nip from the ice closing in, and over
and over again we had to turn back; but we soon found open water again,
after steaming gently along the edge of the track, and thence northward
once more, till one day the doctor and I took observations, and we found
that we were eighty-five degrees north, somewhere about a hundred miles
farther than any one had been before.
"We shall do it, Cookson!" cried the doctor, rubbing his hands. "Only
five more degrees, my lad, and we have made our fame! Cookson, my boy,
you'll be knighted!"
"I hope not, sir!" I said, shuddering, as I thought of the City
aldermen. "I would rather be mourned!"
"That's a bad habit, trying to make jokes," he said, gravely. "Fancy,
my good fellow, making a pun in eighty-five degrees north latitude! but
I'm not surprised. There is no latitude observed now, since burlesques
have come into fashion. Where are you going, Cookson!"
"Up in the crow's-nest, sir," I said. "I don't like the look of the
hummocky ice out nor'ard."
I climbed up, spy-glass in hand, when, to my horror, the doctor began to
follow me.
"That there crow's-nest won't abear you, sir!" cried Scudds, coming to
the rescue.
"Think not, my man?" said the doctor.
"Sure on't!" said Scudds.
"Ah, well, I'm with you in spirit, Cookson!" he exclaimed.
And I finished my climb, and well swept the horizon line with my glass.
There was no mistaking it: ice, ice, ice on every side. The little
canal through which we were steaming came to an end a mile farther on;
and that night we were frozen in fast, and knew that there was not a
chance of being set free till the next year.
The crew was divided into two parties at once, and without loss of time
I got one set at work lowering yards, striking masts, and covering in
the ship, while the others were busied with the preparation of the
sledges.
Two days after, a party of ten of us, with plenty of provisions on our
sledge, and a tent, started under the doctor's guidance for the Pole.
It was very cold, but the sun shone brightly, and we trudged on, the
doctor showing the value of his natural covering, though he was less
coated with furs than we were.
He pointed out to me the shape of the land, and which was frozen sea;
and at the end of two days, when we were in a wild place, all mighty
masses of ice, he declared his conviction that there was, after all, no
open Polar sea, only ice to the end.
We had had a bitter cold night, and had risen the next morning cold and
cheerless; but a good hot cup of coffee set us right, and we were
thinking of starting, when Scudds, who was with us, Abram being left in
command, kicked at a piece of ice, saying, "That's rum-looking stuff!"
"There's something in it," said the doctor's nephew, who was always in
the way.
"Let me see," said the doctor, putting on his spectacles. "To be sure--
yes! Axes, quick!"
He took one himself, gave the block of ice a sharp blow, split it in
halves, and, to our utter astonishment, a strange-looking animal like a
woolly dog lay before us, frozen, of course, perfectly hard.
"A prize!" said the doctor; and we, under his orders, made a good-sized
fire, laid the perfectly preserved animal by it, and at the end of a
couple of hours had the satisfaction of seeing it move one leg, then
another, and, at last, it rose slowly on all fours, raised one of its
hind legs, scratched itself in the most natural way in the world, and
then seemed to sink down all of a heap, and melt quite away, leaving
some loose wool on the snow.
"Well," said Scudds, rolling his one eye, "if I hadn't ha' seen that
'ere, I wouldn't ha' believed it!"
"Only a case of suspended animation, my man," said the doctor, calmly.
"We shall make more discoveries yet."
The doctor was right; for this set all the men hunting about, he giving
them every encouragement, so that at the end of an hour we had found
another dog; but in dislodging the block of ice in which it was frozen,
the head was broken off, so that the only good to be obtained by thawing
it was the rough wool and some of the teeth, which the doctor carefully
preserved.
"Isn't it much colder here, doctor?" I said, for the wind seemed to go
through me like a knife.
"Hush!" he whispered; "don't let the men hear, or they'll be
discouraged. It's perfectly frightful; the thermometers are stopped!"
"Stopped?" I said.
"Yes; the cold's far below anything they can show. They are perfectly
useless now. Let's get on?"
