“Certainly,” chimed in the Professor, “Krocker Land has a long coast of course. The nearer we get to it the greater likelihood of eddies, conflicting currents, flood tides and even favoring winds driving us ashore. I’m for the advance.”
“And I,” I concurred. We dug out the dogs, who were not very deeply covered, fed them, had tea and biscuit and some potted beef stew, and were off. Goritz calculated we had covered eight miles in northing, though our speculative way around obstacles had made the actual stretch spanned much longer.
Curiosity and suspense conflictingly urged us to make haste. The snow died away with the wind, and the sun, running its cartwheel course along the horizon, again watched us from the east in a clear sky. It was a “gorgeous Arctic day.” The summer heat had not yet too strongly prevailed, and the air almost sparkled over the dazzling splendor of the ice, undulating where it was seen in spaces somewhat cleared of snow, or spread with the deep ermine of the snow itself, which again, in rifts, drifts or circular heaps, reflected the sun like a firmament of pinpoint stars. The snow, melting, became compressed, and at length a duller lustre relieved our eyes of the strain of the almost insupportable brilliancy of the morning hours.
We had made sluggish headway, the wet snow clogging and detaining us; indeed we lightened the load on the yacht-sledge, and used the sledges and extra dogs to improve our progress. About noon we saw the results of the night’s collision. A toppling but not very high pressure ridge had soared upward between our floe and another, presumably larger, for it had overtaken the one we were on. On that floe we must ourselves continue our advance, for already to the north and west we saw the broad leads of open water, indicated to Goritz’s experienced eyes by the dark “water blink” seen, as he told us, the day before.
But how to surmount the barrier of ice blocks? Goritz and Hopkins went forward to investigate, the Professor and myself watching the dogs whose sudden alternations of obedience and mutiny kept us perpetually active. Hopkins found a less prominent section of the ridge, where the slanting and unevenly disposed blocks might be flattened to aid our progress, or be shattered into fragments, with dynamite. We adopted Peary’s expedient in shaking the “Roosevelt” free of ice at Lincoln Bay. Dynamite sticks attached to poles were stuck among the blocks, and connected by wires to our battery. Then we turned on the current. The explosion seemed to stop our hearts and breath, but if it did we were conscious enough to wonder at the fountain of splintered ice that rose like a geyser in the air, shimmering too with ten thousand irises against the sun, as it subsided with clatter and tinkling to the floe.
We had cleared our way and to our exultation the avenue opened showed us a wonderfully level and unencumbered field of ice. This obstruction might have been circumvented by taking to the water, but too late we realized the danger of being crushed in the battling floes that swirled together with the current or were driven by the winds. It was a prudent measure to keep to the ice at present. Our launch was flat, rounded and intended, like the “Fram,” to rise over the squeezing ice blocks. But would it? It seemed a trifle top-heavy, with its varied load. An upset would have been fatal; the dogs would be lost.
And now joy ruled, hope rose, the promise seemed granted. Oh, the incurable madness of human dreams. A gleam of light betokens the full day; it may be only a ray from a lantern, or the quiet before the storm gives assurance of eternal peace; it may be but the presage of the tempest.
We drove in triumph through the dismantled gateway, pierced by the convulsion of those yellow sticks of doom. Out on the white field, on which perhaps only the wind had left its imprint, which no eye but that all-seeing orb of day had ever scanned, whose silence only the winds, the waves, the storming ice had ever broken, and which now, the first time since Eternity began its reign there, was rudely assailed—we imagined it as an astonished deity—by yelping dogs and four hurrahing mortals!
The snow was deep and melting, but our dogs (Goritz had harnessed all the dogs and they were still in good condition) dragged the strange bulk of our ice-yacht with its rocking cargo at a topping speed. Exhilaration reigned, we were hilarious with confidence. It was not long before Hopkins, in spite of the heavy trudging, indulged in some characteristic musical levity, and his baritone notes finely contrasted with the silence of that void, in which we alone seemed sentient and animated.
It was a college reminder, and I just recall that the refrain had a most freakish incongruity: