"All new!" he said, proudly. "We're about the first ship to make this passage. McClintock on a sledge was up here."
Helen Marr brushed the hair from her forehead and turned with the silver coffeepot in her hand. She pointed over the taper jib boom of the Pole Star. "I remember," she said, "a painting in an old book, of Lady Franklin and Sir John Franklin sitting together in an old London room. The painting was called 'The Northwest Passage.'"
"He died down there," said Stirling, pointing toward the magnetic north. "See the glint of ice? The sun won't sink to-day, it will rim the world to the west and slowly rise."
The girl watched Stirling and stepped closer to his side. "Do you think we can get through to open sea?" she asked, turning her face up to his.
He shook his head. "I don't know," he answered. "We'll try! We're heading for Barrow Strait and Lancaster Sound. Both may be jammed with ice. If they are——"
Stirling's pause was suggestive. The girl shuddered and drew a coat about her shoulders, then set the coffeepot down on the deck and glided to the taffrail. A nip had come into the air, and it was no longer day or night. The sea birds rested upon the floes without motion; the seals and walrus watched the fast-gliding ship, then slipped into the water, and were gone. Desolation and death ruled the world above seventy-three.
Stirling waited until the girl came back. She picked up the coffeepot, and her eyes were filled with longing as she said:
"Go back and do what you can. There seems to be ice everywhere."
Stirling squared his shoulders and stepped briskly to the wheelsman. He bent there and consulted the binnacle, reached and took the chart which the leader held out to him. Its details were vague enough. Dots showed where land might be, and the soundings were in spots where explorers had lowered a lead line through the frozen surface.
"A bad place to be," Stirling said to the leader. "I think we are in for it from now on."