14 Arctic Adventure (10 page)

What they saw was no serpent. It was more like a lot of serpents, Hal counted them. There were ten. And all of them sprouted from one body. Judging by its size, Hal reckoned it must weigh a thousand pounds. The most terrible thing about its appearance was its huge black eyes, almost a foot in diameter. It had terrific jaws, large enough to take in Roger at one gulp. With its tentacles stretched out it must measure fifty feet from tip to tip.

Hal knew what it was. It was the giant cuttle, which has various other names such as giant squid, devilfish and cuttlefish.

It was quite at home in all oceans, including the Arctic, and was so strong that it could drag down a large boat. It was the world’s largest invertebrate, that is, an animal without a backbone. It was carnivorous—nothing but meat would satisfy it. And here, before its nose, were two fine chunks of meat.

But it had evidently dined so well that it was not hungry. Instead it was startled and a little frightened by these two animals that did not seem to be afraid of it.

It waved its tentacles about, and it was easy to see that on each one there were four rows of cups, each cup full of sharp edges like knives. In fact that was why it was called a cuttle. Cuttle is a very ancient word meaning knife. When these suction cups were clamped on any prey the knives began their work and the victim was dead long before it reached the monster’s jaws.

Every tentacle did look like a snake, but it ended not in a head but in a sort of hand which could firmly clutch and hold any living object.

Hal had learned that this peculiar beast had a shell —but the shell was not on the outside, but inside the body. Though inside, it protected the heart and other organs.

Disturbed by the boys, the peculiar beast spouted a cloud of ink into the water which entirely concealed him from sight. That was why it had still another name —the pen-and-ink fish.

Hal feared that the cuttle behind the cloud of ink would now swim away. It would swim backwards, forcing itself along by jets of water from its siphons — a method copied by the makers of jet planes. Men had learned something very valuable from this remarkable Something.

Hal and Roger burst through the ink cloud, determined that this marvellous creature should not escape. The monster, preparing to swim, brought all its ten arms in close to the body. Hal slipped his lasso over the head and back over the body. Then he pulled it tight, imprisoning not only the body but the ten ‘serpents’. Roger helped to adjust the loop and got for his pains a slash from a tentacle with its dozens of knives. The result was that his Neoprene suit was badly cut and would need a lot of repairs before it could be made waterproof again.

His skin had been badly gouged and the blood that came from the wounds made another cloud, this time of red, beside the black cloud of the cuttle’s ink.

The boys then carried the end of the heavy rope up to a floe, where it was seized by a dozen men. Inch by inch the prize exhibit was drawn out of the water and began its journey to the airport.

They walked the streets of Thule — Hal, Roger and Olrik.

‘Quite a town,’ said Hal.

‘Sixteen streets,’ said Olrik, ‘and a radar tower fifty feet higher than the Empire State Building.’

‘All I see is shops, shops, shops,’ said Hal. ‘Where are the people who live here?’

‘The big bosses live in these houses. The working men live under the ice.’

Hal stopped and stared at Olrik. ‘You don’t mean that.’

‘Of course I do. Haven’t you been down under?’

‘No. I’ve had all I can handle on top.’

‘Come with me,’ said Olrik. ‘I’ll show you the under-ice city.’

Outside Thule they reached a hole in the ground. A stairway took them down to the strangest town they had ever seen.

It consisted of immense metal tubes twenty-six feet in diameter. These tubes were the streets of the town. The floor was made of planks. Along the side of the tube were cabins where the working men lived.

‘But why don’t they build the cabins up on top?’ said Hal.

‘Because they would soon be buried in snow. Once they were up above, and the snow completely covered them. So they went below where the snow can’t get at them.’

There was not a glimpse of daylight but there were plenty of electric lights. ‘It’s like being in a submarine,’ Roger said.

But this was much larger than any submarine ever built. There were several dining-rooms. There was a library. There was a game room with table tennis. There was a radio room. There was a gymnasium, and a theatre where, Olrik said, you could see the latest American films even before they were shown in America.

‘How far down are we?’ Hal asked.

‘Thirty-six feet below the surface,’ said Olrik, ‘and getting deeper every time we have a snowstorm.’