I stood staring at him, feeling a strange stupor coming over me. It was
not unpleasant, being something like the minutes before one goes to
sleep; but I was startled into life by the doctor flying at me, and
hitting me right in my chest. The next moment he had a man on each side
pumping my arms up and down, as they forced me to run for quite a
quarter of an hour, when I stopped, panting, and the doctor laid his
hand upon my heart.
"He'll do now!" he said, quietly. "Don't you get trying any of those
games again, captain."
"What games?" I said, indignantly.
"Getting yourself frozen. Now, then, get on, my lads--we must go
ahead!"
For the next nine days we trudged on, dragging our sledge through the
wonderful wilderness of ice and snow. At night we camped in the broad
sunshine, and somehow the air seemed to be much warmer. But on the
tenth day, when we had reached the edge of a great, crater-like
depression in the ice, which seemed to extend as far as the eye could
reach, the intensity of the cold was frightful, and I spoke of it to the
doctor, as soon as we had set up our little canvas and skin tent.
"Yes, it is cold!" he said. "I'd give something to know how low it is!
But let's make our observations."
We did, and the doctor triumphantly announced that we were within one
degree of the Pole.
We were interrupted by an outcry among the men, and, on going to the
tent, it was to find them staring at the spirit-lamp, over which we
heated our coffee. The flame, instead of fluttering about, and sending
out warmth, had turned quite solid, and was like a great tongue of
bright, bluish-yellow metal, which rang like a bell, on being touched
with a spoon.
"Never mind, my men!" says the doctor coolly. "It is only one of the
phenomena of the place. Captain, give the men a piece of brandy each."
"A little brandy apiece, you mean, sir."
"No," he said coolly; "I mean a piece of brandy each."
He was quite right: the brandy was one solid mass, like a great
cairngorm pebble, and we had to break it with an axe; and very delicious
the bits were to suck, but as to strength, it seemed to have none.
We had an accident that evening, and broke one of the doctor's
thermometers, the ball of quicksilver falling heavily on the ice, and,
when I picked it up, it was like a leaden bullet, quite hard, so that we
fired it at a bear, which came near us; but it only quickened his steps.
In spite of the tremendous cold, we none of us seemed much the worse,
and joined the doctor in his hunt for curiosities. There was land here
as well as ice, although it was covered; for there was on one side of
the hollow quite a hill, and the doctor pointed out to me the trace of
what he said had been a river, evidently emptying itself into the great
crater; but when he pulled out the compass to see in which direction the
river must have run, the needle pointed all sorts of ways, ending by
dipping down, and remaining motionless.
We were not long in finding that animal life had at one time existed
here; for, on hunting among the blocks of ice, we found several in which
we could trace curious-looking beasts, frozen in like fossils.
We had set up our tent under the lee of a great rock of ice, on the edge
of the crater, which looked so smooth and so easy of ascent, that it was
with the greatest difficulty that we could keep the doctor's nephew from
trying a slide down. He had, in fact, got hold of a smooth piece of ice
to use as a sledge, when the doctor stopped him, and put an end to his
enthusiasm by pointing down and asking him what was below in the
distance, where the hollow grew deep and dark, and a strange mist hung
over it like a cloud.
"If you go down, Alfred, my boy, you will never get back. Think of my
misery in such a case, knowing that you have, perhaps, penetrated the
mystery of the North Pole, and that it will never be known!"
The young fellow sighed at this arrest of his project.
Just then we were roused by a shout from Scudds, whom we could see in
the distance, standing like a bear on its hind legs, and moving his
hands.
We all set off to him, under the impression that he had found the Pole;
but he was only standing pointing to a great slab of transparent ice,
out of which stuck about ten inches of the tail of something, the ice
having melted from it; while, on closer examination, we could see,
farther in through the clear, glassy ice, the hind-quarters of some
mighty beast.
"A mammoth--_Elephas Primigenius_!" cried the doctor, excitedly. "We
must have him out."
We stared at one another, while the doctor wabbled round to the other
side of the great mass, where he set up a shout; and, on going to him,
there he was, pointing to what looked like a couple of pegs about seven
feet apart, sticking out of the face of the ice.
"What's them, sir?" says one of the men.
