The only feasible method of procedure seemed to be to get aerial photographs, piece together the long strips of film, and from a study of these get an idea of the lay of the land. This would take time. To cruise continually would burn the precious fuel and oil that must be more or less hoarded for the return trip. Better to establish a central camp for sleeping and eating, then to radiate out on air trips at regular intervals.
For a time the dirigible forged ahead, the eyes of all watchers searching the snow barrens for a safe base camp. Below them a snow fog began creeping over the land, a mysterious curtain of blue and gray light. As they swept on in this strange haze, snow hills and valleys took on warped, unreal proportions. The official decision was that it was better to land now than to risk crashing into some shrouded peak.
At other landing fields there had been hundreds of men to pull at the drag ropes and gently ease the ship to earth. Here there was naught save snow and perhaps a polar bear or two—no very active assistance at landing in that!
Lee Renaud, like the rest of the crew, was full of anxiety as to how the new, and untried method Captain Jan was depending on would work. He hurried along the corridor to a trapdoor section where Bartlot and a number of his officers and men were grouped about a great flat metal plate that was connected to a windlass by hawsers passing over two sets of pulleys.
In the meantime, the dirigible, by motor power and the use of elevators, had been descending lower and lower, until it was now less than a hundred feet above the great ice field.
At a word of command from the Captain, the metal plate was let down through its opening in the ship. They heard when it struck the ice with a clank.
Along one of those pulley hawsers had been affixed a heavily insulated length of pliable electric wiring. Now, with hand that trembled a little as he began his great experiment, Captain Jan pushed an electric button that connected power from one of the ship’s generators to this wire leading down to the plate resting on the ice far below. This plate was in reality an electric stove. As the current hit it, it was supposed by its heat to sink rapidly into the ice. Then when the electricity was cut off, it would freeze deep and fast into the ice—or so men hoped and prayed it would.
After a breath-taking interval, Captain Jan turned the windlass gently, to see if the plate-anchor held in the ice. More and more he wound on the turn shaft—and the anchor held! The experiment was working! A great shout went up from all sides. Many hands cranked at the windlass, taking in the lines, gradually forcing the ship down and down.
At last the pneumatic bumpers touched ice. It was all hands out to see what manner of frozen world they had landed in.
Viewed from above, this surface had looked smooth enough, but now they found it to be far from a “looking-glass surface.” There were up-ended ice cakes and pressure ridges to be clambered over. Of a certainty, water must be somewhere under this ice sheet. For water freezing, expanding, contracting, was what shot up the slabs of pressure ice. This was no pleasant place to dwell. There were whole stretches where the ice floor had split asunder in deep crevasses and purple chasms. Seeming snow hills were mere masks across gully traps.