The climb to the top of the island, which they undertook an hour later, was scarcely less dangerous than had been the struggle to cross the tumbling ice-floe, for this island was little more than a gigantic granite bowlder rising for a distance of some five hundred feet out of the sea.
They crept along a narrow shelf where a slip on some pebble might send them crashing to death in the tumbled mass of ice below. They scaled an all but perpendicular wall, to drag their sleeping-bag and the few other belongings, which they had dared attempt to carry, after them by the aid of a skin-rope. Then, after a few minutes' rest, they would rise to climb again.
But at last, their efforts rewarded, they found themselves standing on the edge of a snow-capped plateau. "Now," said Lucile, "if there are any people living on the island, it won't be on top of it, but in some sheltered cranny down by the shore where they are away from the sweeping winds and where they can hunt and fish."
"But think what they may be like!" said Marian. "They may be savages who have never seen a white man. We don't even know whether we are a hundred miles from Bering Straits or five hundred. And neither of us has ever been on an island in the Arctic Ocean!"
"That," said Lucile, "has nothing to do with it. We're on one now. We can't very well go back to the ocean ice. We haven't any food. We couldn't hide on this little island if we wished to. So the best thing to do is to try to find the people, if there are any, and cast our lot with them. I once heard a great bishop say that 'humanity is everywhere very much the same.' We've just got to believe that and go ahead."
Shouldering the sleeping-bag, and leaving to Marian the remaining seal-oil in the skin-sack, the butcher knife, and the fishing outfit, she marched steadily forward on a course which in time would enable them to make the outer circle of the island.
"See those piles of stones?" Lucile said fifteen minutes later. "Those did not just happen to be there. They were put there by men. See how carefully they are piled. The piles look tall and slim. I have heard a sea captain say that the natives of this coast, in very early days, when there was warring among tribes, piled stones on high points like this to make those who desired to attack them think they were men, and that there were many warriors in the place."
"Then," said Marian, catching her breath at the thought, "there must be people on this island."
"Not for sure," said Lucile. "The people who piled up those rocks might merely have been living here temporarily, using this island as a hunting station; and then, even if they were living here permanently, famine and contagious diseases may have killed all of them off."
They trudged on again in silence. Everywhere the rocky rim of the island frowned up at them, offering no suggestion of a path down to the foot, or of a rocky shelf below where a group of hunters might build a village.