“Haul, Alfred!”
And haul it was; the weight seemed trebled. I knew—the water was hauling too, but, before Goritz went, it might, for all I cared, drag me to the same doom. I guess Hopkins and the Professor felt that way, too. It seemed nip and tuck. Were we all to be pulled into the frigid maelstrom, to be finally ejected into the Arctic sea in the rush of the sub-glacial river? Somehow thinking this way put steel into our muscles and defiance in my heart, and—we pulled Antoine Goritz back to life at least, and his reception on the top of that glacier was as fervent, if a little less boisterous and showy, as if he had been met by the king in an audience room at Copenhagen. He was drenched and cold, had a wrenched shoulder but I took his place ahead now, and he dried off with exercise, after the fashion of Arctic navigators. And a bowl of tea that the Professor bewitched with a little of our last bottle of whisky helped matters.
We had left the glacier; that icy track was far below us, and distance contracting and closing all its wicked seams revealed it as a blazing white ribbon, negligently thrown over the shoulders of the still, black rocks. It looked well. The aneroid registered 6000 feet. The snow was awful in spots, and we rolled into holes unsuspectedly saturated with water. Our snowshoes were indispensable, but the dogs were almost useless, floundering and helpless in the drifts. Our dog meat was rapidly diminishing, and, if the cruel dilemma must come, rather than to exhaust our supplies on them we would be compelled to kill them.
We were pushing along what bore the appearance of a col or pass between two majestic peaks, wrapped in ermine to their highest points, ermine that in the day glittered magnificently, rayed and starred with innumerable irises, and that in the lesser illumination of the night was immobile and dead, a monstrous winding sheet over a dead world.
A terrifying snow storm held us up for two days. The air was so dense with the falling crystals that we felt encased. It was a singular sensation. The Professor, who had been incubating some ideas (we always looked forward with expectancy to his first utterance after a spell of prolonged silence), launched the amazing paradox, during this storm, and while we, in the most detached manner awaited its conclusion in our snug tent, that we were approaching a warmer, snowless, and rainy zone. It was Hopkins who first recovered his powers of utterance after this promulgation.
“Professor, as a sedative to the distracted mind, you’ve got everything else winded. And for novelty, well, Barnum and Bailey’s best advertiser couldn’t begin to get the collocation of superlatives necessary to give a hint of your surprising guesses.”
“It is not difficult to understand,” resumed the Professor urbanely, with that calm manner of shelving the unconventional Yankee which always enraptured Hopkins; “the wind has been westerly, the excessive precipitation shows it was a moist wind, a wind heavily laden with suspended water, that moisture was dropped out as snow here, but west of us it must have escaped expulsion. Why? Because it was not cold enough to condense it as snow. I think, though, it fell as rain. We shall see.”
“And,” he added a moment later, “on my theory of a polar depression that would be so.”
We went to sleep on that, and the depth of our slumbers had some complimentary significance for the Professor’s prediction.
After the storm, the sky failed to clear, and a wind sprang up from the north that rapidly increased in violence, hurling the snow in torrents, blinding, cutting us and foundering the wretched dogs, who lay down in their tracks repeatedly, or snarled up together in vicious fights. But Goritz was inexorable. He insisted on pushing ahead. His reason was just. We were now near the turning point; we had surmounted KROCKER LAND RIM. Should we go on or turn back? If it was to be back we had many things to think of, and not much time to waste, with our larder growing smaller each day and the prospect of half-rations ahead. Goritz had a tender heart and I know he wanted to get the dogs back, too.