CHAPTER XVSHAGUN
Facing a storm, a vessel at sea would have reefed sails and laid low for the blow. But on this great elongated gas bag, there was nothing to reef. She could only turn tail and race the wind for her life.
Telegraph orders, rushed from control-room to engine quarters, brought the huge dirigible up short, rearing and plunging like a frightened steed. At touch of the engineers, the marvelous mechanism of drive-shaft and bevel gear tilted each propeller on its axis to throw the ship into reverse and back it around. For so huge a bulk, she wheeled in her tracks with amazing speed.
There was need of speed!
Even in that short time while receiving the wirelessed warning out of the air and plunging into retreat, great banks of cloud had reared themselves on the horizon, looming black and sinister. With every passing moment they rolled up, darker, heavier. With awful menace, a great droning roar filled the air.
The Nardak was turning back on the very fringes of an onrushing storm that seemed to leap out of the nowhere.
With a rumble the wind-clouds loosed their first furious gusts in a rage that tore the clouds themselves into a jagged pattern. Ragged openings gave vistas into the still more fearful storm that they had masked!
Through the barrage of thunderheads burst a three-headed tornado, three huge twisting wind-spouts that seemed to reach from earth to sky. Writhing, speeding, twisting across the sky, they pursued the Nardak like great devouring serpents. Devourers they were! Terrific wind velocity within those whirling storms could pluck the hair from the human head, could tear a man limb from limb, could wrench a great airship into shreds and splinters.
With a rush and a roar, forerunners of the storm seemed to burst upon the Nardak from all quarters, seemed bound to beat the great hulk into submission.
Gone was the smooth, swift gliding with which the Nardak had swept northward for more than a thousand miles. In the fury of the gale, the huge ship of the air rocked and plunged. Everything not built in or lashed into place was flung crashing about the hull. Lee Renaud and Captain Jan were careened together and then dashed to the floor and flung hither and yon in a welter of broken furnishings.
“Is it the—the end? Will she capsize?” Lee managed to shout to Captain Jan.
“Heavy ballast—can’t turn over. This pounding within, without, that’s the danger.” Even as Captain Jan spoke, came a thunderous crash of falling objects within the hull. “The struts—if they break, they’ll slash the bags like knives!”
Like some hunted wild animal, the Nardak plunged on her way, riding the constantly changing air currents, sweeping on the edges of the storm, dodging between gales, by a miracle of maneuvering never letting herself be completely swallowed in the maw of the storm monster.
Behind her, three snaky wind-spouts came together with a concussion that rocked sky and earth. In the twinkling of an eye, the face of the land was changed. Trees, boulders, a whole cliff were swept upward and reduced to powder in the grinding crush of the winds. A great air wave, like some tidal wave of the sea, flung the huge Nardak high as though it were a bit of chaff, sucked it earthward to almost scrape the ground.
Then, as swiftly as it had roared into being, the tempest died away. The wind muttered and rumbled low, and dropped into a strange calm.
For a little space the airship hung in this calm, quivering and trembling like some spent runner that has barely survived a terrific race.
By degrees, the apathy of exhaustion passed from the crew. Battered and bruised, with strained, white faces, the men rallied from their terrifying experience and began to take up their tasks.
With apparent serenity, the Nardak went on her way. But in many and varied places, men labored to repair the damages of the storm. The thrashings of a broken strut had ripped the tough cloth-and-membrane lining of one gas bag. It was a total loss—a loss that reduced the lifting power of the dirigible, but did not cripple the ship to any appreciable extent. The builders had allowed an overplus of helium to meet such an emergency. Much more alarming was the discovery of a defect in the propeller shaft and the flapping of wind-torn fabric on the port stabilizer fin.
Because Lee Renaud was cool-headed, as well as young and active, he took his part in the emergency repair work that now must be done.
There was no halting of the great dirigible on her flight. She simply went into reverse, pointed her nose to the northwest, and took up her storm-broken course once more. If possible, she must keep to her scheduled time of going into the Arctic. For the Arctic summer might last two months, and it might last only a week or so. Arctic summer means a slight melting of snow in wind-swept valleys, means black up-thrust of rock and cliff here and there where the snow-cap has slipped. It is in this brief period, the only time when the contour of the terrain of this ice-locked land is even slightly exposed, that geologist and scientist and gold prospector must make their swift search for the treasure held in Arctic rocks.
So without ever slowing down, much less landing, the Nardak held to her course, while men, like tiny midgets, crawled perilously over her hull, within and without. In the crowded quarters of a motor gondola, mechanics repaired and replaced a propeller, all in the space of four hours. That was a hot and heavy task. But the real danger came to those workers suspended in a sort of harness against the outside of the great dirigible to repair its dismantled fin, while the giant ship held to her speed and to her height of a thousand meters in the air.
Young Renaud was one of those who let themselves be swung in a net of ropes between heaven and earth, while they plied great needles in the latest thing in “dressmaking,” seamstering for a new garment for the stabilizer fin. The tattered condition of the fabric of the port fin was evidence of the suck and pull of the storm she had grazed. More than a third of it hung in shreds. Armed with a huge needle and a cord thread that billowed in the wind, Lee did his share of sewing blankets into place as patching material on the exposed framework. This would have to do till the dirigible made her landing at that last outpost of civilization, Shagun Post on Hudson Bay.
