Naturally they had abandoned the sleds. The ice on the stream which flowed out of this mouth of the Coleville River was so broken that they could no longer use it as a highway. The bottom of what had once been the ocean was only partly ice-covered. There were enormous rocks to climb over, or to find a path around. Reefs and ledges reared their heads fifty feet and more high. There were sinks, too, in the floor of the old ocean; but these were mostly covered with ice.
The Arctic Ocean must have receded at the time of the upheaval which had flung this island into the air so rapidly that many of the sea's denizens, beside the school of whales, could not escape.
Here, in one big pool, lay frozen in the ice a monster white shark. It had battered itself to death against the rocks in trying to escape. Through yonder blow-hole in another pool there suddenly appeared an enormous bewhiskered head, with great tusks like the drooping mustache of a soldier.
"A walrus!" exclaimed Jack, recognizing the creature.
"And yonder are seals playing in the open pool," said Mark.
"These pools, or lakes, are still of salt water," said the professor, thoughtfully. "Ah! what would I not have given to have been on that headland yonder at the moment the ocean went out."
"Not me! Not me!" cried Phineas Roebach. "I'd gone completely off my head then, for fair—I know I would!"
"Mr. Roebach is not quite sure now that he isn't suffering from some form of insanity," said Jack, chuckling.
"Den it suah is too bad dat we nebber kin fin' dat chrisomela bypunktater plant ter cure him wid," declared Washington White, dolefully.
"But, by the piper that played before Pharaoh!" ejaculated Phineas Roebach, at last brought to a point where he had to admit that no reasonable explanation would fit the conditions confronting them, "tell me this: What has become of the Arctic Ocean?" "You can search me!" drawled Jack. "I can assure you, Mr. Roebach, that I haven't seen it. Have you got it, Mark?"