CHAPTER XIX
IN THE GONDOLA
“Be a good sport, Scotty! Crank her up and give me a call in about three minutes. That’s all the time I’ll need to get up to the navigation-room.” Lee Renaud, Ye Tireless Radio Hound, as his shipmates had laughingly dubbed him, pushed a batch of wireless outfit into the grasp of Scotty McGraw, assistant port-engine tender, with a plea for a little help in testing a new radio device.
Lee began backing out of the narrow confines of the engine gondola, but he never gained even the flimsy, swaying catwalk leading up into the hull. For, with a roar of fury, a sudden Arctic gale struck the ship. It seemed to leap up out of the nowhere to whirl and pound the huge envelope at every point. Like so much meal in a sack, Renaud was flung crashing back into the gondola.
From other parts of the dirigible came rendings and crashings. It was as though the great ship were caught in a giant’s hand and flung hither and yon. The Arctic had lain bland and tractable for a space, while man in his floating gas bubble had slipped into the frozen domain to rifle it of its stone-sheathed treasures. In suddenly awakened fury, the Arctic loosed its weapons of sub-zero, knife-edged gale, hail, sleet, and hurricane swirl that sucked and battered and tore.
On through the storm-darkened air, the dirigible plunged, swoop and check, swoop and check, now half capsized, now riding high, now riding low. Mountains fell away into blackness; the white land was left behind. They were over the frozen sea. All control of the ship was gone, all sense of direction lost. It might be a hundred miles, a thousand miles off its course.
Like a toy of the winds, the huge silver bubble was tossed high on the mad currents of the ocean of air. In some upper stratum, a rushing, swirling river of the winds caught the dirigible in its grasp and swept the lost ship back into the north faster than any of its human load had ever traveled before.
A hundred, two hundred, three hundred miles an hour—then the speed indicators broke!
Every part of the ship seemed out of touch with every other part. So far as any human connection was concerned, the engine gondolas, the hull, the fore-car might have been so many separate planets hurtling through space.
Lee Renaud, battered and banged almost to pulp, thought all feeling was gone from him forever. Yet in one awful flash, he sensed what was befalling them now. As though the river of air had reached the edge of some unseen, mighty precipice, and flowed over in a deadly, rushing torrent, the ship was sucked down and down over the invisible Niagara. Through a stratum of sleet it tore and gathered an ice sheathing of dangerous weight.
From an engine nacelle came a jerk of machinery striving to lift the great bag. Out of the hull rained tanks and stores, as frantic hands cast off ballast to try to save the ship. But it was impossible to halt the down plunge of the huge ship. In another moment, the Nardak scraped the ice of the polar sea, its port side grinding against the ice.