With the motors running gently, and with men hauling at the drag ropes, the great silver hull of the Nardak was finally drawn into this Arctic cave-hangar. Ice columns served as anchor posts for its hawsers. The great dirigible held central place within the shelter. Here and there little rooms and tunnels rayed off from the main room. In one was set up a workshop with anvil and hammers and an electric furnace. In another a kitchen with pots and stove and part of the stores banked against the wall. Further on, Lee Renaud had spread some laboratory material, tubes, acids, wires. He was trailing the flaw in his radio receiver, experimenting with an acid dip for selenized plates, to render them impervious to the terrific cold of this bleak white world. Since the wiring of his radio was in perfect order, and since the little machine worked well within a compartment heated to moderate warmth, Renaud was more than sure that the penetrating touch of the bitter Arctic must have interfered with his sensitized plates. With grim determination he pushed on with his work. He must find the flaw, must find the cure. Failure of these little portable connecting links could spell failure for the whole expedition.
When the expedition began to settle itself into the real business of this hazardous journey, seeking gold in this white, frozen land, Renaud watched his little “knapsack radios” being placed in the various field outfits with a clutch at his heart. Suppose the new acid-treated plates worked no better than the old ones? Suppose, in dire need, the radios failed, even as his had failed in part during the wolf episode!
Far different from anything that had ever heretofore been tried out, were Captain Jan Bartlot’s very modern methods of gold seeking. For generations, the great Canadian Northwest has been luring men into its frozen heart to seek wealth. The magnet which drew adventurers into this enormous wilderness, where for hundreds upon hundreds of miles there was no sign of human life, no vegetation save the fossilized leaves and twigs of a million years ago, no connection with the world of living men—the magnet which lured was mineral wealth. Gold, silver, nickel, platinum, not reckoned in millions of dollars, but in billions, lay almost to hand, just below the frozen crust of this frozen land. For hope of such treasures, men in the past pushed into the very fringes of the Arctic Circle by the primitive sledge drawn by wolf-dogs, and the equally primitive canoe of bark or skin. With such crude, laborious means of travel it took almost superhuman endurance to even reach the mineral fields of the Arctic. When the old-time mining prospector stepped off the train and aboard sled or canoe, it meant a whole summer of grueling, grinding travel before he reached the northern ore country. Then winter darkness would cover the land, and the prospector could do nothing but sit down and await the coming of another spring. The following year, when the red rim of the sun again showed above the Arctic world, he set about his prospecting, slow work that might lead him to wealth, but that would likely take the whole of summer daylight in the doing. That meant another settling down for another lonely sojourn through the night of winter. The next spring the bearded, fur-clad prospector trekked his wealth back to civilization—if he lived to tell the tale of those terrible years of frozen exposure, hardship and suffering. Three years to trek a thousand miles and back! Hundreds followed the lure of gold up into the far north. Only tens lived to get back.
Olaf Valchen was one of those prospectors, who, eight years ago, followed the land trail and the water trail, by sled, by skin canoe, up into the frozen north. He had found gold—millions of dollars’ worth of it in the strange rottenstone mounds that edged a frozen lake. Three years later he reached civilization, but as penniless as when he had adventured forth. On the long trail, when one has to either cast away life or gold—well, one drops the heavy skin sacks in the snow, and struggles on, thankful to survive.
And now he was going back to try to find again the trail that led to gold. But this time he was following the Arctic trail in a manner that was most modern of the modern.
In the past, one year by sled and portage! Now, over the same trail by air in a few days! As the Bartlot expedition had by dirigible so speeded up the trek into the north, so it now planned to speed up the business of prospecting.
In this marvel of mine-prospecting by air, the camera was to be the surveyor’s first instrument.
When the great dirigible backed out of its ice hangar and took the air once more, it wore a new appendage—a small, boat-like arrangement that swung by long hawsers far below the hull. In the nose of this and aimed toward earth were set three big motion-picture cameras. The major part of that million feet of film was about to be put into use.
As the huge ship of the air, day after day, radiated out from its cave base on journeys that covered hundreds of miles, the steady grind of cameras devouring film made aerial maps of the frozen hills, valleys, mountains, and lakes.
This was no film to be “canned” and carried to a warmer clime for development and display. To fulfill its purpose, it had to be developed right here in liquid baths of eight hundred gallons of water. A startling order for a land where water was not water at all, but solid ice. So after the aerial cameras had clicked their final click, some rousing times were had at the ice cave camp. Captain, engineers, weather man, radio men, doctor, geologist, cook and crew, every man-jack of them turned out to lug snow, three tons of it! Cook pots were everywhere. Buckets and bags of snow were dumped in them to melt. In the end, tons of snow made hundreds of gallons of water—and the film had its developing bath, Arctic or no Arctic!