Lost in the Air

by Roy J. Snell

The Doctor, who had sat all this time in silence, smoking his black cigars, now rose and began pacing the deck.

"Four or five days? Four or five, did you say? Great Creation! That will mean the losing of the race!"

Jarvis nodded his head.

"H'anything less would mean that and more," said the old engineer. "Going down with such a shaft would mean death to all of us."

The Doctor sighed. "We can't help it, I suppose—but it's a cruel blow."

"There's many a break in a long airplane voyage anywhere," he consoled himself, "and I think the chances for accidents in the Arctic are about trebled. I don't wish our rivals any fatal catastrophe, but a little tough luck—say a wing demolished; or an engine burned out—might not be so much to my displeasure."

The days that followed were spent in various ways. Hunting seals and polar bears was something of an out-the-way pleasure for seafaring men. Then there were checkers and cards, besides the daily guess as to their position at noon.

Strangely enough, for once in the history of Arctic currents, they found themselves being carried where they wanted to go, in a direct line for Point On-na-tak, and during the entire four days and a half there was hardly a point's deviation from the course. On the evening of the fourth day, Dave thought he sighted land, and the midnight watch reported definitely that there was land to the port bow; two points, one more easily discerned than the other. This news brought the whole crew on deck. And for two hours there was wild speculation as to the nature of the country ahead of them; the possibility of inhabitants and their treatment of strangers. Azazruk, the Eskimo, thought that he had heard from an old man of his tribe that the point was inhabited by a people who spoke a different language from that spoken by the Chukches of East Cape and Whaling, on the Russian side of Behring Strait. But of this he could not be sure. If the old engineer knew anything of these shores other than the facts he had already stated concerning wood and coal, he did not venture to say. And no one asked.

So they drifted on until the bleak, snow-capped peaks showed plainly. Morning revealed a bay lying between the two points. Toward the entrance to this bay they were drifting. One obstacle remained between them and land. A half mile of the floe in which they were drifting lay between them and the black stretch of open water which extended to the edge of the solid shore ice, upon which the submarine might be dragged and over which the shaft might be carried to land. But how was that stretch of tumbled icefloe to be crossed? This, indeed, was a problem.

It was finally decided that Dave and the old engineer should spend the forenoon exploring the ice to landward for a possible narrow channel that would open a way to the water beyond. For this journey they took only field-glasses, alpine staffs and a lunch in a sealskin sack. Had they known better the nature of the land they were about to visit, they might have gone more fully equipped.