How gently all the lore of this man oozed out of him! he seemed an oracle, as, with hot-tingling fingers pressed against the gunwale of the boat, we listened to his words. “Sebastopol is not taken.” Where and what was Sebastopol?
But “Sir John Franklin?” There we were at home again,—our own delusive little speciality rose uppermost. Franklin’s party, or traces of the dead which represented it, had been found nearly a thousand miles to the south of where we had been searching for them. He knew it; for the priest had a German newspaper which told all about it. And so we “out oars” again, and rowed into the fogs.
Another sleeping-halt has passed, and we have all washed clean at the fresh-water basins, and furbished up our ragged furs and woollens. Kasarsoak, the snow top of Sanderson’s Hope, shows itself above the mists, and we hear the yelling of the dogs. Petersen had been foreman of the settlement, and he calls my attention, with a sort of pride, to the tolling of the workmen’s bell. It is six o’clock. We are nearing the end of our trials. Can it be a dream?
We hugged the land by the big harbour, turned the corner by the old brew-house, and, in the midst of a crowd of children, hauled our boats for the last time upon the rocks.
For eighty-four days we had lived in the open air. Our habits were hard and weather-worn. We could not remain within the four walls of a house without a distressing sense of suffocation. But we drank coffee that night before many a hospitable threshold, and listened again and again to the hymn of welcome, which, sung by many voices, greeted our deliverance.
[CHAPTER XXI.]
CONCLUSION.
We received all manner of kindness from the Danes of Upernavik. They gave us many details of the expeditions in search of Sir John Franklin, and added the painful news that my gallant friend and comrade, Bellot, had perished in a second crusade to save him. We knew each other by many common sympathies: I had divided with him the hazards of mutual rescue among the ice-fields; and his last letter to me, just before I left New York, promised me the hope that we were to meet again in Baffin’s Bay, and that he would unite himself with our party as a volunteer. The French service never lost a more chivalrous spirit.