Muscles ached, but men joked and bantered and worked all the harder. Then at last it was all aboard—eight hundred pounds of oil, seven tons of gasoline, a thousand pounds of chocolate, pemmican, coffee and hard biscuit, which were to provision this great adventure.
Ground lines were loosed, the Nardak rose slowly. A clamorous ovation saluted her from the watchers. Shouts rose in four different languages, the bell of the little log mission clanged its farewell. Lomen Larsen touched off a row of powder-flares in a final uproarious salute.
Higher and higher rose the Nardak, then sped northward on her last great stretch of flight.
What would happen in this unexplored land? Only the future could answer.
CHAPTER XVI
QUEST FOR CAMP
Lee Renaud’s black eyes looked out anxiously from the shaggy fur of his hooded parka or Eskimo coat as he climbed out on the top of the airship to see if ice had formed. Not a pleasant task, this, in a wind pressure created by a speed of over a hundred miles per hour, and with the thermometer at twenty below zero! Good, no ice sheathing as yet on the great shining hull. Coatings of ice and sleet were the danger to a dirigible—these could weight the ship down to a tragic fall.
Below the Nardak stretched snow fields, and often great frozen lakes where the ice lay sometimes smooth, sometimes thrust high in grotesque ridges where some throe of nature had hurled up the frozen substance. For days now they had been traversing the snow barrens, a strange white world where daylight held continuously. For this was the land of the midnight sun. Through the summer of this weird Arctic world, there would be months of daylight, with the sun riding from horizon to horizon, but never quite dipping out of sight. With autumn would come a twilight that would merge into the long winter night when the sun left this frozen land to months of darkness.
In the present daylight period, the Nardak’s men must make their exploration, then flee before the night, back to civilization and home.
Ordinarily, the great ship kept to a height of well over two thousand feet, but when the photographers wanted to picture some object, the dirigible would be glided down to a thousand, five hundred, even a mere three hundred feet above ground. Lee Renaud was startled to find that ice sheets which from on high had looked glassy smooth, from the near view stood out in deep ridges and furrows, as though broken by some giant’s plowshare. Nature turned some strange tricks up here in this frozen North.
Everywhere was white stillness. Not a sign of vegetation; not a sign of animal life—or so it seemed at first. Those untrained in the ways of the Arctic do not at once realize the protective coloring which Nature has bestowed on her denizens in this land of eternal cold.