Seven Frozen Sailors. Fenn George Manville
is only one of the phenomena of the place. Captain, give the men a piece of brandy each.”
“A little brandy apiece, you mean, sir.”
“No,” he said coolly; “I mean a piece of brandy each.”
He was quite right: the brandy was one solid mass, like a great cairngorm pebble, and we had to break it with an axe; and very delicious the bits were to suck, but as to strength, it seemed to have none.
We had an accident that evening, and broke one of the doctor’s thermometers, the ball of quicksilver falling heavily on the ice, and, when I picked it up, it was like a leaden bullet, quite hard, so that we fired it at a bear, which came near us; but it only quickened his steps.
In spite of the tremendous cold, we none of us seemed much the worse, and joined the doctor in his hunt for curiosities. There was land here as well as ice, although it was covered; for there was on one side of the hollow quite a hill, and the doctor pointed out to me the trace of what he said had been a river, evidently emptying itself into the great crater; but when he pulled out the compass to see in which direction the river must have run, the needle pointed all sorts of ways, ending by dipping down, and remaining motionless.
We were not long in finding that animal life had at one time existed here; for, on hunting among the blocks of ice, we found several in which we could trace curious-looking beasts, frozen in like fossils.
We had set up our tent under the lee of a great rock of ice, on the edge of the crater, which looked so smooth and so easy of ascent, that it was with the greatest difficulty that we could keep the doctor’s nephew from trying a slide down. He had, in fact, got hold of a smooth piece of ice to use as a sledge, when the doctor stopped him, and put an end to his enthusiasm by pointing down and asking him what was below in the distance, where the hollow grew deep and dark, and a strange mist hung over it like a cloud.
“If you go down, Alfred, my boy, you will never get back. Think of my misery in such a case, knowing that you have, perhaps, penetrated the mystery of the North Pole, and that it will never be known!”
The young fellow sighed at this arrest of his project.
Just then we were roused by a shout from Scudds, whom we could see in the distance, standing like a bear on its hind legs, and moving his hands.
We all set off to him, under the impression that he had found the Pole; but he was only standing pointing to a great slab of transparent ice, out of which stuck about ten inches of the tail of something, the ice having melted from it; while, on closer examination, we could see, farther in through the clear, glassy ice, the hind-quarters of some mighty beast.
“A mammoth —Elephas Primigenius!” cried the doctor, excitedly. “We must have him out.”
We stared at one another, while the doctor wabbled round to the other side of the great mass, where he set up a shout; and, on going to him, there he was, pointing to what looked like a couple of pegs about seven feet apart, sticking out of the face of the ice.
“What’s them, sir?” says one of the men.
“Tusks!” cried the doctor, delightedly. “My men, this is as good as discovering the North Pole. If we could get that huge beast out, and restore his animation, what a triumph. Why, he must have been,” he said, pacing the length of the block, and calculating its height, “at least – dear me, yes – forty feet long, and twenty feet high.”
“What a whopper!” growled Scudds. “Well, I found him.”
“We must have him out, my men,” said the doctor again, but he said it dubiously, for it seemed a task beyond us, for fire would not burn, and there was no means of getting heat to melt the vast mass; so at last we returned to the camp, and made ourselves snug for the night.
In the morning, the doctor had another inspection of the mammoth, and left it with a sigh; but in the course of the day we found traces of dozens of the great beasts, besides the remains of other great creatures that must have been frozen-in hundreds or thousands of years before; and the place being so wonderfully interesting, the doctor determined to stay there for a few days.
The first thing, under the circumstances, was to clear the snow away, bank it up round us, and set up the tent in the clear place under the shelter of the big mammoth block.
We all went at it heartily, and as we scraped the snow off, it was to find the ice beneath as clear as glass.
“Ah!” said the doctor, sitting down and looking on, after feeling the mammoth’s tail, knife in hand, as if longing to cut it off, “it’s a wonderful privilege, my lads, to come up here into a part of the earth where the foot of man has never trod before! – Eh! what is it?” he cried, for his nephew suddenly gave a howl of dread, dropped the scraper he had been using, jumped over the snow heap, and ran off.
“What’s he found?” said Scudds, crossing to the place where the young man had been busy scraping, and staring down into the ice. “Any one would think – Oh, lor’!”
He jumped up, and ran away, too, and so did another sailor; when the doctor and I went up to the spot, looked down, and were very nearly following the example set us, for there, only a few inches from us, as if lying in a glass coffin, was a man on his back, with every feature perfect, and eyes wide open, staring straight at us!
“Wonderful!” exclaimed the doctor.
“Then some one has been here before?” I said.
“The ice must have drifted up,” said the doctor. “We are the only men who have penetrated so far. Quick, my lads; we must have him out!”
The boys didn’t like the task, and Scudds was almost mutinous; but the doctor soon had us at work, cutting a groove all round the figure; and, after about five hours’ chipping, we got out the great block with the figure inside perfect, and laid it down in the sun, which now exercised such power in the middle of the day that the ice began to thaw, just as we awoke to the fact that the cold was nothing like so intense, for the spirit-lamp on being tried burned freely, and the brandy, instead of being like rock, showed signs of melting.
At first the men held aloof from the operation; but after a few words from the doctor, Scudds suddenly exclaimed, “No one shall say as I’m afraid of him!” – and he rolled his eye wonderfully as he helped to pour hot water over the figure, which, far from being ghastly as the ice grew thinner, looked for all the world like one of our own men lying down.
In about twelve hours we had got all the ice clear away, and the fur clothes in which the body was wrapped were quite soft. We were then so tired, that, it being night, the doctor had the figure well wrapped up in a couple of buffalo robes, and, in spite of a good deal of opposition, placed beside him in the tent, and we lay down to rest.
I don’t know how long we’d been asleep, for, with the sun shining night and day, it bothers you, but I was awoke by somebody sneezing.
“Uncle’s got a fine cold!” said young Smith, who was next to me.
“So it seems!” I said; and then there was another sneeze, and another, and another; and when I looked, there was the doctor, sitting up and staring at the figure by his side, which kept on sneezing again and again. Then, to our horror, it sat up and yawned, and threw its arms about.
Every fellow in the little tent was about to get up and run away, when the frozen sailor said, in a sleepy fashion, “Why, it’s as cold as ever!”
I tried to speak, but couldn’t. The doctor answered him, though, by saying, “How did you get here?”
“Well,” said the figure, drowsily, “that means a yarn; and if I warn’t so plaguey sleepy, I’d – Heigho! – ha! – hum! – Well, here goes!”
We sat quite awe-stricken, not a man stirring more than to put a bit of pigtail in his mouth, while the English sailor thus spun his yarn: —
Chapter Two.
The English Sailor’s Yarn
You see, I haven’t the trick of putting it together, or else, I dare say, I could spin you no end of a yarn out