Chagra was willing enough, but it took him all night to scrape up the necessary dogs, and not till next morning, October 30th (a day which later became indelibly burned into my memory), behind a team of eleven dogs driven by my original Yakut pilot, did I set off in a temperature twenty degrees below zero for Bulun where from Nindemann and Noros I hoped to learn of De Long’s whereabouts. Two days later, after hard labor by the dogs through deep snow and over broken ice, I was at Ku Mark Surk, where I changed my worn-out dog team for a reindeer sledge, and with that made the last sixty miles southward up the frozen Lena to Bulun, arriving on the evening of November 2.
I promptly enquired my way to the hut where were lodged Nindemann and Noros, and in mingled fear and hope hurried there. What was I going to hear of my captain, of Dr. Ambler, about my other shipmates? Which one of them was already dead, what chance had I of rescuing the survivors? With my heart pounding violently, I pushed open the door of the hut.
CHAPTER XXXIII
In the smoky light of the rude interior of that Yakut hut, I saw at first only Louis Noros, clothed in ragged woolen underwear, bending over a rough table, sawing away with his sheath knife on a loaf of hard black bread, while in a corner by themselves a number of Yakuts were busy over the fire on their own supper. Noros glanced up on my entrance, looked at me vacantly, and then resumed his hacking at the hard bread. I waited a moment to see if he might recognize me, but as he did not, I advanced, stretched out my hand, and said,
“Hello, Noros! Don’t you know me?”
Startled at being addressed in English, Noros dropped his knife, peered intently in my face, and then fell on my neck, sobbing,
“My God, Mr. Melville, are you alive?”
At this outburst, through the smoky room I saw Nindemann suddenly lift himself on one elbow from a rough couch at the side and cry out brokenly,
“Mr. Melville! We thought you were dead! That all hands on the Jeannette were dead except me and Noros! Louis and me thought we were the only survivors—we were sure the whaleboat’s were all drowned as well as the second cutter’s!”
Bending over Nindemann, too far gone to lift himself, while Noros clung round my shoulders, I wept with them.