“And really,” the Professor continued, “nothing could be more favorable than our prospects at present. We are drifting northwest; wind and tide are pushing us along on the right course. Krocker Land, my friends, is not one hundred miles away. This coming storm will help amazingly, and I see no reason why we shouldn’t raise sail.”
The suggestion was overruled by Goritz. The danger of collisions was too great, and the headway might be faster than we could overcome if we were threatened with one. The ice was getting softer; pools of water glistened all around us, and a bad blow might break us up.
Watches were kept, and as the light lasted the full twenty-four hours, we were not likely to be surprised by unsuspected invasions. The higher floebergs were to be feared. Their bases, prolonged far below, furnished push surfaces to the tide for perhaps hundreds of feet, and their mass supplied momentum. They were dangerous neighbors. And now the storm rose furiously around us. Except for our peril it was a spectacle we might have enjoyed. The Professor alone was absolutely unconcerned, and his nonchalance calmed our own apprehensions.
The clouds in strips and bulging banners were carried high above us. Streamers they seemed, from the eastern sky where the high lying cirrus flakes, slowly expanding into shapeless patches, had already delivered their usual warning. These again were soon blotted out in the onrushing scud all around us. A dull yellow light at first spread its sickly tint over the ice field, and the sun, darkened and blurred, was soon utterly cloaked from view. The wind rose quickly, brushing close to the surface of the ice, ushering in interminable strife among the pitching blocks. They ground together, and the swell, started below them, kept their edges pounding, while a tumult of groans and creaking noises like the smashing of heavy glass raised an unceasing din, a din indeed that possessed some of the elements of a wild, fascinating rhythm. The rain came in pelting downpours, whipped into horizontal sheets by the blast, and then with a sudden drop of temperature changed to blinding snow flurries, that buried everything in white dust, and sometimes smote us with the sharpness of myriad-edged microscopic needles.
The water washed in long flows over the sides of the berg, and the berg itself rocked and shook, threatening to start our ice-yacht into motion, and to carry her and her precious cargo into the whirling, fighting ice about us. Fortunately it continued to grow colder, and the snow, besides offering us means of banking the yacht, stem, stern, and prow, and ramming her bowl-shaped sides with a stiff embrace from which a jolt would hardly free her, provided a bed for the poor dogs, who were frantic with misery, howling and whining in disgust.
Our berg had shrunk considerably; it was only a remnant, an angle of the big field we had entered with such rejoicing, and we knew it was getting smaller. When the dogs had quieted, and we felt that the launch was immovable, we crept into the box-cabin and gratefully partook of hot tea, warmed pemmican, and biscuit, with cups of soup to “wash it down.” It was a parnassian feast, and though we were anxious, the snug refuge and the soul-stimulating grub brought us to the verge of exultation. Even the hard knocks that the pack received attested to our progress, and if it held together, and the blizzard lasted, we would win some miles of our journey, almost without effort, and, as Goritz said, “it was just the sort of a blow to clear the track.”
I certainly had fallen asleep. Pictures had risen like projections on a screen, one after the other, in my mind, one melting deliciously into its predecessors, and all linked together by the memories of home. My mother, my sister and her two boys under the pine tree by the side of the dreaming pond, holding in its reflexions the cloud-flecked bosom of the blue sky, and the slanting cliff, the hillside graveyard, and the reversed boats moored to the little dock, and then the dash of the phaeton down the road, the group waving their kerchiefs at me, and my own answering salute, the turn of the road, the dark passage through the spruce forest, the cleared farmsides with the red houses, and the clustering friends along the filled fences, cheering, and then—a terrific bump—the phaeton had smashed against a stone, and—!
“Wake up, Erickson, all hands busy.”
It was Goritz’s voice bellowing in my ear, it was his hand, shaking me like a giant by the shoulder. I leaped to my feet, dazed and, leaping to conclusions as quickly, thought the ice had split our keel and we were sinking. Everything was dark around me. I heard Hopkins swearing over the oil lamps which had fallen to the floor and the Professor mumbling further away. And then came a curiously stifled boom.
“Well, what’s up?” I stuttered.