CHAPTER XV
A PLUNGE TO THE ICE
Jack Darrow was a youth less likely to be panic-stricken than his chum; but just as Mark Sampson had lost his head for a few minutes on the occasion when the Snowbird was tried out, so Jack was flustered now.
The flying machine shot up at such a tangent, and so swiftly, that he was both amazed and frightened. The speed indicator showed a terrific pace within a few seconds, and when Jack first tried to reduce the speed he learned that the mechanism acted in a manner entirely different than ever before.
The motor made more revolutions a minute than she was supposed to make when pressed to the very highest speed. When he had raised the bow of the flying machine at the start she had shot up almost perpendicularly into the air. He was afraid she was going to turn a back somersault.
As he depressed the planes he found that it took much more depression to bring the Snowbird down to even keel. And the rapidity with which they left the ground and soared upward was in itself enough to shake Jack's coolness. Suddenly (being furnished with the professor's patented ear-tabs) he heard that gentleman calling to him from below:
"Get back to the five-hundred-foot level—quick!"
Light as his head had become, and confused as he was, Jack realized what these words meant, and he knew enough to obey without question. He brought the Snowbird down the air-ways on a long slant and at a swift pace. He realized that, as they descended, he was able to breathe more easily and his head stopped ringing. For some moments he had felt like an intoxicated person in the vastly rarified plane of the upper ether.
The professor staggered to the young operator's side.
"Danger! Danger above, boy!" he gasped. "We cannot cross these mountains while—while the air is so thin."
"But we need not cross them to reach Aleukan?" suggested Jack, speaking with some difficulty himself. There was a pain in the region of his lungs and he saw that Professor Henderson was very pale.
"That is a fact," panted the professor. "Descend, Jack. Make it two hundred feet. Be careful!"
For as the youth depressed the planes again the ground beneath seemed to fairly leap up to meet them.
"What do you know about that?" gasped the young aviator. "She—she doesn't work at all like she used to."
"Less attraction," declared the scientist.
"What do you mean, sir?" cried Jack. "Has the law of gravitation lost its power over us—and over the flying machine?"
"There is a difference—a great difference," proclaimed Professor
Henderson. "The power of attraction is lessened mightily."
"What does it mean? What can it mean?" murmured the disturbed youth.
"I suspect—I fear—"
What the professor would have said was not spoken then. Mark interrupted by shouting:
"Look ahead! Look ahead! What is that—a river?"
"There is no river of size in this locality," declared the professor, quickly, training his glasses on the white streak that appeared on the ground ahead.
Phineas Roebach struggled forward to the operator's bench. He gasped:
"This is worse than I ever thought flying could be. Do you have to go so fast? I cannot get my breath. Hullo! That's the glacier ahead. The dog trail to Aleukan follows the ice for more than fifty miles."
"A glacier it is," agreed Professor Henderson. "It seems pretty smooth,
Jack. You can descend still farther."
That they were all suffering from the rarity of the atmosphere was plain. It seemed as though the envelope of breathable air surrounding the earth had suddenly become vastly rarified. If the atmosphere had been so changed all over the globe it would be a catastrophe unspeakable.
"We certainly can't cross these mountains—nor the Rockies," groaned
Jack. "How are we ever going to get home again?"
"If the air remains as it is now?" asked Mark. "You're right! We're imprisoned in this part of Alaska just as fast as though we were caged behind iron bars."
"If we only had some of those torches we used on the moon," said Jack.
"What will we do, Professor?" begged Mark.
"Let us not lose hope," responded the old scientist. "First we will get to Aleukan and see if our provisions have been brought over from Coldfoot."
"I'll bet they haven't been brought across the range," said the pessimistic Mark. "If the air everywhere is so rarified the men would die crossing the mountains." "Think of the people living on Mt. Washington—and other heights!" cried Jack, suddenly. "Why, they will be snuffed out like candles. It is an awful thought."
"We will hope, at least, that this fearful catastrophe is local," said the professor, seriously. "Have a care, Jack! Don't dip like that. We do not want to descend here."
It was extremely difficult to manage the Snowbird, for she answered to the levers so much more quickly than before. The air pressure on the craft was so slight that at the least touch she mounted upward like a scared quail! The speed of the aeroplane had to be reduced, too; they traveled scarcely forty miles an hour.
On either hand as they winged their way over the great river of ice (it was quite four miles broad) sharp cliffs arose, guarding the glacier. These cliffs ranged from two hundred to a thousand feet high.
The professor, at once interested in such a marvel of nature, begged Jack to reduce the speed even more. They merely floated above the cracked expanse of whitish-green ice for some minutes.
"That's what the earthquakes did for it," said Phineas Roebach. "You see those crevasses—and some of 'em mighty deep? Well, they weren't here the last time I came this way." "She is in motion again, perhaps," suggested Professor Henderson.
"It ain't been in motion for ages—or, so the Aleuts say," responded the oil hunter.
"But there looks now to be some sagging forward. There is a crevasse splitting the glacier from wall to wall," proclaimed the scientist.
"We'd never be able to sled over this trail in the world!" cried Mark.
"How would you pass such a yawning gulf as that?"
"It beats me what's happened here since I was across last," muttered
Roebach, scratching his head in bewilderment.
The yawning ice was right beneath the flying machine. It was a hundred yards across at the surface. They seemed to be looking down for five hundred feet, or more, into its greenish depths.
Jack had turned the Snowbird's prow and they were drifting toward the western cliffs which guarded the glacier. Here the rocky heights were at least seven hundred feet above the ice.
Out of a crack in the high wall—from its eyrie without doubt—a huge female eagle suddenly shot down toward the drifting aeroplane. The flying machine seemed not to startle the great bird at all; it only angered her. Perhaps she had young up there in the cliff and she feared her hereditary enemy, Man, was coming on wings to deprive her of them.
With a scream of rage the eagle dashed herself directly into the face of Jack, strapped to the operator's seat. For once Andy Sudds had not his rifle at hand; and, the attack was so unexpected, it is doubtful if he could have come to the rescue in season.
With beak and claws the bird endeavored to tear at the youth's face. Jack jerked loose the transmitter and beat it to pieces over the bird, but without making her desist.
Again and again the feathered creature darted in, claws expanded and beak snapping. With one talon she raked Jack's right arm and shredded the heavy coatsleeve, the sleeve beneath, and scratched his arm. The next instant her iron beak snapped upon his left hand.
Jack Darrow was plucky, but the pain of the wound brought a scream to his lips. It was answered by the wild shrieks of the eagle.
And then, ere any of his friends could reach him (for the professor had gone back to the cabin), the boy, fighting for his sight—indeed, for his very life—by some unfortunate movement depressed the planes. Like an arrow from the bow the Snowbird shot downward into the yawning crevasse which split the glacier from wall to wall. With a yell of terror Mark Sampson sprang forward to the operator's bench. But he was too late—if he could have done any good at all.
The Snowbird swung to one side. Her right forward plane crashed against the wall of ice, shattering some of the hard crystal. But on the rebound the fluttering flying machine sank lower. Jack tried to make her rise. She refused to obey the lever.
And then, with a suddenness that made them all catch their breath, the Snowbird plunged down into the ice-gulf and ended her dive with a terrific crash on a narrow shelf at least two hundred feet below the surface of the glacier.