‘Doesn’t the snow on top keep it very cold down here?’

‘On the contrary, snow keeps it warm. It’s a very good insulator.’

Men who happened to be off duty were having a good time —looking at films, playing games, reading, singing, talking politics, protected from any bad weather that might happen to be outside.

The boys came out into a snowstorm. A chill wind was blowing. They had to admit it was much better under the ice.

A few days later Olrik took them to another under-ice city. It was called Camp Century and It was even larger and better than the first. Main Street was a quarter of a mile long. It was covered by iron sheets above which was snow many feet deep. When rain came the snow turned to ice.

‘Those iron sheets will be removed after a time,’ said Olrik.

‘Doesn’t the snow fall in?’ said Hal.

‘No,’ said Olrik. ‘After the snow becomes hard it is able to support itself.’

Main Street was very busy. It was so high and wide that tractors and trucks that Olrik called weasels were able to pass through without difficulty. There were fourteen cross streets. They were lined with cabins made of plastic.

‘We think plastic will be used a lot in the ice-sheet stations of the future,’ Olrik said. ‘It makes good, tight little houses.’

Tn the centre of the town there was a nuclear power plant to provide all the electricity needed in the little city.

‘Sometimes it is too warm,’ said Olrik.

‘Do you get cold air from above?’ Hal asked.

‘No, from below.’

‘How could you do that?’

‘Holes have been bored forty feet down into the ice and fans bring up the cold air.’

They visited the quarters of the officers. They were large, lovely rooms with leather-covered armchairs, mahogany chests, decorated lamps, thick carpets and everything else that an officer could desire.

This modern town under the ice was designed for one hundred and fifty men, but Olrik said it would soon be enlarged to accommodate a thousand.

Some of the rooms that Hal and his companions visited were twenty-four feet wide and two hundred feet long. One of these was a laboratory in which experiments were being made to improve still further this unique city under the ice.

‘Would you like to go to the iceberg coast?’ Olrik said one morning.

Hal was surprised. ‘You mean Greenland’s east coast? That’s eight hundred miles away. By dog team it would take twenty-five days to get there.’

‘I see you have been reading up on it,’ said Olrik. ‘You’re a pretty thoroughgoing chap. You always look before you leap,’

‘Cut the compliments,’ Hal said. ‘All I know is that we have no chance of getting to the east coast. It must be wonderful. Most of the world’s icebergs are born there. But we can’t afford to spend twenty-five days to get there and twenty-five days back.’

‘Well then,’ said Olrik, ‘how about half a day to get there and half a day back?’

‘Dream on,’ laughed Hal. ‘You can only do that by plane. And we have no plane.’

‘Yes you have, if you want it. You know I work at the airport part time. A fellow I know is going to fly over to inspect a mining operation. I asked him if he could take you along. He would be glad to have your company. It’s lonesome flying alone. The young fellow is called Pete. He’ll be leaving at eight this morning. It’s nearly that now. Get on some very warm clothing because it’s mighty cold over there.’

They dressed warmly and accompanied Olrik to the airport, where they met Pete. He shook hands with them.

‘Glad to have you along,’ he said. ‘Hop in.’

They climbed aboard. Something above them began to whirr.

‘So you fly a helicopter,’ said Hal.

‘I fly almost anything,’ said Pete, ‘but a helicopter is best on this trip because landing on the cliffs of the east coast is sometimes pretty difficult.’

‘I understand,’ said Hal. ‘The helicopter lets you down easy. You don’t need a runway.’

‘That’s right,’ said Pete. ‘It’s pretty wild over there. Nothing but cliffs and glaciers. No runways. No trees, no grass, nothing but ice and snow and precipices. It’s a bad place to live, a good place to die.’

Now they were crossing the great Greenland ice cap. ‘They say’, Hal remarked, ‘that this ice cap is millions of years old. The oldest part of it, of course, is at the bottom. What would happen if the whole ice cap melted some day during a warm spell along with the one at the South Pole and became just a part of the sea?’

Pete answered, ‘If they melted, it would raise the level of the sea 245 feet.’

‘Think of that!’ said Hal. ‘All the cities along the coast from New York to Buenos Aires would be drowned.’

