Presently Dacres touched his comrade on the shoulder.
"The sea!" he exclaimed.
It was the sea. Right ahead was an expanse of open water, though greatly encumbered with huge bergs, for the "Meteor" was now passing over the birth-place of those enormous mountains of floating ice that find their way down into the Atlantic as far south as the fortieth parallel.
Even as he spoke there was a terrific crash, like that of a peal of thunder. The voyagers were just in time to see a mass of ice, nearly three miles in width, topple over the end of the glacier and fall into the sea. Almost instantaneously the placid surface changed to that of a tempestuous sea, as the iceberg rolled and plunged ere it gained a position of stability.
Ten seconds later the "Meteor" struck the first of the air-waves caused by the sudden disturbance of the atmosphere.
Well it was that she was of the non-rigid type, for otherwise the shock would have broken her back. As it was she writhed like a tortured animal. The crew, holding on like grim death, looked at each other in amazement akin to terror. At one moment her bow was pointing upwards at an angle of forty-five degrees; at the next the airship was banking steeply downwards.
It was a nasty two minutes while it lasted, but by the time the "Meteor" settled on an even keel she was tearing over the open sea.
CHAPTER XV.
THE NORTH POLE.
AT the twenty-third hour after leaving Portsmouth the "Meteor" came to rest on the ice under the lee of Cape Columbia and within three hundred yards of the "New Resolute," the ship of the British Arctic Expedition.