CHAPTER XXF-O-Y-N
Renaud lay where he had been flung, in a narrow trough of snow that was almost like a coffin. He scarce knew whether he was alive or dead. At first the bitter cold had pierced him sharply. Now his arms felt nerveless, like some leaden weights. All sense of touch seemed to have left his hands. He hardly knew whether they were still attached to his wrists or not.
Suppose he were dead? Suppose he were in his coffin? A pleasant stupor was creeping, creeping over him.
He was dying. He was freezing to death.
Through his stupefied brain a tiny thought kept hammering desperately. Rouse—move—stir! So the tiny impulse kept throbbing, but slower, and slower now. It was the impulse of life resisting death to the very end.
The storm gale had spent itself, but a tag end of wind fluttered across the wastes and hurled snow with a sudden vicious sting into Renaud’s face. Its cold slap roused the boy momentarily. He stirred. His circulation set up its throb again. Life was calling. Lee forced himself to a sitting posture. He must not give up. He must fight this temptation to abandon himself to this numbing, creeping cold. In slow movements, he freed himself of the drift snow, forced himself to stand, began to put one numb foot before the other in shaky progress across the ice sheet and its swathing of snow.
At last he reached the splintered debris of the engine cabin. Two men in the wreckage! Scotty was breathing. Lee could feel the faint movement when he laid his hands on the other’s furred garment above the heart. Then Lee had his arms under Scotty’s shoulders, shaking him, pounding him, begging him to rouse, to live. In urging another back into life, Renaud strengthened his own muscles, hardened his own resolution to fight.
It took long labor from both Scotty and Renaud to revive Van Granger, the other engineer. He had been stunned by a blow on the head. The left side of his face was all blackened and swollen from impact with the ice. Even after his two mates had lifted him, walked him, rubbed up his circulation with desperate, vigorous strokes, he was too weak to do more than sit propped with his back to a snow mound near a tiny warming fire they had started with bits of the splintered wood from the cabin.
But they must have some kind of shelter against storm, sleet and cold. Here was plenty of material such as the Eskimos use for building their round-topped igloos. But Scotty and Lee knew well enough that their untrained hands held no knack for setting snow blocks into the perfect dome of an igloo. Any dome-shaped snow carpentry of theirs was likely to crash down on their heads at the first breath of wind. So they contented themselves with merely setting up straight thick walls of snow blocks. For roofing, they used material they salvaged from the wrecked gondola. Over their whole domicile, sides and top, they banked a warm blanket of snow, packed down hard and firm.
Every bit of food, broken machinery, pieces of wood and metal, were painstakingly gathered and stored within or close beside their shelter. It was a jumbled medley, remnants of broken radio, a case of chocolate, bursted cans of fruit, bundles of fur garments. Scattered here and there in the wreckage were lumps of the rich specimen ore taken out of the Arctic surface mine. To men marooned on an ice sheet, gold was a mockery. Food, instead of gold, was treasure to them now.
Lee and Scotty worked on and on, gathering bits of wreckage, banking deeper their snow roof, pushing themselves to the point of exhaustion. For as long as they labored, they could force off thought. But finally they had to give in to physical weariness, had to drop down to rest. And all unbidden, thoughts marched blackly across their minds.
What could be the end? What hope could they have?
All they knew of the dirigible was that they had seen it still aloft, swept off in the gale. And then, later, that distant column of smoke. Had the silver hull of the Nardak gone up in flames? Or was that wavering smoke line a beacon, lighted by their shipmates where they had landed? And should the Nardak still be safe, and navigable, how would her searching crew ever find the castaways, three minute dots on the vast sheet of ice? For, clad in their grayish white furs, they were scarcely discernible against the white background of ice and snow.
Lee Renaud burrowed his head between his hands, as though by pressure he would stop the ugly round of thought. But thought swept on, ceaselessly.
To make matters worse, it was drift ice they were on, a great sheet that constantly changed its position. In a gale, it might be pounded into a thousand pieces and become little pans that would scarce support a man’s weight.
Scotty, a short, heavy-set fellow, wearing spectacles that miraculously had not broken in his fall, worked continually with the remnant of his sun compass and a small magnetic compass. From position, checked by these, and by the loom of some far, white mountain peaks he hazarded a guess that they were in the drift somewhere to the west of Spitzbergen—and their nearest land would be the island of Foyn, an uninhabited speck in the polar sea, unvisited even by whalers, unless storm drove them there.
Spitzbergen—Foyn! Land that guarded the European gateway to the Pole! How mighty was the river of the winds! Caught in its currents, an exploration expedition had been hurled from the American Arctic, across the top of the world, to the polar regions above Europe.
“If the wind carries the drift aright,” Scotty pointed to a distant white height, “we may come near Foyn Island and we may be able to make it to that piece of land by crossing from floe to floe.”
“Foyn—land—uninhabited! This nearest land might be the South Pole, for what good it’ll do us!” thought Lee Renaud bitterly. Why had he forced himself to live? Why hadn’t he let himself go in that first quick, merciful stupor? What if they did ever reach that barren, ice-sheathed island? They might eke out their little store of food to last a few weeks. They might catch seals, shoot a bear—get food for a month, for a year. But in the end starvation, exposure, death must claim these forlorn castaways.
Need to work for another helped Renaud shake off some of the black hopelessness that enveloped him. Granger, who was ill, had to be warmed and fed, and made comfortable as far as was possible on this insecure haven of drifting ice. Cooking a scanty meal, melting snow for water, cutting a crude eye-shade out of wood to protect Granger’s vision from the snow glare—just such homely tasks as these braced Lee Renaud and set him on his feet. Shame for the weakling thoughts in which he had let himself indulge now swept over him. He was young, he had strength. He would keep his courage up. If he had to die—well, he would die. But he would go like a man, master of himself.
