Wireless calls began coming in to the Nardak from the distant north. “What has happened? You are overdue here already!” These calls were from the radio operator at Shagun, the wilderness settlement that would be the dirigible’s only halting place on its way to the Arctic.
A relay of supplies had been shipped here, the end of both railroad and civilization. The Nardak was to take them aboard so as to enter upon the last lap of her journey as fully fueled and provisioned as possible.
Seven hours behind her schedule, the great silver Nardak drifted into the sky above Shagun.
The boom of guns and the lighting of a line of signal fires greeted her. These were to call together a landing-crew to lend their aid in bringing to earth the first dirigible ever seen in these parts.
For a time, the Nardak hung motionless, then by the use of movable planes and sliding weights, by which the center of gravity was shifted, she slowly began to nose down towards earth.
Waiting in a spreading, wedge-shaped formation were two long lines of nearly a hundred men. Not nearly so many were really needed. But every husky denizen of Shagun wanted to have a hand at manning the pull ropes of this monster visitor. Slowly the great ship of the air was drawn to earth in the vast clearing which Lomen Larsen, the Factor of the Shagun Post, had prepared ahead of time for the reception of the sky ship. Here, of course, was no cement landing field and ironringed cement posts to receive mooring ropes, but the ground had been smoothed, and trees served as mooring posts.
As Lee stepped off the ship, he felt that he had stepped off into the Land of Contrasts. Here at Shagun ended the shining lines of steel rails over which traveled the mighty engines and loaded cars of the Great Northern. And here at Shagun began primitive transportation by birchbark canoe, shoulder-pack and dog-sled by which necessities were carried on into the North. Bearded white men, Indians, a few slant-eyed Eskimos with cotton garments of civilization donned incongruously atop their native furs, moved along the trails and in and out the low-roofed log shacks. And above these primitive folk loomed the high aerial and mighty masts of a modern powerful radio sending station!
But not for Lee Renaud, nor for anyone else of the expedition, was there much time to stand day-dreaming over the strangeness of the long arm of radio reaching out to touch this primitive settlement on the Arctic fringes. For it seemed the great Nardak landed in her open-air dock one minute, and the next the work of loading her new cargo and of further repairing began.
Men fell to with a vim. Men learned in geology and meteorology donned dungarees and entered upon a brand-new career of stevedoring. A perspiring aerial photographer and an equally perspiring slant-eyed Eskimo tugged a huge box to the hold opening. Indian trappers and the engineers of the latest thing in air engines labored together at the mountain of bales and barrels and tanks to be put aboard. A dozen times Yiggy escaped his quarters and rushed joyously underfoot to enter battle-royal with shaggy sled huskies that could swallow him at a mouthful—and a dozen times Yiggy had to be rescued from battle, murder and sudden death.