Under the Sea to the North Pole (18 page)

She addressed her companions.

“Gentlemen,” said she, “it seems to me that my father and his two companions have realized their plan and triumphantly crowned their attempt.”

Hubert looked at her in some surprise.

“What makes you say so?” he asked.

“Oh! it is very simple,” she replied. “We are on the edge of the open sea; and we have before us the wall of ice that you and Monsieur Schnecker could not cross in the balloon. Now, my father had brought the submarine boat with him, had he not?”

“Yes, quite right as far as you go, but I do not see what that has to do with it.”

“But is it not manifest that the expedition has succeeded?” concluded Isabelle. “For if it were not so, we should have found the boat.”

“That is true,” said the sailors.

At the same time, Hubert kept to himself a painful reflection that had just occurred to him,—

“It proves that the travellers went down beneath the waves, in their endeavour to pass the belt of permanent ice. But there is nothing to show that they will ever come back.”

With an effort he drove these painful thoughts away, and even proposed with some gaiety that after what Isabelle had said, they should pitch their tents on the spot they had reached, and remain there as long as possible to wait for the return of the travellers,

In the interval they could visit the surroundings and study the configuration of these strange places.

The plan was adopted, and the programme followed to the letter.

The 27th was as fine a day as the preceding one, but the thermometer fell to 20 degrees below zero. The first care of the explorers was to run to the edge of the ice to verify the state of the sea. The waves were moving freely; not the least frost stained their surface. D’Ermont’s astonishment was great when he found that the thermometer, sunk to fifteen feet, rose to 4 degrees, the normal temperature of water.

This polar sea was ‘therefore not subject to the intense cold which reigned in its environs.

More than ever there rose in the minds of all a desire to cross the barrier of ice, and penetrate the mysterious pole hidden behind the formidable wall of icebergs.

They resumed their walk, but this time along the edge of the palaeocrystic ocean. Everywhere they found the same clean breakage, cut and polished but nowhere rounded off by the action of the waves. Here and there the pack, from twelve to eighteen yards thick, was cut into by ridges, cracks and creeks generally narrow, which they could jump over. But it was evident that under the action of a storm from the south it would break up into huge masses, leaving wide channels between them through which a large ship could find a passage.

Nares, then, was right from his point of view, Lockwood from his, the first in affirming, on the authority of his lieutenant, Markham, that the open polar sea was a myth, the other in his voyage in 1883 in declaring that the waves beat freely on the northern shores of Greenland.

Accepting the general opinion, Hubert concluded that the action of the cold, variable with the years and seasons, would be apparent over even the smallest areas of the ocean, and that the free zone owed its immunity from its influence to some very warm current passing under the Pole itself.

He hesitated no longer. Giving orders to launch one of the boats, he embarked in it with Lieutenant Pol. They set sail, and ran before the south-west breeze.

It was ten o’clock in the morning when they started; it was eleven in the evening- when they returned, and the sun was just touching the horizon. They had sailed sixteen miles before reaching the foot of the ice wall.

There their curiosity was awakened by the strange character of the cliffs, which seemed to be fixed in granite sockets rather than immersed in the ocean. The cause of this was soon evident.

The huge palaeocrystic wall was in no place in contact with the water. It rested on a sort of prodigious ledge, which rose from the depths of the abyss. Lieutenant Pol sounded the depth, and found no bottom at 225 fathoms.

All was now explained. The mass of ocean which separated the Pole from the neighbouring lands like Courbet Island and Cape Washington rolled in mighty waves of water warmed by a subterranean current or the presence of some hidden furnace. The cold had no influence on it at these depths, and it was only on the surface that it was subject to oscillations of. temperature.

D’Ermont and Pol concluded that the Pole itself was a large island entirely covered with ice. To reach it was apparently impossible, for the barrier of monstrous blocks offered no fissure permitting a passage, nor were there any means of scaling it.

When they returned they found the camp in a state of excitement.

An event of the greatest gravity had occurred: Isabelle had disappeared.

Guerbraz, in deep trouble, rapidly informed Hubert of what had happened. After the boat had gone they had started out exploring to the east, and had reached without difficulty a part of the floe where the hummocks were as numerous as anthills. Some of these hillocks were of extraordinary height, attaining some of them twenty, some of them forty, yards in elevation. They had been up several of these, and the weary, explorers were about to return to the camp, when Guerbraz discovered a bottle on the field entirely free from the coating of ice it ought to have had. The mark where it had fallen was still fresh. This bottle contained a paper, which Isabella hastened to read. And as soon as she had cast her eyes on the document she was seized with feverish agitation. “I will not go back to the camp,” she said, “until I have found my father! My good Guerbraz, give this paper to Lieutenant D’Ermont when he returns, telling him that my father is here, ought to be here, in some place, perhaps still alone, and that I shall have no rest until I have found him.” And in spite of all. they could say or do, she ran off among the hummocks, aided by her snowshoes, which she wore on these long excursions; and suddenly behind one of the hummocks she disappeared. “And you did not search for her?” exclaimed Hubert, mad with sorrow. “Pardon, captain, we could do no more. We have just come back for provisions, and are then off to find her. Are you coming with us?” D’Ermont had stopped. Under the oblique rays of the sun he read the document that had been found. It was a sort of letter from De Keralio himself. This is what it contained:—
“16th August.—
I throw this paper, without hope and without resources, into the open sea, which will not be open much longer. The ice is coming up from south to north, and we are now on a floe drifting to the east All our instruments remain in the boat. We have neither tent nor sleeping-bags. A sudden shock has separated us from our boat and our return to the Pole, The two voyages there and back have been satisfactorily accomplished. The Pole is an island surrounded by reefs which support the wall of ice. We journeyed under water at a depth of about 600 ft. If the sea freezes we will try to recover our boat. Latitude 87° 48' 20" longitude 43° l6' west. That is our last observation. It is winter, and the accident occurred at 6h. 15 min. in the morning. We have ten pounds of preserved bread and 800 grammes of pemmican. If the crew of the
Polar Star
find this bottle let them look for us to the east.”

