CHAPTER XVIIIPROSPECTING
“Ah-boom-ah!” It sounded like guns, but it could be only the roar of some glacier avalanche, or an ice peak splitting asunder.
“Ah-boom-ah! Ah-boom!” There it came again, almost at hand.
Puffs of white smoke, fur-jacketed men running, dropping on knee to aim, to fire, leaping up to run on again. These were Goode, Millard, Harrison, and a score of armed men from the dirigible. At their onslaught, the wolf-pack leaped snarling into action, faced the hail of lead for a moment, then fled, leaving their dead behind. The snarling call and hunger wail of a pack cheated of its prey drifted back on the wind.
Numb and stiff in their frost-rimed furs, the cave refugees had to be lifted down from the ice ledges. Hot soup, and many hands to rub up circulation in numb forms soon brought them back to normal.
“How—how’d you ever find us so quick?” asked Renaud. “Radio wouldn’t work—”
“Like thunder, it wouldn’t!” ejaculated Tornado Harrison, whirling on his heel. “Why, your voice came sliding in on that ship’s instrument like greased lightning. Simms tuned in to your voice soon as that buzz signal zipped in. He answered you a dozen times, telling you that help was coming. Didn’t you get that?”
“Got nothing, not a sound, till those guns boomed. They were powerful welcome, though,” Renaud grinned, then sobered down. “Something wrong with my instrument. Next time it might not work even one way. Got to look into that.”
The next few days saw mighty changes at the ice cave. Instead of slinking wolves and flapping owls, it now housed a settlement of humankind. A very modern settlement it was. Man had brought electricity into the wastes of the Arctic,—electricity for heating, for cooking, for running various mechanical devices.
Before the explorers moved into this vast, ready-built, triangular abode, however, some precautionary steps were taken. No telling whether bear as well as wolf had made this a den. Smoke bombs and gas rockets were hurled in to drive out any dangerous inmates. Then when the atmosphere cleared, thorough investigation was made by the light of electric torches. They found themselves in a mammoth shelter. A great opening back into the mountain that must have been full three city blocks deep by a block wide. So high was its pointed ceiling that our National Capitol and a couple of skyscrapers besides could have been housed beneath it.
With the motors running gently, and with men hauling at the drag ropes, the great silver hull of the Nardak was finally drawn into this Arctic cave-hangar. Ice columns served as anchor posts for its hawsers. The great dirigible held central place within the shelter. Here and there little rooms and tunnels rayed off from the main room. In one was set up a workshop with anvil and hammers and an electric furnace. In another a kitchen with pots and stove and part of the stores banked against the wall. Further on, Lee Renaud had spread some laboratory material, tubes, acids, wires. He was trailing the flaw in his radio receiver, experimenting with an acid dip for selenized plates, to render them impervious to the terrific cold of this bleak white world. Since the wiring of his radio was in perfect order, and since the little machine worked well within a compartment heated to moderate warmth, Renaud was more than sure that the penetrating touch of the bitter Arctic must have interfered with his sensitized plates. With grim determination he pushed on with his work. He must find the flaw, must find the cure. Failure of these little portable connecting links could spell failure for the whole expedition.
When the expedition began to settle itself into the real business of this hazardous journey, seeking gold in this white, frozen land, Renaud watched his little “knapsack radios” being placed in the various field outfits with a clutch at his heart. Suppose the new acid-treated plates worked no better than the old ones? Suppose, in dire need, the radios failed, even as his had failed in part during the wolf episode!
