The land I had glimpsed was now a mile ahead of me, its frowning eastern cliffs stretching right across my course. The gray precipices were hundreds of feet high. Above them, the land ran back into dark forests and shaggy wooded hills where no landing was possible. Then I saw a small beach strewn with boulders. Pure desperation made me head the plane toward it.
Over the boiling white hell of breakers I shot. My wheels touched the beach. Before I could brake with the forward jets, the port window smashed against a projecting boulder. But that was the only damage when I stopped out of reach of the waves.
I shut off the rocket motor and stumbled out of the ship. My knees were trembling with the reaction of prolonged tenseness. But the land and sea inside the incredible blind spot made me forget my exhaustion.
The air was keenly cold. It was the cold of an ordinary northern spring, though, not the bitter polar chill it should have been. The sky was dark with clouds, fleeing before the gale. The boom of raging surf and keen of wailing winds were loud in my ears. Stranger even than the comparative warmth was the faint green radiance that seemed to pervade the air. An eldritch glow that could barely be seen, it seemed to stream upward from the ground. It was oddly exhilarating.
"Might be gamma radiation from some unknown source," I reasoned. "That may account for the refraction that makes this whole area a blind spot. I wish I had instruments here to check. Hope it doesn't have the usual effects of gamma radiation on human tissue. But it seems invigorating."
Excitement began to rise in me. I had found a hidden land of strange warmth completely unknown to civilization, here in the polar wastes. Its strange trick of refraction had defied discovery until now. No scientist could have been dropped in that blind spot without feeling the urge to explore. Waiting for the storm to die down, flying out of the blind area and getting back to the ship for a regular exploration party would have been wiser. But like every other man, I had the desire to be first in an unknown land.
I moored the plane between two boulders and removed my flying togs to don regulation exploring clothes for Arctic weather. With a pack of food pellets and blankets on my back, I began to climb the jagged, craggy wall.
Gasping for breath, I reached the rim of the lofty cliffs. Cold sea winds buffeted me, and the boom of bursting breakers came muffledly from below. Harshly screaming sea-gulls soared and circled around me.
To my right lay the edge of the cliffs. To my left, a strip of heather ended in a forest of fir trees, bending in the wind. Beyond the dark fir forest, shaggy, wooded hills rose steeply. Toward the south lay the greater part of the land, rising into higher forested hills. It was a wild northern landscape, bleak, harsh, inhospitable. Yet somehow I relished being alone among screaming winds and gulls, and booming surf, and groaning trees.
I stared at the towering little island I had glimpsed. Its cliffs rose sheer from the green sea for a thousand feet. Its flat top was on a level with the mainland, and separated from it only by a narrow, deep chasm through which the ocean surged.