Hugh McAlister

“ Lee Renaud burrowed his head between his hands, as though by pressure he would stop the ugly round of thought. But thought swept on, ceaselessly.
To make matters worse, it was drift ice they were on, a great sheet that constantly changed its position. In a gale, it might be pounded into a thousand pieces and become little pans that would scarce support a man’s weight.
Scotty, a short, heavy-set fellow, wearing spectacles that miraculously had not broken in his fall, worked continually with the remnant of his sun compass and a small magnetic compass. ”

“ Not for nothing had he followed the work of those old inventors making their way forward, a step at a time. In his own old workshop in the Cove, Lee had copied those steps in real, working mechanisms that, however crude they might have been, had yet achieved results. A modern, up-to-date inventor would be used to a splendid laboratory, used to purchasing smooth, finished, machine-made products to help with the carrying out of his ideas. But Lee Renaud, like those oldtime pioneers in electricity, was used to seizing upon wood and wire, scrap metal and glass. ”

“ In the haze of the ever shifting Arctic lights, horizons are most uncanny things. Sometimes objects far away seem almost under the nose. And again, men find their feet mounting some small rise that in the haze they had thought was far away. Mirages, too, fling processions of strange scenes before the eye. A mountain, a lake, a river looms vividly ahead, then fades back into the shadows from which it has sprung.
So it was a good ten hours of hard travel, and stumblings, and dodgings of ice pitfalls, before the exploration party came within “normal eyesight” view of the great black triangle. ”

“ On even so slight a thing as a bundle of snow moss does the success of an Arctic trip hang. For without this specially prepared moss to line boots and absorb dampness, the feet of men tramping the blizzard-swept snow barrens would freeze.
Just such details as these, and a thousand others, great and small, had to be attended to by Captain Jan and the men who worked with him.
A trip into the frozen north was no holiday of leisure; it meant hard work for all concerned.
The busiest place aboard the Nardak was the radio-room, with its every space—walls, ceiling, desk—crowded with modern equipment. ”

“ With modern machines in that ice hangar, this little band of explorers could tap the air of the civilized latitudes and bring its music across thousands of miles of snow barrens. A turn of the dial in the ship’s radio-room, and the long arm of radio reached forth and plucked music out of the air, the latest news from America’s metropolitan cities, tunes from Broadway and personal messages from well-wishers. ”

“ Below the Nardak stretched snow fields, and often great frozen lakes where the ice lay sometimes smooth, sometimes thrust high in grotesque ridges where some throe of nature had hurled up the frozen substance. For days now they had been traversing the snow barrens, a strange white world where daylight held continuously. For this was the land of the midnight sun. Through the summer of this weird Arctic world, there would be months of daylight, with the sun riding from horizon to horizon, but never quite dipping out of sight. ”

“ Captain Jan was the type of man whom danger lures as a honey-pot lures bees. A great new gold rush was stirring the Western Hemisphere—a flying rush into Canada’s frozen Arctic on the hunt for that precious metal. A fur-clad adventurer’s discovery of gold-bearing rock in the northern wilds of the Mackenzie Delta had sent men trekking into that frozen land by canoe, by foot, by dog-sled. On his other explorations, Jan Bartlot had followed land trails and sea trails. But now he proposed to follow the air trail up into the Arctic, to take a huge dirigible into that land of storms and snows. ”

“ FIGHTING THROUGH Radio had brought ships of the air and ships of the sea into the Arctic to search for the lost crew from the great Nardak. Radio must now be the guide to focus the eyes of the searchers upon these dots that were freezing, starving humans on the boundless wastes.
Like one demented, Lee Renaud hung over his crude sending machine, tap-tapping his call into the air. He ate next to nothing, slept only in snatches. He must get in touch with Spitzbergen, with the base ship, the Kravassin, anchored there. ”

“ Endurance gains the wolf-pack its meat—relentless persistence in the chase and untiring watching and waiting for hunger, weakness and thirst to drop some beleaguered creature into their jaws.
Green eyes of hate glared up from the cave floor at the men trapped on the ice wall. Red tongues lolled hungrily over long jaws each time there was some faint movement of slipping or sliding, for it might presage a human losing grip and falling into the waiting death ring below. ”

“ At the ship itself, ladders and hawsers and scores of willing hands waited to draw them up to safety.
“Easy now! He’s injured! That one’s not seeing much. Easy, easy!” rose calls from the ice.
Blanket slings hoisted up Van Granger and Scotty.
Lee Renaud had the strength to go up and over by himself, though the feel of solid ship beneath him took the last of his fighting spirit out of him. Safe! He didn’t have to be strong for himself and for the sick and injured men longer. He was going to make a fool of himself—going to faint. He fought off blackness in vain. ”

