That feeling lasted only for a few minutes. The plane rose higher and the ocean began to look as oceans always had looked. The clouds were scattered and the sun was shining down on us.
CHAPTER IV
Fears and Hopes
I turned in my seat and grinned at Jim and he grinned back. This was the first time that I had felt that life might still be worth living.
We were so near the north magnetic pole that a compass was almost useless. I found myself thinking that I would be guided by the sun as long as daylight lasted, and then suddenly realized that now the sun was stationary in the heavens.
I knew there was not much chance of missing an island fourteen hundred miles long if I flew anywhere in its general direction. I set a course of north-north-east with the idea of striking land somewhere about the settlement of Upernavik. I decided that it would be less likely to have been affected by the catastrophe than Godhavn, the capital of North Greenland. Godhavn was the largest town, but it was located on a small island off the coast, and I thought it might have been swept away by tidal waves. We found out later that every settlement on the coast had disappeared, except Upernavik.
It must be remembered that the Greenland of those days was very different from the present flourishing center of the world's government and civilization. Eighty-six percent of its 826,000 square miles was covered by an ice-cap which in some places was two thousand feet thick. There were frowning cliffs coming down to the ocean's edge and the center of the island was a high plateau. That was really all most people knew about it.
It was entirely by accident that I knew a little more. I had once a Danish mechanician working for me who had travelled from Iceland to Greenland before he finally landed in New York looking for a job. There is a mineral called cryolite which is used in making a certain kind of porcelain and is found only in Greenland. A Pennsylvania concern held the mining concession and shipped the ore to Philadelphia. Jens Jensen came down on one of their steamers and hired out as a mechanician with the idea of getting a plane to fly back.
It seems he had discovered deposits of copper. He tried to interest me in developing them and he told me about Greenland. At first I did not believe him when he told of great stretches of country covered with shrubs and flowering plants and dwarf trees. When he said that there were four hundred varieties of plants and over a hundred types of birds I was so openly skeptical that he gazed at me reproachfully and then left the room. In a few minutes he came back with a volume of an encyclopedia open at the article on Greenland.