Roger said, ‘Has anybody ever bored down through the ice cap to the bottom?’

‘No, they bored a hole fifty feet deep and found that the snow there had been laid down in 1879.’

‘Why don’t they bore deeper?’

‘Because the ice cap is twisting like a snake. If you should bore a straight hole today it would be a crooked hole tomorrow. It would be so twisted that you couldn’t possibly get to the bottom of it. Nobody can imagine how this ice cap moves about. There are a few stations on the ice sheet but you don’t know where to find them. They wander here and there. The moving ice carried one station 550 feet in a year. Another station moved half a mile south. The ice cap is alive and kicking. It has a mind of its own.’

Roger looked off to the north-east. ‘Do those black clouds mean it’s going to snow or rain?’

‘Those are not clouds,’ said Pete. ‘They are mountains. They’re called the Watkin Mountains. They are 12,200 feet high. And the mine I am going to see is bored right into the side of one of them. I’ll take you to the iceberg area and leave you there while I go on to the mine. I’ll be there two or three days, then come back and pick you up.’

‘That’s all right with us,’ said Hal. ‘We have a tent and our sleeping bags, and provisions.’

As they neared the east coast they could see the ocean covered with icebergs. Hal remembered how a mighty iceberg such as these had sunk the great ship Titanic in 1912. It was the largest ship in the world and it was making its first voyage. Its captain believed in speed, he couldn’t wait for anything, because he wanted to break the trans-Atlantic record. The sea was very calm and the night was clear and cold. The captain knew there were icebergs ahead but ^be depended upon a sharp lookout rather than reducing speed.

The lookout wasn’t sharp enough. Faster than any ship afloat at that time, the Titanic ploughed head-on into an iceberg which split the ship open as if it had been a walnut. Water rushed in and the ship began to sink. Down to their death went 1,500 passengers.

Perhaps the captain had thought that his mighty ship could plough right through any iceberg. He was sadly mistaken. The berg was just chipped a little, while the ironbound ship became in one moment a pile of junk.

The captain was severely criticized for his carelessness but that did not bring 1,500 people back to life.

Another careless fellow was the captain of the ship Californian, which was only ten miles away but did not respond to the distress signal and simply went on its way without offering any help to the sinking ship and people.

Looking down from the helicopter the boys could see rivers on their way to the ocean. These were not rivers of water but rivers of ice.

‘Those glaciers are very deep,’ Pete said. ‘Some of them almost a thousand feet from top to bottom. One is seven hundred miles long —the longest in the world. Of course being solid ice, they move very slowly, about a hundred feet in a year. But they finally get to the edge of the cliff overlooking the sea. They don’t stop there. Pushed from behind, the glacier keeps going right on into the air. It may ooze out anywhere from a hundred to five hundred feet. But it has nothing to hold it up, so finally, with a terrific crash, it falls three hundred feet to the sea. And that means a new iceberg.’

Roger was excited. ‘I want to see that.’

‘You’ll see it. And you’ll hear it —the cracking and groaning and thundering of the glacier and the terrible crash when it falls into the water throwing up fountains in every direction.’

‘And that’s what they call calving,’ said Hal.

‘Yes,’ said Pete. ‘It’s a strange way to describe it, but it means that just as a cow gives birth to a calf so the glacier gives birth to an iceberg. I must say an iceberg is a mighty big calf.’

Pete couldn’t land his helicopter where he wanted to. The 100-mile-an-hour wind so common on this coast blew the helicopter out over the sea and a wind current carried it down almost to the water. Pete worked hard to get his machine up again into the air.

He circled a couple of icebergs, always in danger of striking one, and finally got the flying machine up above the cliff. There he brought it to a wobbly landing.

Hal and Roger piled out with their tent, sleeping bags and provisions.

‘Good luck,’ cried Pete, as he turned his plane to the north and took off for the mine.

Roger shivered. ‘What makes it so awfully cold here? It’s much colder than it was on the other coast and that was cold enough.’

Hal replied, ‘There’s no north-flowing current here as there was on the other coast to warm it up a little bit. On this side there’s nothing but cold current coming from the north.’