The party soon started for the highest peak of the island of Poloe—or Poloeland, as Alf preferred to call it. Oolichuk carried on his broad shoulders one of those mysterious cases out of which the Captain was so fond of taking machines wherewith to astonish the natives.
Indeed it was plain to see that the natives who accompanied them on this occasion expected some sort of surprise, despite the Captain’s earnest assurance that there was nothing in the box except a few meteorological instruments. How the Captain translated to the Eskimos the word meteorological we have never been able to ascertain. His own explanation is that he did it in a roundabout manner which they failed to comprehend, and which he himself could not elucidate.
On the way up the hill, Alf made several interesting discoveries of plants which were quite new to him.
“Ho! stop, I say, uncle,” he exclaimed for the twentieth time that day, as he picked up some object of interest.
“What now, lad?” said the Captain, stopping and wiping his heated brow.
“Here is another specimen of these petrifactions—look!”
“He means a vegetable o’ some sort turned to stone, Chingatok,” explained the Captain, as he examined the specimen with an interested though unscientific eye.
“You remember, uncle, the explanation I gave you some time ago,” said the enthusiastic Alf, “about Professor Heer of Zurich, who came to the conclusion that primeval forests once existed in these now treeless Arctic regions, from the fossils of oak, elm, pine, and maple leaves discovered there. Well, I found a fossil of a plane leaf the other day,—not a very good one, to be sure—and now, here is a splendid specimen of a petrified oak-leaf. Don’t you trace it quite plainly?”
“Well, lad,” returned the Captain, frowning at the specimen, “I do believe you’re right. There does seem to be the mark of a leaf there, and there is some ground for your theory that this land may have been once covered with trees, though it’s hard to believe that when we look at it.”
“An evidence, uncle, that we should not be too ready to judge by appearances,” said Alf, as they resumed their upward march.