Moving Mountains

By Walter L. Bailey

(Previous chapter)

Chapter Six — Plunging Ever Southward

Morning came suddenly to Bob. He sat up on his bed of boxes and gazed about dazedly. He unwound the blankets from his body, moved to the cave’s entrance, and pulled back the blanket. Icy air struck his face.

Without, all was still. The storm had blown over and the sun was again trying to pierce the haze which still wrapped the Arctic. The ocean had frozen over again with new ice while they slept. Huge piles of old ice could be seen everywhere, stacked where the gale had hurled it.

Bob turned to wake his companions, but found them already climbing out of their blankets. Without much talk, they ate, made crude sleds out of provision boxes, and, loaded to capacity, started southward along the ocean floor, dragging the heavy sleds behind them in silence.

For hour after endless hour they labored on — southward, ever southward across the ice. More than once old Spike, who was in the lead, was forced to shift provisions from Dan’s sled to his own to lighten the youth’s load. But even then Dan lagged. His strength was not equal to this strain.

Bob, bringing up the rear, was continually kicking the back of his pal’s lagging sled. He noticed that old Spike’s face wore a deep troubled look, but the old engineer maintained his usual silence.

Once or twice, without stopping the procession, Bob reached forward and lifted a box from Dan’s sled and placed it on his own. He noticed a decided increase in Dan’s pace. But now his own load dragged sorely on his already overtaxed muscles. He pulled on and on, however — forward, ever forward across the icy ocean floor. Bob’s legs began to ache, his breath became short, quick gasps, still he kept on and on, until his very brain seemed numbed.

Then suddenly he saw the form of old Spike stagger ever so slightly. A creepy chill passed through Bob’s body. What if old Spike played out? What would become of them? He was the only one who could lead them out of this!

Bob watched closely as they trudged on. Again old Spike wavered, this time more pronounced. But he straightened up again and moved slowly on, only to come to an entire halt before he had taken a dozen steps more. Bob saw the veteran engineer stagger until he almost fell, then he slowly disentangled himself from his sled-ropes and without a word to either boy, moved forward toward a ridge of ice several dozen feet ahead. The ridge rose eight or ten feet above the ocean’s floor.

With grave misgivings and too weary himself to follow, Bob watched the engineer’s form climb slowly to the top of the ridge. He saw Dan drop to his sled and sit humped in silent exhaustion. The cold was terrible. Bob shivered. He saw old Spike drag himself to a leaning position on top of the ridge and scan the ocean floor on the opposite side. But Bob knew what he was seeing — ice, ice, endless stretches of dead-white ice. Miles and miles of it, and they were already exhausted. Again Bob shivered, not so much from cold as from the grim realization that nothing lay ahead of them but ice, with final starvation and death. They were not equipped to fight their way across this icy world. He sank wearily to his sled.

His tired eyes rested on the back of Dan’s humped figure seated on the sled directly ahead of him. It seemed funny that Dan had nothing to say. It was not like Dan to sit in silence. But then Bob realized that he himself had nothing to say. Somehow he preferred to sit in silence — a silence corresponding to the stillness of the desolate drab scene about him. The dull, hazy sky was bleak, still. Not even a breeze stirred over the endless stretches of dead-gray ice.

The figure of old Spike could be seen sprawled on the ridge-top, gazing on into what lay ahead. His figure looked limp and broken in that awful silence. Then suddenly Bob realized that the silence was not complete. There was a voice in it — a dreadful, terrorizing voice. A voice that painted a picture of despair; of stark tragedy; of men slowly perishing on that ominous, eerie, never-ending expanse of ice.

Bob listened to this voice in the silence, and drank deeply and bitterly of its message. It was all about him; it seemed suddenly to shout from the very sky; to burst forth from the endless sweeps of ice; to cry from the humped, broken figures of his comrades before him. This whole frigid world seemed suddenly filled with it, and with its escapeless message of destruction.

Then it was that Bob became aware of another voice in the cold silence — a voice that was distinct even though it came on a lower scale. It mingled with the first voice, yet seemed widely separated from it. Though the voice whispered, it seemed to send a message clearly through the turmoil to Bob’s ears. The message was the opposite of the first voice; was uplifting, heartening. Bob listened intently to it.

“Lo, I am with you alway. Even unto the end of the world!”

But somehow he was not strong enough; somehow his mind could not fully grasp this whispered message which was floating so serenely to his ears. The terrible voice of destruction was pressing too close. The ice seemed colder, the white-gray distance seemed to simmer with heat — but Bob knew that it was simmering with cold. He glanced again at Dan, who was seated as before. Then his eyes lifted to old Spike on the ridge-top. The man was sprawled against a large protruding hump of ice.

And as he looked, old Spike half raised himself, cupped his hands to his mouth and a crying call rose high over the cold plains. Bob shuddered violently. Again old Spike half raised himself — and once more that despairing cry lifted itself and reverberated across the desolate icebound Arctic, echoing and re-echoing through the ice.

Bob pulled himself out of his troubled sleep with great effort. The little cave was roaring with sound. Old Spike and Dan were standing in the cave entrance waving and shouting. Outside in a huge water lane which the Arctic storm had left, stood an ice-patrol boat. Its whistle was sending a joyous cry across the dead-white ice. The sound seemed to fill the whole world. Leaping up, Bob joined his comrades.

An hour later they had boarded the patrol and had related their experience to the captain and crew, and had heard how the ice patrol boat number 490 had picked up the Banaza’s SOS; how it had sped to the rescue to pick up the Banaza’s crew from the small boats; how the Captain had learned from six blacks that the three had been left behind.

Through powerful glasses, the Captain had seen the three working at the cave on the iceberg. But before the berg could be reached, the storm which had carried the berg so far north, broke, and the ice-patrol was unable to do more than keep afloat, dodge bergs, and follow slowly the general direction taken by the big berg. But the ice-patrol had followed them on and on, finally working its way through lead after lead to its present position far into the ice.

Bob and Dan were leaning over the after-rail. Slowly the nose of the patrol boat swung around, and the glistening iceberg with its many spires and cave-like depressions was slowly lost to sight in the ice behind.

Very slowly, the ice-boat made its way along the jagged water-lane. Sometimes the lane narrowed so that the little boat’s sides scraped the ice-pack to get through; but it plowed on and on, ever southward.

Bob and Dan gazed back across the gray-white expanse of ice with the narrow lane running through it.

“Some day,” said Dan, “I’d like to travel over that ice to the North Pole.”

“And freeze to death,” returned Bob without looking up.

“Not if we have the proper equipment,” returned Dan. “And take along those words from the deck-radio.”

“We’ll go sometime,” said Bob without further argument.

The ice-patrol plowed on, taking them farther and farther from the ice-bound Arctic. The pack-ice became thinner and thinner, until it faded away into the deep blue sea.

Nothing lay in their homeward path now, save a half dozen harmless, wandering bergs — a half-dozen moving mountains.

(The End)