Ingomar was a splendid setting off to him. Curtis, with his spare body, his extreme vitality, his noble mind and grasp of soul. Ingomar, with his splendid physique and king-like form. But Ingomar knew the rudiments of most sciences, and he had the rare gift of picking up just the main points of a subject. Hide a few small nuggets of gold in a gravel heap, and Ingomar would soon have found them for you, and wouldn’t have bothered much about the gravel. That’s the sort of man Ingomar was. With all this there was a deal of romance in his character, and he had one set purpose in this expedition, which, if he could but fulfil, he felt would make his austere father proud of him.
Curtis and he were nearly always together during the thorough exploration—from a scientist’s and surveyor’s point of view—of that great tract of water far inside the Antarctic circle called Ross’s Sea. The mariners of old did not take much time to study science. It was the surface of the sea they dealt with, and the land around it.
After passing Ringgolds Knoll, vide map, you will steer east and south, and after Cape Adare is passed, south into this sea, and its simplest exploration would take months.
It has Victoria Land on the right, a land of wondrous interest, a land of fire in the frozen ocean, land of volcanoes, extinct and extant, of awful icebergs, of more terrible, yet beautiful ice-barriers, and in summer a land of birds in millions.
To explore and survey this sea was one of the chief objects of the voyage.
And now that they had reached Cape Adare, they set about the work in good earnest.
I think you know that Charlie was a boy of many fads—that is the low name for his studies, perhaps—for Charlie’s fads were a step or two above keeping rabbits and guinea-pigs. We have seen how when at sea he used to delight to swing away aloft in the crow’s-nest, and all the marvels he saw from that eyrie of his would, if described in print, fill a biggish book. There was poetry and romance, too, in his life in the nest, and I’m not sure that his thoughts did not take a nobler turn, and that up there at night, swinging among the stars and planets, as one might say, he did not believe himself to be nearer to God—the God of infinity, mind you, not of this insignificant earth alone.
Anyhow, when he used to come down of a night, after a spell up yonder, his eyes had a happier look, and his face seemed to shine, while his thoughts seemed far away.
He was a harder student than Walter, though had you asked Captain Mayne Brace, he would have told you straight that the latter might possibly make the better sailor, as sailors go nowadays.
“But, bless you, sir,” Brace would have added, “your smutty, rattling steamships, all bustle and filth, have almost frightened good old Neptune off his own blue throne.”