“In all probability that berg our friends are on has been carried into the strait by this time,” Tom declared.
“You seem dreadfully certain that the poor chaps are still alive,” Ned said.
“Captain Karofsen has hope of that, so why not?” rejoined Tom. “We have not come away over here to find Mr. Damon and Mary’s father starved or frozen, I hope.”
But Tom was anxious. He would not leave his post in the pilot room that night. As the darkness increased the two great searchlights of the seaplane flashed their beams over the icefields, and it did seem as though, if there were any castaways there, these signals would be answered. The castaways from the Kalrye were known to have electric torches.
Until the thin edge of the sun appeared above the horizon again the Winged Arrow soared over the sea. Captain Karofsen pointed out the coast of Greenland, which the boys at first had thought was a row of icebergs in the distance.
“My Kalrye, she vos sailing by there when she vos wrecked,” said the schooner captain. “We make it in about two days more. Undt she iss lost!”
The plane swept around and drifted back toward Iceland on the other tack. Beneath, the points of broken ice began to sparkle, tipped by the brief rays of the sun. The sheets of unbroken ice were as blue as the sea itself. As the plane moved southward there were fewer open channels and pools. It seemed, before noon, as though able men cast away in this ice might make their way to one shore or the other.
Yet, if they did, neither the Greenland nor Iceland coasts afforded much hope of succor. The first named was utterly barren for hundreds of miles, while the fishing settlements on Iceland were far apart on this northwestern coast.
Now and again somebody spied something moving on the ice, and down the flying boat would swoop that the object might be the better examined. In each case the searchers were disappointed. Several times small herds of seals were made out, or a pair of walruses. Once a huge polar bear was seen drifting down a channel, enthroned on a lump of ice. It had evidently been fishing at the edge of the open water and the chunk of ice had broken away from the parent field.
A school of round-backed whales, some ten of them, were observed swimming down a channel, evidently making for the warmer seas.