"I declare!" chuckled Jack Darrow, who could not miss the joke, despite the seriousness of their situation. "Somebody has removed the ocean without permission." Behind a great fortress of rock which had once been an island they saw the same column of smoke. But it was something nearer to them on the bed of the Arctic sea that more particularly attracted their attention.
"Look at that thing! That monster!" cried Mark, pointing.
"And there is another!" shouted Jack.
"Whales!" yelled the excited Andy Sudds. "Those are whales as sure as shooting—there's a school of them here."
And they had no more than made this discovery when a party of men, all dressed in furs and some dragging great sleds behind them, came out from behind the pile of rocks which had certainly once been an island in the ocean.
These new-comers did not see our heroes and their friends, but they approached the whale stranded nearest to the rocks. This huge leviathan, like all the others of the herd, was long since dead. The men attacked him with blubber-saws and axes and began to cut him up in a most workmanlike manner.
"A whaling ship, sure enough," declared Professor Henderson, who seemed the least astonished by these manoeuvres. "We will be among friends soon. And we will hope that the ship—despite the fact that her crew has come whaling ashore,—will have her keel in deep water." The party ran their sleds ashore on the right bank of the river at its old mouth. Then they started at a round pace for the spot in the old bed of the ocean where the crew of the whaler were cutting up their prize.
CHAPTER XXVIII
ON THE WHALING BARK
It was several miles from the brink of what had once been the polar sea to the spot where the whalers were at work. Jack Darrow, Mark Sampson, and their friends found it a difficult way to travel too.