The lieutenant shuddered as he finished the letter. “Forward!” he cried; “and may God help us! There is not a minute to lose.”

Everyone was on the move to the north-east. An idea suddenly occurred to Hubert. He asked Guerbraz,—

“And the dog? What have you done with the dog? Did he follow his mistress?”

Guerbraz hesitated. Then he replied,—

“That is probable, for since she left us we have not seen him.”

D’Ermont heaved a sigh of consolation and raised his eyes to the sky.

“God be praised! That is one more chance for Isabelle. Let us hope we shall arrive in time for the others.”

Willing as they were, in spite of their using snowshoes, those large soles of skin stretched on wooden frames, and which assist progress considerably, the men were exhausted. Three of them fell, and only got up to fall again a few steps further on. The cold was becoming terrible. At midnight the thermometer registered thirty-four degrees below zero.

Hubert had the tents pitched. As the sky was clear and there was no sign of a snowstorm, he ordered a meal to be at once prepared. To facilitate the cooking and to warm the poor wretches caught by the cold, which increased every hour, he started the hydrogen stove in the largest of the two tents.

For himself he had no mercy. The thought of the disappearance of his betrothed almost drove him mad. He .took a few mouthfuls of hot soup, and rushed on ahead, leaving the men under the command of Lieutenant Pol.

Dr. Servan and Guerbraz followed on his track, and soon came up with him.

Hubert was wringing his hands.

“Have you seen the barometer?” said he to his two companions. “We are certainly going to have a terrible storm. And this unhappy girl who is out in this weather, who has foreseen nothing and feared nothing! Shall we ever find her alive?”

They ran at their utmost speed along the hummocky pack, falling heavily, plunging into deep gullies of snow. Where, then, had Isabelle disappeared?

The sky clouded over rapidly. The storm was coming up at a gallop.

The three men shouted together, and making speaking-trumpets of their hands, called Isabelle in despair.

Nothing replied over all that gloomy waste. There was not even an echo.

Suddenly Guerbraz had a happy thought. “Call the dog!” he said.

Without waiting for the consent of his companions, he shouted with all his might,—

“Salvator! Salvator! Salvator!”

The three men stood silent and listened. They seemed to hear a distant cry.

They were not mistaken.. Between two gusts that swept across the ice they heard a plaintive bark.

It was a bark of bad augury, a lament, one of those -sounds which make the bravest shudder. , “Oh! Heaven!” wept D’Ermont. “She is dead!”

”Courage, captain,” said the energetic Guerbraz, “and forward!”

For the second time the dog’s sorrowful bark traversed the air.

“Salvator would not whine like that,” said Hubert, “if Isabelle were alive.”

“We must never despair,” said the, doctor, hurrying on.

And Guerbraz, as if to encourage himself, gave a loud shout of—

“All right, Salvator, all right. We are coming.”

But the gusts from the south-west bore away their shouts. Thick flakes began to fall, and the snow gathered in drifts under their feet. Luckily the terrible cold, which was now forty-two degrees below zero, froze it hard immediately it fell. They did not run over it; they flew.

At last it seemed as though the barking were coming nearer them. Yes, they were approaching it. The brave dog had scented them, and instead of the lugubrious call they had heard at first, he was now baying with his full strength.

Guerbraz was the first to see him.

He was crouching before an enormous hummock at least thirty feet high. This mountain of ice was made up of two or three separate hillocks joined together by fresh snow. Every moment this new kind of mortar grew thicker and thicker, in spite of the desperate efforts of the dog to clear it away with his paws. In front of him were the traces of a passage recently practicable, and now being rapidly blocked in.

With the butts of their guns the three men soon cleared out the hole.

And as if he had been waiting for this, the dog rushed at the thin crust which- still obstructed the passage, broke it away at the shock, and dashed through, barking furiously.

Hubert lay on the snow at the level of the hole and shouted,—

“Isabelle! Are you there? For the love of God, answer!”

A voice, which appeared to be very weak, replied, as if coming out from the earth,—

“Yes, Hubert, I am here. I am not alone. My father——”

The rest of the phrase was lost. Besides, it was not necessary.

Immediately the three men set to work. The herculean shoulder of Guerbraz shook the walls of this tomb of ice under which they supposed their friends were buried alive. Hubert making a fuse with a handful of powder, used it as a petard to shatter the blocks which the cold had frozen together.

After twenty minutes of almost superhuman effort, a last explosion, the fifth at least, shook the wall of ice and opened up a sort of subterranean corridor.

The three men uttered the same cry. What they had taken for the top of a hummock was nothing but the stern of the submarine boat, of which the rest of the hull was plunged deep down into the snow. The hood of the companion gave it the aspect of one of those huts of which traces are still found in the northern regions of Greenland and Grinnell Land. But here there could be no doubt what it was. The Eskimos are savages of too much sense to build a dwelling on so unstable a ground as the frozen surface of the ocean.

Hubert jumped over the shaking masses of ice that rose above the buried boat, and was the first to penetrate into the interior.

A heartrending spectacle awaited him.

Isabelle, as pale as at death’s door, was kneeling over a man, whose appearance was that of a corpse. From time to time she was moistening the blue lips of the moribund leader of the expedition.