Far different from anything that had ever heretofore been tried out, were Captain Jan Bartlot’s very modern methods of gold seeking. 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. For hope of such treasures, men in the past pushed into the very fringes of the Arctic Circle by the primitive sledge drawn by wolf-dogs, and the equally primitive canoe of bark or skin. With such crude, laborious means of travel it took almost superhuman endurance to even reach the mineral fields of the Arctic. When the old-time mining prospector stepped off the train and aboard sled or canoe, it meant a whole summer of grueling, grinding travel before he reached the northern ore country. Then winter darkness would cover the land, and the prospector could do nothing but sit down and await the coming of another spring. The following year, when the red rim of the sun again showed above the Arctic world, he set about his prospecting, slow work that might lead him to wealth, but that would likely take the whole of summer daylight in the doing. That meant another settling down for another lonely sojourn through the night of winter. The next spring the bearded, fur-clad prospector trekked his wealth back to civilization—if he lived to tell the tale of those terrible years of frozen exposure, hardship and suffering. Three years to trek a thousand miles and back! Hundreds followed the lure of gold up into the far north. Only tens lived to get back.
Olaf Valchen was one of those prospectors, who, eight years ago, followed the land trail and the water trail, by sled, by skin canoe, up into the frozen north. He had found gold—millions of dollars’ worth of it in the strange rottenstone mounds that edged a frozen lake. Three years later he reached civilization, but as penniless as when he had adventured forth. On the long trail, when one has to either cast away life or gold—well, one drops the heavy skin sacks in the snow, and struggles on, thankful to survive.
And now he was going back to try to find again the trail that led to gold. But this time he was following the Arctic trail in a manner that was most modern of the modern.
In the past, one year by sled and portage! Now, over the same trail by air in a few days! As the Bartlot expedition had by dirigible so speeded up the trek into the north, so it now planned to speed up the business of prospecting.
In this marvel of mine-prospecting by air, the camera was to be the surveyor’s first instrument.
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.
This was no film to be “canned” and carried to a warmer clime for development and display. To fulfill its purpose, it had to be developed right here in liquid baths of eight hundred gallons of water. A startling order for a land where water was not water at all, but solid ice. So after the aerial cameras had clicked their final click, some rousing times were had at the ice cave camp. Captain, engineers, weather man, radio men, doctor, geologist, cook and crew, every man-jack of them turned out to lug snow, three tons of it! Cook pots were everywhere. Buckets and bags of snow were dumped in them to melt. In the end, tons of snow made hundreds of gallons of water—and the film had its developing bath, Arctic or no Arctic!
Outside on the snow barrens, the polar world went its old way. The cold streamers of the northern lights flickered in the sky; the wolf-pack flung its hunting howl on the winds; the great white bear stalked across his lonely domain.
But within the shelter of the ice tunnel, a handful of humans had dared to bring a new way of life into the Arctic wilds. Here a little audience sat thrilled and tense before a screen on which a moving-picture machine projected flight pictures made and developed in the very teeth of Arctic cold. Here was pictured no tawdry drama of human love and hate. Instead the film unrolled magnificent vistas of mountain land and lake land. Before the screen sat the expedition geologists, exploring a thousand miles by paper in less time than the prospectors of other days took to explore only a few miles on foot, and with the pick and shovel. To a geologist, this pointed range of hills meant a certain rock formation. The lake bed presaged another. The long, low, rounded mounds circling water meant the great pre-Cambrian rock shield, the oldest stone formation in the north country, stone so old that its weathered seams have chipped and cracked and broken, so that the treasure it once hid now shows through in extrusions of gold or copper, silver or platinum.
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.
“Shades of all ancient explorers!” 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.
When, from study of the aerial photographs, the geological map was finally pieced together and arranged, it was time for the ground prospecting to begin. The prospectors were carried out in pairs. The dirigible landed them in various places where the ground formation was such as to indicate the pre-Cambrian sheath rising in its long, shallow mounds. Some men were put down within a few miles of the cave base; some, hundreds of miles away. These intrepid ones were left with a pup tent, an eiderdown sleeping bag, a rifle and ammunition, radio outfit and food.
Left alone, the men were to make a temporary camp immediately and to begin prospecting. If they made a find, they were to communicate with the main base by radio, or by orange flags laid out on the white snow as signals for the dirigible when it passed over again. In the prospecting crew were the best of their kind, miners from Africa, India and the Yukon.
The messages began rolling in incredibly soon. The ship’s radio men had to dance continual attendance on buzzer signal and radio code. The first prospector to get in touch with dirigible headquarters was Olaf Valchen.
