Dick picked up some of the fine, white feathers with which the nest was lined. “Yes, these are about as soft feathers as are known. The Eskimos gather and trade them to the white men for tools and things. In the United States we call it eiderdown.”
They wandered on down the shore to the point where the great glacial ridge west of their camp extended into the sea. The ridge sloped off into the water in a long slope at the foot of which the waves rumbled and thundered, dashing the huge icebergs this way and that as if they were toys. Occasionally they could hear the distant noises of the glacier as fragments of it fell into the sea, or when its slow movements caused huge cracks to form in its depths.
Dick led the way a short distance up the slope toward a dark knob that was sticking up through the snow and ice.
“I wonder if that isn’t one of the meteors they say are in the polar regions,” he said. “Robert Peary, the great explorer, brought back some fine specimens to American museums. This does look like it might be a very small one.”
They stopped at the protuberance and inspected it curiously.
“It looks like melted iron to me,” Sandy declared. “Is that what meteors are made of?”
“Yes, a form of iron,” Dick replied. “It’s called meteoric iron. Scientists claim it is about the hardest iron which has been found in a natural state. In the sky it is heated to a liquid state by the friction of falling through the air, then when it strikes the earth’s atmosphere it cools suddenly and explodes with a loud report, lighting up the country for miles and miles.”
“Why do more meteors fall in the polar regions than in the other zones?” inquired Sandy, meditatively fingering the meteoric rock.
“I don’t remember having read the exact reason, and I’m not sure that more do fall up here, but if there are more it must be because the atmosphere is so much colder. The meteors explode much higher in the sky, then lose their velocity and so fall to the earth’s surface near the pole.”
“Well, the glacier seems to have pushed this meteor up here,” said Sandy, “so there’s no telling where it actually fell.”