“Nay, nay,” cried the surgeon, laughing. “I am but a student—a baby student. Were I to live for ten thousand years I should still be only reading in the first book of Nature.”
“You are modest, at all events,” Claude said; “and I believe that is a sign of genius.”
“One cannot help feeling both modest and humble, Captain Alwyn, when standing face to face with the first facts of science, and knowing that the little knowledge he has acquired is to the vast unknown but as the light of a candle to the noonday sun.”
For days the Icebear followed the course of this estuary. Sometimes it narrowed to a mere deep cutting or canal, anon it would widen out into a broad oblong lake. At length it ended in an inland gulf or sea, some thirty or forty miles square.
In latitude this mysterious sheet of water was fully a degree and a half south of the inlet.
Dr Barrett spent days in dredging, and in roaming over the hills, studying botany and geology.
There were high mountains all around, and it was a strange sight for those on the deck of the Icebear, which was anchored at some little distance from the shore, to witness mighty cataracts tumbling sheer over the very summits of these hills, and coming roaring and foaming down their sides. The men looked upon this as magical, but it is easily explained: there were other hills behind these—much higher ones—that were invisible from the ship’s deck, and it was from these the waters poured down.
As might have been supposed, they found the waters of this inland sea less salt than the ocean itself, though by no means brackish.
“I think, sir,” said Dr Barrett, when he came off one evening, “that we need hardly proceed farther north. We can hardly expect to find another such lake as this.”
“Here, then, we shall winter,” replied Claude.