After nearly six hours of ceaseless storm-driven flight, I received the greatest shock. Peering ahead through the frosted cabin windows, I realized suddenly that there was a great area dead ahead — which I could not see!
"It can't be real!" I gasped. "A colossal blind spot—"
My vision seemed to slide around that vast area. I could see the ice-pack beyond it, scores of miles away. I could see the ice on either side of it. But the area itself just didn't register.
"Some trick of refraction, perhaps due to the terrestrial magnetic currents that are strong here," I muttered. "Maybe it's connected with the mystery of the aurora."
My scientific reasoning didn't quiet my nerves. For the storm that bore me on was carrying me straight toward that huge blind spot. When I was almost to the edge of the enigmatic area my vision seemed to slide away to either side, almost at right angles. If this was refraction, it was a type that was completely unknown to science.
My storm-tossed plane hurtled with reckless speed toward the edge of the vast blind spot; I could see nothing whatever ahead. Everything seemed crazily twisted out of focus, distorted by that weird wall.
Abruptly the gale flung my reeling plane directly through the fantastic wall that defied my vision — and I was inside the blind spot! But now I could not see outside it.
"This — this is impossible!" I gasped with startled terror.
I could see nothing but the interior, a great space of tossing ocean, curving ominously to every sinister horizon. Black waves, black clouds … Suddenly I gasped in amazement. Far ahead loomed a long, high mass of forbidding, dark land.
The storm still howled with all its original fury, carrying me dangerously low over the foam-fanged waves toward the distant land. Through the scudding snow, I detected a faint greenish radiance. But realization of my immediate peril swept away my demoralization. I could not land in that vicious sea. Yet neither could I climb again in that gale.