Outside on the snow barrens, the polar world went its old way. The cold streamers of the northern lights flickered in the sky; the wolf-pack flung its hunting howl on the winds; the great white bear stalked across his lonely domain.
But within the shelter of the ice tunnel, a handful of humans had dared to bring a new way of life into the Arctic wilds. Here a little audience sat thrilled and tense before a screen on which a moving-picture machine projected flight pictures made and developed in the very teeth of Arctic cold. Here was pictured no tawdry drama of human love and hate. Instead the film unrolled magnificent vistas of mountain land and lake land. Before the screen sat the expedition geologists, exploring a thousand miles by paper in less time than the prospectors of other days took to explore only a few miles on foot, and with the pick and shovel. To a geologist, this pointed range of hills meant a certain rock formation. The lake bed presaged another. The long, low, rounded mounds circling water meant the great pre-Cambrian rock shield, the oldest stone formation in the north country, stone so old that its weathered seams have chipped and cracked and broken, so that the treasure it once hid now shows through in extrusions of gold or copper, silver or platinum.
With modern machines in that ice hangar, this little band of explorers could tap the air of the civilized latitudes and bring its music across thousands of miles of snow barrens. A turn of the dial in the ship’s radio-room, and the long arm of radio reached forth and plucked music out of the air, the latest news from America’s metropolitan cities, tunes from Broadway and personal messages from well-wishers.
“Shades of all ancient explorers!” Lee Renaud chuckled to himself. “How those old fellows would turn over in their graves at the idea of music from Broadway being just twenty seconds from the Arctic Circle. And it all happened because a Pomeranian monk shut some electricity in a glass jar.” As his mind went back to his own first studies of things electrical, Lee had the strange feeling that King’s Cove and all his old life were in the realm of the unreal—that only the Arctic, and radio at the top of the world, and a modern airship flying the polar wastes were real.
When, from study of the aerial photographs, the geological map was finally pieced together and arranged, it was time for the ground prospecting to begin. The prospectors were carried out in pairs. The dirigible landed them in various places where the ground formation was such as to indicate the pre-Cambrian sheath rising in its long, shallow mounds. Some men were put down within a few miles of the cave base; some, hundreds of miles away. These intrepid ones were left with a pup tent, an eiderdown sleeping bag, a rifle and ammunition, radio outfit and food.
Left alone, the men were to make a temporary camp immediately and to begin prospecting. If they made a find, they were to communicate with the main base by radio, or by orange flags laid out on the white snow as signals for the dirigible when it passed over again. In the prospecting crew were the best of their kind, miners from Africa, India and the Yukon.
The messages began rolling in incredibly soon. The ship’s radio men had to dance continual attendance on buzzer signal and radio code. The first prospector to get in touch with dirigible headquarters was Olaf Valchen.
“Stand by—O. V. on the air! After breakfast, better hop over here in that sky boat. Location a hundred miles west of where longitude 110 cuts latitude 65. Come prepared to knock off a few samples of greenstone with a geologist’s hammer, and fly back to base to have ’em assayed before supper. Come in a hurry! Got something real to show you! O. V. signing off!”
As the great dirigible, answering this joy call, sped through the snow haze and skimmed lower and lower, her lookouts sighted the orange signal laid out on the frozen white, and her engines were halted. The ice anchor was dropped and with a loud hissing seared its way to a secure depth. The hawsers were windlassed up, and the great hull eased to earth on its pneumatic bumpers. The entrances to gondolas and navigating section were flung open—and the first fellow out was Yiggy, fur boots and all, barking a delighted greeting to his stocky blond Norwegian master. Scooping up the wriggling terrier into his arms, Olaf Valchen led the way to his find.
A hundred paces back from where he had laid out his flag signal, the prospector stopped on the banks of a frozen lake. Circling the lake was a rim of low mounds. One of these, like a domed ant hill, thirty feet high and some two hundred feet in diameter, had been partly freed of its frozen crust. These bare spots showed dull green and gray, the famous greenstone of the Canadian prospectors who had made lucky strikes. Nakaluka, the rottenstone of the Eskimos! So old was this, the oldest stone formation in the north country, that it was crumbling asunder, cracking apart in great seams. And in those seams lay gold, glittering and yellow.