At last he reached the splintered debris of the engine cabin. Two men in the wreckage! Scotty was breathing. Lee could feel the faint movement when he laid his hands on the other’s furred garment above the heart. Then Lee had his arms under Scotty’s shoulders, shaking him, pounding him, begging him to rouse, to live. In urging another back into life, Renaud strengthened his own muscles, hardened his own resolution to fight.
It took long labor from both Scotty and Renaud to revive Van Granger, the other engineer. He had been stunned by a blow on the head. The left side of his face was all blackened and swollen from impact with the ice. Even after his two mates had lifted him, walked him, rubbed up his circulation with desperate, vigorous strokes, he was too weak to do more than sit propped with his back to a snow mound near a tiny warming fire they had started with bits of the splintered wood from the cabin.
But they must have some kind of shelter against storm, sleet and cold. Here was plenty of material such as the Eskimos use for building their round-topped igloos. But Scotty and Lee knew well enough that their untrained hands held no knack for setting snow blocks into the perfect dome of an igloo. Any dome-shaped snow carpentry of theirs was likely to crash down on their heads at the first breath of wind. So they contented themselves with merely setting up straight thick walls of snow blocks. For roofing, they used material they salvaged from the wrecked gondola. Over their whole domicile, sides and top, they banked a warm blanket of snow, packed down hard and firm.
Every bit of food, broken machinery, pieces of wood and metal, were painstakingly gathered and stored within or close beside their shelter. It was a jumbled medley, remnants of broken radio, a case of chocolate, bursted cans of fruit, bundles of fur garments. Scattered here and there in the wreckage were lumps of the rich specimen ore taken out of the Arctic surface mine. To men marooned on an ice sheet, gold was a mockery. Food, instead of gold, was treasure to them now.
Lee and Scotty worked on and on, gathering bits of wreckage, banking deeper their snow roof, pushing themselves to the point of exhaustion. For as long as they labored, they could force off thought. But finally they had to give in to physical weariness, had to drop down to rest. And all unbidden, thoughts marched blackly across their minds.
What could be the end? What hope could they have?
All they knew of the dirigible was that they had seen it still aloft, swept off in the gale. And then, later, that distant column of smoke. Had the silver hull of the Nardak gone up in flames? Or was that wavering smoke line a beacon, lighted by their shipmates where they had landed? And should the Nardak still be safe, and navigable, how would her searching crew ever find the castaways, three minute dots on the vast sheet of ice? For, clad in their grayish white furs, they were scarcely discernible against the white background of ice and snow.
Lee Renaud burrowed his head between his hands, as though by pressure he would stop the ugly round of thought. But thought swept on, ceaselessly.
To make matters worse, it was drift ice they were on, a great sheet that constantly changed its position. In a gale, it might be pounded into a thousand pieces and become little pans that would scarce support a man’s weight.
Scotty, a short, heavy-set fellow, wearing spectacles that miraculously had not broken in his fall, worked continually with the remnant of his sun compass and a small magnetic compass. From position, checked by these, and by the loom of some far, white mountain peaks he hazarded a guess that they were in the drift somewhere to the west of Spitzbergen—and their nearest land would be the island of Foyn, an uninhabited speck in the polar sea, unvisited even by whalers, unless storm drove them there.