They were fortunate enough to find a smooth and level spot suitable for grounding the Flying Fish upon, at a distance of barely a quarter of a mile from the objects of their interest; and it being by that time six o’clock in the evening, and too late to do any good before dinner, they secured the ship there for the night—taking the precaution of fully weighting her down with compressed air in addition to mooring her firmly to the ice by her four grip-anchors. It was a most happy inspiration which impelled them to take this precaution; for when they arose next morning a terrific gale from the northward was blowing, accompanied by a heavy ceaseless fall of snow; and, well secured as the ship was both by her weight and by her anchors, she fairly trembled at times with the violence of the blast. Had she been dependent only upon her anchors and her own unassisted weight—which the reader will remember was very trifling notwithstanding her immense dimensions—she would infallibly have been whirled away like a bubble upon the wings of the gale. The highly-compressed air, however, held her securely down upon her icy bed, and, beyond imparting an occasional tremor, as already mentioned, the tempest, fierce as it was, had no power to move her.
In such terrible weather it was of course useless to think of pursuing their investigations; it would, indeed, have been the sheerest madness to have attempted to face the furious gale, with its deadly cold and the blinding whirling snow. The travellers were therefore compelled to spend an inactive day. For this, however, they were by no means sorry; they had been keeping rather late hours since entering the Arctic circle, and this interval of inaction afforded them an opportunity of securing their arrears of rest. Besides this there were sketches to complete, and a thousand little odd matters to attend to—to such an extent, indeed, that when they once began work they wondered at their own thoughtlessness in not having attended to them before. Thus employed, with occasional interludes of meditative gazing out upon the ceaseless whirling rush of the snow, the day passed rapidly and pleasantly away, wound up by an hour or two of vocal and instrumental music after dinner. They retired early to their warm comfortable state-rooms that night, and were lulled to sweet dreamless slumber by the howling of the gale outside.
The four following days were spent in the same manner—the gale lasting all that time with unabated fury, accompanied by an almost ceaseless fall of snow. But on the fifth day the weather moderated; the snow ceased, or at all events fell only intermittently; the wind backed round and blew from the south-west; and the exterior temperature, which during the gale had fallen to thirty-three degrees below zero, rose twenty degrees. The sky was still overcast and lowering, it is true, and the cold was still intense. But notwithstanding this the weather, compared with that of the preceding five days, seemed positively fine; and, wrapping themselves up in their warmest clothing, and arming themselves with pick and shovel, they set out to discover if possible what lay concealed beneath the two queer-looking poles.
Chapter Eleven.
An Interesting Relic.
They issued from the ship through the trap-door in her bottom; and no sooner did they find themselves in the open air than an almost uncontrollable impulse seized them to go back again. The contrast between the warm comfortable temperature of the ship’s interior and the bitter piercing cold without was so great that at first the latter felt quite unendurable. They, however, persevered; and, after perhaps ten minutes of intense suffering, the severe exercise of scrambling over the rotten slippery hummocks somewhat restored their impeded circulation, and they began to feel that, perhaps, after all, they might be able to do something toward the execution of their self-imposed task. The mere act of breathing, however, continued to be exceedingly painful; and when they at length reached the spot of which they were in search, they were able to fully realise, for the first time in their lives, the incredible difficulties attendant upon the exploration of the regions within the polar circles.
On a nearer inspection of the two poles they proved to be stout spars about the thickness of a man’s leg; and, from the appearance in each of a sort of sheave-hole, Lieutenant Mildmay declared his conviction that they were the masts of a small ship. They were very rotten, however, and, if Mildmay’s surmise was indeed correct, the craft must have been under the ice for a very long time. The mere suggestion was enough to fully arouse their curiosity; and, forgetful for the moment of the intense cold, to which they were already in a measure growing accustomed, they set to work with a will plying pick-axe and shovel upon the ice with such small dexterity as they possessed.
The task to which they had devoted themselves was, after all, not a very difficult one, the ice, especially that of ancient formation, yielding readily before the vigorous strokes of their picks; and it soon became evident that they could work to greater advantage by dividing themselves into two gangs of two each; one gang breaking up the ice with the pick, and the other shovelling away the débris. The low temperature, however, made the work very exhausting; and by lunch time they had only succeeded in excavating a hole some twenty-five feet long—or the distance between the two masts—by six feet wide and four feet deep. They had widened this excavation by a couple of feet and sunk it some four feet deeper by six o’clock that evening; and then they knocked off work for the day, returning to the Flying Fish stiff, and exhausted with their unwonted exertions, but with more voracious appetites than they ever remembered experiencing before.