"Tusks!" cried the doctor, delightedly. "My men, this is as good as
discovering the North Pole. If we could get that huge beast out, and
restore his animation, what a triumph. Why, he must have been," he
said, pacing the length of the block, and calculating its height, "at
least--dear me, yes--forty feet long, and twenty feet high."
"What a whopper!" growled Scudds. "Well, I found him."
"We must have him out, my men," said the doctor again, but he said it
dubiously, for it seemed a task beyond us, for fire would not burn, and
there was no means of getting heat to melt the vast mass; so at last we
returned to the camp, and made ourselves snug for the night.
In the morning, the doctor had another inspection of the mammoth, and
left it with a sigh; but in the course of the day we found traces of
dozens of the great beasts, besides the remains of other great creatures
that must have been frozen-in hundreds or thousands of years before; and
the place being so wonderfully interesting, the doctor determined to
stay there for a few days.
The first thing, under the circumstances, was to clear the snow away,
bank it up round us, and set up the tent in the clear place under the
shelter of the big mammoth block.
We all went at it heartily, and as we scraped the snow off, it was to
find the ice beneath as clear as glass.
"Ah!" said the doctor, sitting down and looking on, after feeling the
mammoth's tail, knife in hand, as if longing to cut it off, "it's a
wonderful privilege, my lads, to come up here into a part of the earth
where the foot of man has never trod before!--Eh! what is it?" he cried,
for his nephew suddenly gave a howl of dread, dropped the scraper he had
been using, jumped over the snow heap, and ran off.
"What's he found?" said Scudds, crossing to the place where the young
man had been busy scraping, and staring down into the ice. "Any one
would think--Oh, lor'!"
He jumped up, and ran away, too, and so did another sailor; when the
doctor and I went up to the spot, looked down, and were very nearly
following the example set us, for there, only a few inches from us, as
if lying in a glass coffin, was a man on his back, with every feature
perfect, and eyes wide open, staring straight at us!
"Wonderful!" exclaimed the doctor.
"Then some one has been here before?" I said.
"The ice must have drifted up," said the doctor. "We are the only men
who have penetrated so far. Quick, my lads; we must have him out!"
The boys didn't like the task, and Scudds was almost mutinous; but the
doctor soon had us at work, cutting a groove all round the figure; and,
after about five hours' chipping, we got out the great block with the
figure inside perfect, and laid it down in the sun, which now exercised
such power in the middle of the day that the ice began to thaw, just as
we awoke to the fact that the cold was nothing like so intense, for the
spirit-lamp on being tried burned freely, and the brandy, instead of
being like rock, showed signs of melting.
At first the men held aloof from the operation; but after a few words
from the doctor, Scudds suddenly exclaimed, "No one shall say as I'm
afraid of him!"--and he rolled his eye wonderfully as he helped to pour
hot water over the figure, which, far from being ghastly as the ice grew
thinner, looked for all the world like one of our own men lying down.
In about twelve hours we had got all the ice clear away, and the fur
clothes in which the body was wrapped were quite soft. We were then so
tired, that, it being night, the doctor had the figure well wrapped up
in a couple of buffalo robes, and, in spite of a good deal of
opposition, placed beside him in the tent, and we lay down to rest.
I don't know how long we'd been asleep, for, with the sun shining night
and day, it bothers you, but I was awoke by somebody sneezing.
"Uncle's got a fine cold!" said young Smith, who was next to me.
"So it seems!" I said; and then there was another sneeze, and another,
and another; and when I looked, there was the doctor, sitting up and
staring at the figure by his side, which kept on sneezing again and
again. Then, to our horror, it sat up and yawned, and threw its arms
about.
Every fellow in the little tent was about to get up and run away, when
the frozen sailor said, in a sleepy fashion, "Why, it's as cold as
ever!"
I tried to speak, but couldn't. The doctor answered him, though, by
saying, "How did you get here?"
"Well," said the figure, drowsily, "that means a yarn; and if I warn't
so plaguey sleepy, I'd--Heigho!--ha!--hum!--Well, here goes!"
We sat quite awe-stricken, not a man stirring more than to put a bit of
pigtail in his mouth, while the English sailor thus spun his yarn:--