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The men, therefore, lifted him also out of his kayak and laid him beside his lieutenant. This accomplished, the little fleet paddled out to sea, and they soon lost sight of the Arctic shore. They did not again pause until they reached a group of small islets, on one of which they encamped for the night.
Thus employed, the short remainder of the Arctic summer swiftly passed away; the sun daily sank nearer and nearer the horizon; the temperature fell; frost made its appearance, hardening the soil beneath the tread and coating the pools and puddles and morasses with an ever-thickening sheet of ice and the vegetation with a delicate tracery of silver; and at length the day came when the anchor was lifted and the Flying Fish moved some few miles out to sea to enable her occupants to witness the final disappearance of the sun beneath the southern horizon.
The home of husband and wife was under one roof at last. Fleetwood went, like one deported, to his wing of the house, physically sensible, in the back turned to his wife's along the corridor, that our ordinary comparison for the division of a wedded twain is correct. She was Arctic, and Antarctic he had to be, perforce of the distance she put between them.
Grounds have been shown for the belief that the general level of the sea may have been different at different times; it has been suggested, for example, that the accumulation of ice about the poles during one of the cold periods of the earth's history necessarily implies a diminution in the volume of the sea proportioned to the amount of its water thus permanently locked up in the Arctic and Antarctic ice-cellars; while, in the warm periods, the greater or less disappearance of the polar ice-cap implies a corresponding addition of water to the ocean.
I had never seen the like. It seemed to me that I had come to a world unknown before. Looking towards the west I saw a long dark green line of water, sunk deeply into the ragged and precipitous mountains. I had come to the Ulf Fjord. The water was the Arctic Sea. I was on the shores of grand old Norway. The fjord was frozen at its inner extremity for about one mile with thick solid ice.
For six months these nineteen human beings drifted on the mass of ice over the polar seas, through all the darkness and horrors of an Arctic winter, without fire except such as was made by burning one of their boats a feeble blaze daily, enough to warm a quart of water in which to soak their pemmican without shelter save such as the heaped ice and snow afforded, and on starvation diet.
In the winter, in the long, long nights and black, howling forests and frozen trenches, with ever-deepening snows and sinking thermometer, with the rivers and the White Sea and the Arctic Ocean solid ice fifteen feet thick, these same soldiers now seen disembarking from the troopships, were to find their enemy greatly increasing his forces every month at all points on the Allied line.
The Northern Lights had flickered out now; the empty sky was sprinkled with a million stars which glittered like scintillating frost jewels frozen into the dome of heaven; there were no sounds whatever to break the deathlike silence of the night, for the Arctic wastes are all but lifeless.
Such is the wondrous sight, and all through the summer, even before and after the period of the non-setting of the sun, the nights are almost as light as day. Indeed, all over Norway, far to the south of the Arctic Circle, the summer nights are remarkably short not altogether an unmixed blessing to those who find it difficult to sleep in daylight.
He even nests beyond the Arctic Circle, and it is said he never sings sweeter than when singing during those long Arctic days. He brings off his first brood in May, and the second in June, and if a dry season does not seriously curtail his food-supply, a third one in September. He is a hustler in every sense of the word a typical American in his enterprise and versatility.
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