“Stand by—O. V. on the air! After breakfast, better hop over here in that sky boat. Location a hundred miles west of where longitude 110 cuts latitude 65. Come prepared to knock off a few samples of greenstone with a geologist’s hammer, and fly back to base to have ’em assayed before supper. Come in a hurry! Got something real to show you! O. V. signing off!”
As the great dirigible, answering this joy call, sped through the snow haze and skimmed lower and lower, her lookouts sighted the orange signal laid out on the frozen white, and her engines were halted. The ice anchor was dropped and with a loud hissing seared its way to a secure depth. The hawsers were windlassed up, and the great hull eased to earth on its pneumatic bumpers. The entrances to gondolas and navigating section were flung open—and the first fellow out was Yiggy, fur boots and all, barking a delighted greeting to his stocky blond Norwegian master. Scooping up the wriggling terrier into his arms, Olaf Valchen led the way to his find.
A hundred paces back from where he had laid out his flag signal, the prospector stopped on the banks of a frozen lake. Circling the lake was a rim of low mounds. One of these, like a domed ant hill, thirty feet high and some two hundred feet in diameter, had been partly freed of its frozen crust. These bare spots showed dull green and gray, the famous greenstone of the Canadian prospectors who had made lucky strikes. Nakaluka, the rottenstone of the Eskimos! So old was this, the oldest stone formation in the north country, that it was crumbling asunder, cracking apart in great seams. And in those seams lay gold, glittering and yellow.
Lee Renaud could feel his heart thumping against his double-furred shirt. He had not dreamed that his eyes would ever see such a thing—a great mound that was one vast heap of wealth, piled up in plain sight, set out where anyone strolling by in the course of the last thousand years might have seen it.
A few hours of work and they had collected bagfuls of samples, so rich that the naked eye could almost estimate their value.
Excitement and happiness swirled through Lee Renaud. But it was not all “gold” excitement. His chief thrill was that his radio had passed a great test. Despite the creeping touch of abnormal cold on metal and acid and tube, his radio had brought in the message! His latest improvement had worked! Already still other plans were dimly outlining themselves, plans for stretching the power of his tiny instrument, making its call reach farther and farther.
Other reports were radioed in. Some prospectors had found other pre-Cambrian rock mounds, but with slight gold value, for ridges of granite rose too close and precluded the possibility of the ore veins stretching to any distance. Here and there, though, more of the vastly rich finds were located, mapped, stake-claimed, and sample ore taken.
On this one trip, gold worth millions of dollars could be taken out. And that was but the beginning. In the next few years, these Arctic Barren Lands would see civilization brought into them because of man’s mastery of the flying ship, and his new power of speeding the spoken word through the air on the waves of radio. For this forward march of civilization into the waste places, first bases of operation would have to be laid. Great dirigibles would transport the gas, food, equipment up into the North. Planes would be flown in. Hangars would be set up. Spare engines, spare parts, together with landing gears for summer or winter, all would be stored away. Gasoline and oil would be put down in large caches. Gradually a combination airport and mining camp would spring into being, with huts, radio mast, machine shops and the rest of the equipment.
Bartlot’s expedition into the great northland had achieved success. And future success loomed ahead.
To Lee Renaud, it was all very wonderful and marvelous. Success written in large letters! And yet through it all, he felt a strange little throb of regret. This success had been too easy, too mechanical. He could not down an unwonted touch of sadness that soon there would be left no more surprises on this world of ours. No far, unknown, mysterious and frozen outposts for man to dream about. The White North conquered, and turned into factory ground!
But young Renaud was indulging too soon in boyish regrets over man’s conquest of the great white mysteries of the north country.
The frozen North still held some surprises for puny man who had dared push his machines of sound and of flight into her vast lonely spaces.
The North reached her icy fingers after the huge silver Nardak loaded with Arctic treasure and headed southward; she roared out her power in merciless blasts that tossed and whirled the great ship like some chip at the base of a cataract.