The Professor passed his hand approvingly over the side of the launch, ignoring the jibe. We dropped the subject, indeed forgot it, listening to Goritz’s animated and assuring praise of the little craft that would introduce us to a new continent, and the incident was never again heard of.
Our next haven was Port Clarence in Alaska, and we had a lot of trouble making it. The ice streaming out of Behring Straits was thick, and, as the Yankee put it, “numerous.” The captain and mates were keen to watch their chances, and we often found ourselves surrounded by blocks that the wind threatened to pack together to our imminent peril. It was very early, and whereas the whalers make Port Clarence about midsummer we expected or hoped to get to Point Barrow about that time. A northwest wind came up and scattered the ice and gave us an open sea, though we were compelled to make some long detours around white meadows of snow-covered ice, that slipped off into the recesses of low, cold fogs and suggested illimitable barriers ahead of us.
The distant rattling or caking sound of grinding ice was sometimes constantly heard for hours, and again vast fields, looking almost motionless, loomed up with the sun shimmering their surfaces into an endless complexity of mirrors. Along the indented or hummocky edges of these little continents we would steam serenely and exult courageously in the thought of crossing just such white ways to the hidden wonders of a hidden world. We often fell into fits of dreaming, buoyed up by the calm and glowing vaticinations of the Professor.
We finally brought up at the port and received a tumultuous reception, having outrun the whaling fleet. The natives, Nakooruks, crowded aboard, and were intently watched but quite passively shunned by the Professor. Water and wood were taken on here, and about one hundred selected dogs, whose points were minutely inspected or determined by Goritz and myself. It was June, and already flowers spun their colored webs over the inhospitable shores, compensating for their brief life here in the north by a marvelous abundance. Yellow, white and blue, the bewitching patches of moss-blue flowering hepatica, forget-me-not, anemone, phlox and daisy charmed us, and for a moment brought back such a flood of memories that a surge of homesickness swept over us, the last tug of the pleasant world we had turned our backs on before the portals of a stranger world opened and closed on us, perhaps forever.
We bought fish and furs from the natives who had traveled hither with their pelts and offerings from Norton Sound, Cape Prince of Wales, and King’s Island. There was confusion and bustle on shore, and on board the barking of dogs, guttural controversies among the Eskimos, wailing of babies, orders, the shriek of the donkey engine hauling on cargo, produced a pleasant excitement which attained its climax on the arrival of the United States revenue cutter. Visiting of the captains, exchange of news followed, and we were told that the season was unprecedented; the ice in the Arctic had broken up early, there was a clear passage in the straits and an audacious whaler had attempted the passage and “skinned” through to Point Hope. We were sanguine of reaching Point Barrow early in July.
On the fourth of July we were under Cape Lisburne, encountering the rush of the wind that seems harbored by that lofty cliff, and which like a physical avalanche pushed us over until the water rippled over the lee rail. Along the shores everywhere there was a broad avenue of open water, stretching from the skirt of shore ice to the heavy packs, sheeted with fogs and murmurously moaning, inimitably flooring that mysterious ocean whose furthest waters beat on the shores of Krocker Land.
From Cape Lisburne the shore line strikes at a right angle to the Corwin coal fields, the low shores, except for a few occasional interruptions, as with Cape Lisburne itself, marking the margins of the higher uplands in the interior. Salt lagoons, crescent shaped beaches, sandpits, shoal basins, furnish a monotonous succession of flattened, uninteresting features, which practically reaches to Point Barrow. At the Corwin coal beds slate, sandstone and conglomerate overlie each other, and the Mesozoic age of the beds themselves is established. Here the Professor emerged from the mental coma which had suspended his pedagogic enthusiasms since we left Indian Point, and a few fern leaf fossils unlocked again the storehouse of his learning and loosened his tongue with eloquent predictions.
Standing up at our mess table with a beautifully preserved fern leaf, sketched in black interlacings, reticulations and frondy leaflets on an ashen-colored slate, the Professor spoke to us, and indeed we ourselves felt the thrill of a reconstructed world in this bleak land, as we saw this silent token of former warmth.
“My friends,” he held up the fossil leaf, “here is a vestige of the past, a leaf of a fern. It tells us of hot, moist, heat-oppressed cycles of years, when marshes densely thicketed with tree fern, swollen with hot rains, drenched in a perspiration of mists, covered these now arid snow-blanketed flats; when a reptilian life, the consonant faunal response to these climatic conditions flourished here also, when, dropping into the bayous and ponds, leaf upon leaf, branches, spores and trunks of an expanded filicine flora built up the masses of vegetable debris in later ages, to become consolidated and transformed into coal and—” the Professor’s eyes started, his inherent smile became a portentous stare, and the wide ears seemed almost to converge to catch his own words of promise; “and—we shall rediscover a warm or temperate climate here at the North Pole. WHY?”
His voice spoke this interrogation in something like a squeal, so that the answer, in its unaffected profundity, produced a really dramatic climax.