Determination and courage seemed to color the pitiless, white frozen waste with some glow of hope. The frozen drift felt solid to the feet, anyway. They were here, and they were alive. Might as well settle themselves in what comfort they could, and hold on to life as long as possible.
Out of the jumbled mass of wreckage, he and Scotty picked such things as might add to the comfort of their Arctic housekeeping.
“Well, here are knives and forks for our banquets.” Scotty Mac held up some aluminum splinters gathered from around the crashed gondola. “With a little twisting and bending, we might convert ’em into fish hooks, if that’d be more to the point.”
“And here’s something we’ll convert into a drinking glass for ice water. My, aren’t we magnificent up here in the Arctic!” Renaud laughingly dug out a glass shade that had once adorned a light in the Nardak’s lost cabin. “Cut glass and very chic! Bet when it made that pleasure trip around the world, it never dreamed it would some day be turned upside down to hold drinking water for a trio of derelicts on an ice island! This felt, from under the engine base, might—might—” What he was going to do with the strip of felt, Lee Renaud failed to say. Something else caught his attention. “Why—why—” the boy gasped, then went to digging into a mass of chocolate and tinfoil wrapping. Something had buried itself down in the very midst of that great bundle of brown sweet.
Lee worked his hands into the mass, then lifted out some tubes, capped in a white metal.
“My radio accumulators!” he shouted. “Thought every fraction of the thing was smashed—but here’s this much, anyway!” He carefully wiped them off, ran his hands over every part, shook them. The liquid within was safe.
The finding of those metal tubes wrought a vast change in Lee Renaud. His first thought, after regaining consciousness when he had crashed on the ice, had been to signal for help with radio. Then he had found his mechanism smashed, an utter wreck. That, most of all, had knocked the heart out of him. He had counted so on radio.
And now like a reprieve from the death sentence had come the finding of these tubes, still intact. A couple of tubes,—little enough, but a start anyway.
“It’s more than von Kleist had,” Lee half whispered to himself. “And three hundred years ago von Kleist had the sense to take a bottle, a nail and some salt water, and figure out a way to get an electric spark. It’s more than Hertz had, either, and he figured out a way to send electric power through the air, for a tiny distance anyway. I can at least rig up some wires and make a try at the thing.”
It was a large order Lee Renaud was giving himself—to try to piece up a radio sending machine, the most delicate and powerful of all mechanisms, out of some smashed junk on an Arctic ice floe.
Not for nothing had Lee Renaud grown up with radio. Not for nothing had he followed the work of those old inventors making their way forward, a step at a time. In his own old workshop in the Cove, Lee had copied those steps in real, working mechanisms that, however crude they might have been, had yet achieved results. A modern, up-to-date inventor would be used to a splendid laboratory, used to purchasing smooth, finished, machine-made products to help with the carrying out of his ideas. But Lee Renaud, like those oldtime pioneers in electricity, was used to seizing upon wood and wire, scrap metal and glass.
It was this crude, hard-bought training that now gave young Renaud courage to face some scraps of broken metal and still to hope to build a radio here on drift ice.
Again and again Lee went through every vestige of the wreckage they had salvaged, laying aside such objects as might possibly be of use. Some long strips of metal, a heavy base that had once been an engine support—here was a start on the antennae. He wired the strips to the base, then wired them together at the top to insure stability. To his antennae, Lee fastened a strip of torn flag that he had found in the wreck. A bit of Old Glory fluttering above some Arctic refugees! Lee could not know how often in the near future their eyes would be fixed on that bit of cloth, their minds desperately wondering if the country behind that flag would not make some attempt to save them.
Working material was of the meagerest. Wires had to be soldered—but with what? For a whole period between “two sleeps” (there was not yet any set day and night in this land of the midnight sun), Lee worked at two coins, a tin box, and a tiny fire of their precious wood splinters—and in the end achieved a rather creditable metal joining. The cut-glass shade, so very chic, now began a new duty as, combined with some tin, a wood stopper and a piece of wire, it served as a battery unit.
Lee Renaud hardly paused for eating or sleeping. Always his fingers were at it, adjusting wires, tubes, battery jars, wiring the parts. He would creep into his sleeping bag to rest, and in less than an hour, while the others were deep in slumber, out he would crawl, to take up his work again. A fever of labor burned within him. He could not lay this thing aside until he finished it, tested it, knew the best or the worst of the case.
For the hundredth time, Renaud looked up at the bit of flag floating on his Arctic aerial. The nation behind the Stars and Stripes would do something towards rescue if—if only America knew the fate of the greatest dirigible that had ever left its shores.
It was to combat that “if” that Renaud squatted beside the tangled mass of wires and jars and metal scraps which he prayed would act the part of a radio sender. Anyway, the thing sparked! There was some power to it!
All in a tremble he raised his finger to tap the first code click over radio adrift in the Arctic. Foyn, the name of their nearest land, that was the first word to send.
“F-O-Y-N on the air, F-O-Y-N—” and that was all Renaud’s radio clicked. For with a shout of anguish tearing up through his throat, he sprang to his feet, overturning the radio in a tangled mass of loosed wire and broken battery, and sped towards the ice edge.
Van Granger had been lying on a pallet of furs at the water’s edge where he could entertain himself with trying for fish with a piece of twisted aluminum for a hook. Being still weak and sick, he had fallen asleep. In a lane of sea water, not twenty feet from the sick man, Lee had glimpsed a dark form gliding under the surface. In the next instant, thirty feet of sea monster rolled to the surface, all hideous saw-toothed black snout, and leaped high out of the water towards the ice edge.