"Sail due west twenty miles and you will find an open sea to the North. All closed ahead. Good luck to you! Good-bye!"
"Aye, aye, sir! Good-bye!" came cheerily from the quarterdeck of the little ship, and they had passed beyond hailing distance.
"Poor, brave fellows," sighed the Doctor.
"They have reached an amazingly high latitude," said the Professor. "They have crossed the 83rd parallel, very nearly as high as Nansen got with his expedition last year."
"I declare that I am sorry for them, and really dislike to take the glory of the discovery from them. But we cannot stop now, and it is utterly impossible for them to get there anyway."
"They would have soon been shut in, and probably forever as they were heading," observed Will.
North and east, as they could distinctly see from their elevation of two thousand feet, far as the eye could reach, all was one vast field of huge piles of ice, exceedingly rough and broken, with here and there towering spires that seemed to reach up toward the globe like grizzly arms that would prevent them from penetrating the secrets of the north that had been held for untold centuries.
As the Doctor had informed the captain of the ship, away to the west was a certain amount of open sea, but it was of limited extent, and the prospects of the poor fellows getting much farther looked more than doubtful.
"And what is to become of them if they cannot get through?" asked Mrs. Jones.
"I cannot tell," returned the Doctor, "but the chances are that they will be crushed in the ice."