“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.