Bray called excitedly to me from the forward deck of the schooner.
"Keith, your hunch was right. There's something queer in this trawl!"
Involuntarily I shuddered in the sudden chill of fear. Somehow I had known that the trawl would bring something up from the icy Arctic sea. Pure intuition had made me persuade Bray to lower his trawl in this unpromising spot.
"Coming, Bray!" I called, and hurried through the litter of sleds and snarling dogs.
Our schooner, the sturdy auxiliary ice-breaker Peter Saul, was lying at anchor in the Lincoln Sea, only four hundred miles south of the Pole. A hundred yards away, the dazzling white fields of ice stretched northward — a vast, frozen, scarcely explored waste.
When we had reached the ice pack the night before, I had somehow conceived the idea that Bray, the oceanographer, ought to try his luck here. Bray had laughed at my hunch at first, but had finally consented.
"Are you psychic, Keith?" he demanded. "Look what the trawl brought up!"
A heavy, ancient-looking gold cylinder, about eight inches long, was sticking out of the frozen mud. On its sides were engraved a row of queer symbols, almost worn away.
"What in the world is it?" I breathed. "And what are those letters on it?"
Halsen, a big, bearded Norwegian sailor, answered me.