Your souls and bodies save.”
The groups turned back, the grave Eskimos climbing in last, over the “Astrum’s” rail. The steamer backed out of the “porridge,” and we, impatient to be off, trimmed up the dogs, tightened the ropes over the pyramidal freight, and cheering as we heard the parting whistles from the “Astrum,” soon hazily obscured in a rising evening dusk, went northward over the great ice field before us.
ON THE ICE PACK
The dogs were alert, the yacht-sledge went along well, the ice was sloppy but fairly smooth, and the floe had apparently escaped the contusions, bumps and collisions, which heap up these Arctic rafts with mounds, faults and pressure ridges, over which our unusual equipage never could have made its way. As it was, we at times traveled slowly enough, avoiding inequalities and dodging obstreperous humps. Towards evening of that first day the thermometer fell, an easterly wind came out of the sullen eastern sky, the snow flakes floated thickly in the air, and the sun glared like a gigantic ruby in the west, across which scurried veils from snow banks, eclipsing and revealing it at inconstant intervals—an augury of a storm.
We camped; that is we unharnessed the dogs, who proceeded, accordingly to the conventional style, immemorially recorded, to tie themselves up into yelping snarls of fur and harness; we lit our stove, partook of tea and pemmican, biscuit and marmalade (Yes, Mr. Link, marmalade) and slipped into protected nooks, amid the boxes on our diminutive ark. As the wind was rising we turned her lengthwise to the wind to prevent a capsize, wedged her forward and, under warning to jump to the ice if anything happened—a generalized warning for almost every sort of disturbance—tried to sleep.
It was a long time before dreams came to me, and when they did come they were unwelcome, for I seemed to be helplessly struggling up an inclined plain of ice over which flowed a sheet of icy water. I woke with a start. A roaring sound, almost stunning in its loudness, came through the snowladen air. The snowfall had increased and might have deadened the distant report had it not been for the hissing wind which brought the sound sharply to our ears, mingling it menacingly with its own sibilant fury. Another and another! We all tumbled out on the ice. The floe shook. We distinctly felt its tremors under our feet, and, as it were, subterranean cracking and splitting noises developed underneath us, as if the floe might break. It was an anxious moment. But the floe was some eight feet thick, a resistant mass that might easily, however, succumb to cleavage surfaces. The booming sound ceased, but a prolonged crushing and rattling followed. Goritz clapped his hands. It seemed an unaccountable exhibition of spirits.
“Well,” exclaimed Hopkins, “what do you make of it?”
“The best thing for us. We’ve got another length laid out for us on the straight track to Krocker Land. This floe probably ended off there somewhere,” he pointed northeast, “and now another has struck it, crumpling the edges. We’re not making such progress as we thought. The whole sea is in motion, but pretty nearly due east, so that as long as we go forward the easting does not hold us back on the northing, or very little.”
“What do you say to breaking up camp now. Let’s see what’s happened,” suggested Hopkins.