“ For generations, the great Canadian Northwest has been luring men into its frozen heart to seek wealth. The magnet which drew adventurers into this enormous wilderness, where for hundreds upon hundreds of miles there was no sign of human life, no vegetation save the fossilized leaves and twigs of a million years ago, no connection with the world of living men—the magnet which lured was mineral wealth. Gold, silver, nickel, platinum, not reckoned in millions of dollars, but in billions, lay almost to hand, just below the frozen crust of this frozen land. ”

“ When the great dirigible backed out of its ice hangar and took the air once more, it wore a new appendage—a small, boat-like arrangement that swung by long hawsers far below the hull. In the nose of this and aimed toward earth were set three big motion-picture cameras. The major part of that million feet of film was about to be put into use.
As the huge ship of the air, day after day, radiated out from its cave base on journeys that covered hundreds of miles, the steady grind of cameras devouring film made aerial maps of the frozen hills, valleys, mountains, and lakes. ”

“ It was a jumbled medley, remnants of broken radio, a case of chocolate, bursted cans of fruit, bundles of fur garments. Scattered here and there in the wreckage were lumps of the rich specimen ore taken out of the Arctic surface mine. To men marooned on an ice sheet, gold was a mockery. Food, instead of gold, was treasure to them now.
Lee and Scotty worked on and on, gathering bits of wreckage, banking deeper their snow roof, pushing themselves to the point of exhaustion. For as long as they labored, they could force off thought. ”

“ Storm warnings tap through the air, radio speeds the word in all directions. In consequence, a mail plane for the West dips south in its itinerary to avoid nasty weather; shipping on the Great Lakes goes into dock or heads for the safety of open water; a mammoth dirigible changes its course to circle around a hail-and-wind-tortured sector of the ocean of air.
Between his hours of standing watch at the radio, Lee turned with delighted eyes to the mosaic of rivers, cities, forests and farms spread beneath the ship. ”

“ For on the desert of ice, when the search party from the Kravassin made landing, they found the whole crew of the lost dirigible—but no dirigible. Not at first, anyway. Instead before their eyes lay a vast mound of snow. Within those tons of white drift lay the wreck of the Nardak—two engines smashed, and no fuel to run those that were left.
Haggard, bearded men, in whom hope had long been dead, laughed and shouted and prayed when they saw the great ship, and the rescue party swarming over the ice.
“The impossible! A miracle out of the sky! How are we found?” ”

“ Ordinarily, the great ship kept to a height of well over two thousand feet, but when the photographers wanted to picture some object, the dirigible would be glided down to a thousand, five hundred, even a mere three hundred feet above ground. Lee Renaud was startled to find that ice sheets which from on high had looked glassy smooth, from the near view stood out in deep ridges and furrows, as though broken by some giant’s plowshare. Nature turned some strange tricks up here in this frozen North. ”

“ Eskimo igloos—the round earth-and-stone huts banked in snow that were the homes of the fur-clad natives of the Arctic! As the huge ship of the air passed like a menacing shadow above this native settlement, fur-clad men crept out from their tunnel-like doors, waved their arms and raced wildly over the snow fields. Seen from the airship, they looked to be tiny ants swarming out of an ant hill. ”

“ To Lee Renaud, stumbling upon all this old knowledge, it seemed that he himself was just discovering electricity. For most of the fifteen years of his life, he had merely accepted electricity as an ordinary, everyday thing. Now the real glory of it smote him, thrilled him, inspired him. He longed desperately to try out these primitive experiments for himself. Here on these pages was given the beginning of man’s knowledge of electricity, the beginning of man’s struggle to harness this mighty power into usefulness. ”

“ Lee Renaud chuckled to himself. “How those old fellows would turn over in their graves at the idea of music from Broadway being just twenty seconds from the Arctic Circle. And it all happened because a Pomeranian monk shut some electricity in a glass jar.” As his mind went back to his own first studies of things electrical, Lee had the strange feeling that King’s Cove and all his old life were in the realm of the unreal—that only the Arctic, and radio at the top of the world, and a modern airship flying the polar wastes were real. ”

“ Everywhere was white stillness. Not a sign of vegetation; not a sign of animal life—or so it seemed at first. Those untrained in the ways of the Arctic do not at once realize the protective coloring which Nature has bestowed on her denizens in this land of eternal cold.
To Lee Renaud, a wind-swept hillside over which the dirigible zoomed low, with moving-picture cameras clicking out film, was—well, was just a hillside dotted with black rocks where the gale had swept off the snow. Then—and Lee opened his eyes very wide—some of the black rocks began galloping off. ”

“ Lee’s hands trembled as he pushed the wire framing of the folding aerial up and up over his head, while he crouched low to give room for it in the slanting niche in which his body was jammed.
It was dangerous work, balancing one’s self in a high ice crack while below the killer horde squatted on its haunches and waited, as only the wolf-pack can wait, for its meat. ”