As the repair crew made its way up dizzy aerial ladders, back to the safety of the interior of the hull, and walked down the long catwalk that led between rows of fuel tanks, Lee ran his hand through his upstanding black hair and laughingly remarked, “Whew! I’m hunting a mirror. Want to see how many gray hairs I got, swinging out there in that hundred-mile breeze. From the way my knees still tremble, bet it’s all—”
“Ha-ooo! Ha-ooo! Ha-ooo!” A strange pitiful wail changed Lee’s joking into an astonished gasp.
It was a wail that came up from the dim, lattice-work shadows of the ship’s bottom, some sixty-odd feet below.
“Man overboard—I mean, lost in-board!” someone shouted.
“Must’ve gone down from the walk here, in the plunge of the storm. A wonder he can still holler, after being hung down there all this time!” said Olof Valchen.
“Ropes!”
“Down the ladder there!”
“We’re coming!”
A jumble of shouts echoed through all parts of the ship.
Lee was one of the first men to go swinging down a long narrow ladder into the shadowy interlacing of beams and girders. Above the catwalk were lights, but down here was semi-darkness, and a maze of struts that must be threaded.
The thin wailing guided him. The gleam of his pocket flashlight glinted on a pair of eyes far below.
Then he was there, all the way to the ship’s bottom, and touching his hands to a body wedged between girders. As Lee’s hands made contact, he gasped at what he found. And Olaf Valchen, who was the next man to get there, echoed his gasp.
Then the two of them, sung out: “We’ve got the rope on! Haul away!”
What the men on the planking far above hauled up to safety and a place in the friendly glow of lights, was no man at all, but Yiggy, the little dog. A battered and banged-up Yiggy, but all there and very much alive, as the wagging of his stub of a tail indicated.
Wireless calls began coming in to the Nardak from the distant north. “What has happened? You are overdue here already!” These calls were from the radio operator at Shagun, the wilderness settlement that would be the dirigible’s only halting place on its way to the Arctic.
A relay of supplies had been shipped here, the end of both railroad and civilization. The Nardak was to take them aboard so as to enter upon the last lap of her journey as fully fueled and provisioned as possible.
Seven hours behind her schedule, the great silver Nardak drifted into the sky above Shagun.
The boom of guns and the lighting of a line of signal fires greeted her. These were to call together a landing-crew to lend their aid in bringing to earth the first dirigible ever seen in these parts.
For a time, the Nardak hung motionless, then by the use of movable planes and sliding weights, by which the center of gravity was shifted, she slowly began to nose down towards earth.
Waiting in a spreading, wedge-shaped formation were two long lines of nearly a hundred men. Not nearly so many were really needed. But every husky denizen of Shagun wanted to have a hand at manning the pull ropes of this monster visitor. Slowly the great ship of the air was drawn to earth in the vast clearing which Lomen Larsen, the Factor of the Shagun Post, had prepared ahead of time for the reception of the sky ship. Here, of course, was no cement landing field and ironringed cement posts to receive mooring ropes, but the ground had been smoothed, and trees served as mooring posts.
As Lee stepped off the ship, he felt that he had stepped off into the Land of Contrasts. Here at Shagun ended the shining lines of steel rails over which traveled the mighty engines and loaded cars of the Great Northern. And here at Shagun began primitive transportation by birchbark canoe, shoulder-pack and dog-sled by which necessities were carried on into the North. Bearded white men, Indians, a few slant-eyed Eskimos with cotton garments of civilization donned incongruously atop their native furs, moved along the trails and in and out the low-roofed log shacks. And above these primitive folk loomed the high aerial and mighty masts of a modern powerful radio sending station!
But not for Lee Renaud, nor for anyone else of the expedition, was there much time to stand day-dreaming over the strangeness of the long arm of radio reaching out to touch this primitive settlement on the Arctic fringes. For it seemed the great Nardak landed in her open-air dock one minute, and the next the work of loading her new cargo and of further repairing began.
Men fell to with a vim. Men learned in geology and meteorology donned dungarees and entered upon a brand-new career of stevedoring. A perspiring aerial photographer and an equally perspiring slant-eyed Eskimo tugged a huge box to the hold opening. Indian trappers and the engineers of the latest thing in air engines labored together at the mountain of bales and barrels and tanks to be put aboard. A dozen times Yiggy escaped his quarters and rushed joyously underfoot to enter battle-royal with shaggy sled huskies that could swallow him at a mouthful—and a dozen times Yiggy had to be rescued from battle, murder and sudden death.
Muscles ached, but men joked and bantered and worked all the harder. Then at last it was all aboard—eight hundred pounds of oil, seven tons of gasoline, a thousand pounds of chocolate, pemmican, coffee and hard biscuit, which were to provision this great adventure.
Ground lines were loosed, the Nardak rose slowly. A clamorous ovation saluted her from the watchers. Shouts rose in four different languages, the bell of the little log mission clanged its farewell. Lomen Larsen touched off a row of powder-flares in a final uproarious salute.
Higher and higher rose the Nardak, then sped northward on her last great stretch of flight.
What would happen in this unexplored land? Only the future could answer.