For a night, or for the length of a period that would have been a night had the hazy red ball of the sun ever dropped entirely below the horizon, the expedition rested in this strange ice waste.
Then a party set out on foot to reconnoiter the land. Captain Jan, Valchen, a dozen others. Lee Renaud was glad his strong young legs gained him a place in this crew. Of necessity, each man had to bear a stout load. One could not venture out in the bare white wastes without food and weapons, a fur sleeping-bag to crawl into in case of a storm, and a great knife for cutting snow blocks to build a wind-break. Also, the party carried bundles of bright, orange-hued flags to mark their trail.
Excitement hung over this little group as they made their start at trail-breaking into the unknown. Some on snowshoes, some on skis, they marched out under the strange glow of the Arctic sun, a glow that sometimes crisped and blistered, but never seemed to hold any cheer in its pale gleams that slanted over eternal ice.
After they had crossed miles of ice level and laboriously scaled frozen cliffs, they came down into a strange valley. On every side were snow mounds, like haycocks in assorted sizes, some the height of a man, some as tall as a one-story building. They were the roofs of round pits. Some pressure below had blown up these weird snow bubbles.
Bartlot, in the lead, stumbled against one. Its sides caved in and the Captain shot out of sight down in a snow hollow fifteen feet deep. Lines were flung down and soon he was drawn out, breathing hard and pretty well banged up, but luckily not seriously injured. After that, the party moved forward, roped together for protection.
Out of curiosity, they now and again slashed openings in the snow domes. Some covered pits fifty and a hundred feet wide, and vastly deep. It behooved them to pick their way carefully here, and to test each step with an Alpine staff thrust into the snow ahead. Behind the party, the orange gleam of the route flags marked a zig-zag trail and showed the way back to the base camp.
After threading this valley checkered with pitfalls, and climbing a range of ice hills all pitted and honeycombed by underground pressure, Bartlot’s party halted on the crest of the ridge to gaze ahead in blank astonishment. A huge dark blot, a triangle in shape, loomed blackly against the white of a mountain of snow. It was as though some giant, passing up this valley, had painted his huge triangular flag on the smooth white, and had gone on his way.
To find the meaning of that mysterious black tri-cornered surface, they must push on to it. It could not be far, just across the valley and up the next height.
But “just across the valley” was a deceptive term. In the haze of the ever shifting Arctic lights, horizons are most uncanny things. Sometimes objects far away seem almost under the nose. And again, men find their feet mounting some small rise that in the haze they had thought was far away. Mirages, too, fling processions of strange scenes before the eye. A mountain, a lake, a river looms vividly ahead, then fades back into the shadows from which it has sprung.
So it was a good ten hours of hard travel, and stumblings, and dodgings of ice pitfalls, before the exploration party came within “normal eyesight” view of the great black triangle.