Meanwhile, the wearing days crawled by and we chafed at our impotence—well, well-equipped and eager to do something, we lay idle. I could have chewed nails for a change; our captain was even more ambitious—entering his cabin one evening with a sketch for his journal, he looked at me and asked abruptly,
“Know Hamlet, chief? No? Well, for something to do, like Hamlet I can say,
“‘Wouldst drink up eisel? Eat a crocodile? I’ll do it!’
“And so I would, chief, if there were any eisel and a few crocodiles in our stores, and by so doing I could change our position to one of usefulness. Well, what have you got there for my journal? Another sketch of this eternal ice?”
August 31st, the last day of summer, came and went. We were still fast in the pack. As a confirmation that summer was gone, we saw again that evening for the first time in months a faint aurora in the sky. De Long climbed to the crow’s-nest with a telescope, took a look around. A desert of ice in all directions, nothing but ice, ice, ice! He came down from aloft, all hope of release gone. Calling the carpenter, he ordered him to commence preparing our portable deckhouse for re-erection. Sending for me, he asked me to accompany him on a tour of the bunkers, to reassure himself, no doubt, on the coal question. Together, lighting our way with oil torches, we clambered through the dusty bunkers, the captain checking by eye my statements of the quantity in each one. Coming out, De Long musing over the figures, declared feelingly,
“God forbid anything happens to make us go back to steam pumping. Only fifty-three tons of coal—an equal weight in diamonds would not tempt me to exchange! For that coal, chief, has got to last us through another winter in the pack!”
Only another winter? What reason, I wondered, had he for supposing the end of a second winter would find us any closer to release? But the pack had far from exhausted its versatility, as I soon enough found out.
CHAPTER XXIII
September 1st came, and winter fell on us like a blanket. Snow, low temperatures, and the prompt freezing over of all stray pools with a coat of ice that failed to melt again gave the pack an immediate wintry appearance that only deepened as the month drew on. September 6th, the anniversary of our being first frozen in, opened our second year in the pack, with the only change noticeable the fact that winter had set in earlier and harder. But of course our present position, a hundred and fifty miles north of that of the year before, might easily have accounted for that.
September drifted by. October came. The temperatures dropped into the sub-zero twenties. We noted only that we were less sensitive to cold than the year before—luckily for us, for apparently we were in for a worse freezing. All hands, officers and men, became more moody, less talkative. By now it was evident to even the dullest-witted that we might go on thus forever in the ice pack; that is, at least till death in one form or another—by starvation, when our food gave out; by freezing, when we exhausted our coal; or by the ice crushing our weak bodies at any time—put a period to our tale. To talk further about what the expedition would do when the ice released us seemed just a waste of breath. The ice was not going to release us.