Up in the keel storage room, Arctic scouts went through the assortment of skis and snowshoes, preparatory to the foot-excursions in the land of snow. Slim up-curved sticks of the skis, broad, thong-latticed spread of the snowshoes—methods of snow-locomotion that have come down from man’s dim, primitive past! These seemed incongruous aboard this modern sky ship. But Captain Jan Bartlot was combining the best of many ages in this exploration.
A little, short-haired dog walked sedately out from the crew’s quarters, navigated a ladder-like stair adroitly, and then curled up beside one of the big observation windows. This was Yiggy, Olaf Valchen’s pet. Yiggy was an old-timer in the ways of the Arctic, having made many trips across the snow barrens with Valchen in his mining supply transport, a big-winged aeroplane. Out of some bits of fur, Olaf was already making Yiggy a new set of boots for polar walking—since Yiggy, being a temperate zone dog, had not been born with foot-pad protection like the shaggy canines of the land of snow and ice.
Here, there and everywhere over his craft went Captain Bartlot, seeing that all things were in proper shape. Before this start for the Arctic could be made, weary months of closest application to detail had already been spent by Bartlot. Equipping an expedition was a huge business. There was the ship itself that had had to be refitted from stem to stern in preparation for bucking Arctic storm and the terrors of the “great cold.” There had been waterproof cloth and fur and machinery and radios and tons of food to be bought. Where they were going, there was no grocery up the block to run to. There was no mechanician’s shop around the corner, either. So to make a ship of the air safe for getting them there and bringing them back, and safe for landing on frozen polar fields, one had to go prepared with hundreds of extra machine parts. One little missing screw could mean a calamity.
A captain must think of dessicated vegetables and canned sunshine for his crew’s health. And just suppose they had forgotten to pack the snow moss! They hadn’t. It was there in its container, along with reindeer skin boots and the down-lined gloves.
On even so slight a thing as a bundle of snow moss does the success of an Arctic trip hang. For without this specially prepared moss to line boots and absorb dampness, the feet of men tramping the blizzard-swept snow barrens would freeze.
Just such details as these, and a thousand others, great and small, had to be attended to by Captain Jan and the men who worked with him.
A trip into the frozen north was no holiday of leisure; it meant hard work for all concerned.
The busiest place aboard the Nardak was the radio-room, with its every space—walls, ceiling, desk—crowded with modern equipment. Here was the powerful short-wave sending and receiving set, an intermediate wave set for communication with near-by cities and other ships of both air and sea, and a radio direction finder. Within this room, a group of mining scouts was carefully taking apart and putting back together one of the Renaud portables, under the watchful eye of Lee. These men must know their radio mechanism. For when the great dirigible dropped these men for scouting in various parts of the Arctic waste, radio would be their only means of communication with the rest of the party.
The staccato tap-tapping of radio telegraph seemed never to drop silent. Either Simms or Renaud was always at the desk instrument. As the string of Morse came in, they deciphered the code into plain English, and passed on the slips of paper to Tornado Harrison, weather-getter of the expedition. From Harrison’s atmospheric deductions, the route of the ship was plotted. There was constant communication between radio-room, chartroom and navigating section.
This Morse code that tapped in so steadily was bringing reports from the United States Weather Bureau at Washington. These reports were the chief aids in navigating the great dirigible.