“Does not my father think that we should go?” asked Cheenbuk, who began to feel uneasy as a fresh burst of flame set fire to the canvas awning, and made the place they stood on unpleasantly hot.
“Yes, my son, he does,” replied Nazinred; “but it does not become men to run from danger.”
So saying he began to move as if in a funeral procession, closely followed by Cheenbuk, Oolalik, and old Mangivik.
As they reached the head of the staircase something like an explosion occurred, for the deck was partially burst up by the heat. The three Eskimos, who did not think their dignity affected by haste, leaped down the stair in two bounds, but Nazinred did not alter his walk in the least. Step by step he descended deliberately, and walked in stolid solemnity to the spot on which the community had assembled as a place of safety.
They did not speak much after that, for the sight was too thrilling and too novel to admit of conversation. Shouts and exclamations alone broke forth at intervals.
The danger to which they had been exposed while on the quarter-deck became more apparent when a clear bright flame at length shot upwards, and, catching some of the ropes, ran along and aloft in all directions.
Hitherto the fire had been much smothered by its own smoke and the want of air below, but now that it had fairly burst its bonds and got headway, it showed itself in its true character as a fierce and insatiable devourer of all that came in its way.
Catching hold of the awning over the deck, it swept fore and aft like a billow, creating such heat that the spectators were forced to retreat to a still safer distance. From the awning it licked round the masts, climbed them, caught the ropes and flew up them, sweeping out upon the yards to their extreme ends, so that, in a few minutes, the ship was ablaze from hold to truck, and stem to stern.
Then the event which Nazinred had referred to occurred. The flames reached the powder magazine. It exploded, and the terrified natives yelled their feelings, while the entire structure went up into the heavens with a roar to which the loudest thunder could not compare, and a sheet of intense light that almost blinded them.
The explosion blew out every fork of flame, great and small, and left an appalling blackness by contrast, while myriads of red-hot fragments fell in a shower on the ice, and rebounded from it, like evil spirits dancing around the tremendous wreck that they had caused.