A second week was wearing itself away when lookouts sighted a thread of smoke on the north horizon.
A day later the Kravassin had fought through to that smoke.
CHAPTER XXV
FROM THE DESERT OF ICE
Small wonder that none had glimpsed the silver hull of the great Nardak! For on the desert of ice, when the search party from the Kravassin made landing, they found the whole crew of the lost dirigible—but no dirigible. Not at first, anyway. Instead before their eyes lay a vast mound of snow. Within those tons of white drift lay the wreck of the Nardak—two engines smashed, and no fuel to run those that were left.
Haggard, bearded men, in whom hope had long been dead, laughed and shouted and prayed when they saw the great ship, and the rescue party swarming over the ice.
“The impossible! A miracle out of the sky! How are we found?” gasped the worn, emaciated Captain Jan.
“The miracle? Wireless it was,” Markovitch the Russian made answer in his halting, precise English. He whirled Renaud around and thrust him forward. “And this youngster the miracle-man is. With some broken wire and bottles, he called to the world, and the world sent men to the rescue.”
But miracles were not over, for the wreck of the Nardak was to go out of the Arctic under her own power.
Snow was shoveled off the huge hull. The Kravassin’s machine shop had tools and furnaces and fusing power to rehabilitate the dirigible and put her back into the air again. Sufficient fuel was spared from the ship’s tanks to get the Nardak to Spitzbergen, that strange Arctic island port where enormous gasoline tanks and lofty aerials of radio towers mark man’s progress in the conquest of the ice country.
From Spitzbergen, the route lay on to Oslo, Norway, where further repairing and refueling were attended to. Then it was off across the North Atlantic, headed for the welcoming shores of America!