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There was also a dull reverberation as of distant thunder that rolled over the sea to us; and when we learned that this was the crackling of the ice-pack in the gorges, we thought with increasing solemnity of the majesty of the spectacle we were about to witness. Thus we pushed forward bravely toward an ice-wall that stretched across the top of the bay from one high shore to the other.
"Why, what do you mean?" asked Ferriss quickly. "Just this: That the ice-pack we're on is drifting faster to the north than we are marching to the south. We are farther north now than we were a month ago for all our marching."
Bucks, meantime, working carefully to seem unconcerned and incensing McCloud with great clouds of smoke, tried to discuss his case with him as he had already done with the mine surgeon. McCloud, thinking it best to humor a crazy man, responded quietly. "The doctor said yesterday," he explained, "it was mountain fever, and he wants to put me into an ice-pack."
He did not know that three weeks before she had been nipped in the ice-pack, and sunk, and that her consort, the "Yantic," had gone impotently home, without even leaving food for the abandoned explorers.
Toward the middle of February we saw a mirage of the coming sun above the horizon; there were flights of Arctic petrels and snow-buntings; and spring was with us. In an ice-pack of big hummocks and narrow lanes we made good progress all the summer.
"All along the edge of the ice-pack everywhere, in fact, to the south of the two stations on the 11th of February on our southward voyage, and on the 3rd of March on our return, we brought up fine sand and grayish mud, with small pebbles of quartz and felspar, and small fragments of mica- slate, chlorite-slate, clay-slate, gneiss, and granite.
It was caught by the ice out in the offing, and driven toward the south; from the harbor they could see it for days, drifting about in the ice-pack, now to the north and now to the south. At last the heavy bonds were broken. But it was difficult alike for the earth and for mankind to resume the normal activities of life. Everybody's health had suffered.
Bucks objected vigorously to the ice-pack. "The doctor tells me that it is the latest treatment for that class of fevers in the Prussian army," answered McCloud feebly, but getting interested in spite of himself.
Just sit me up a little so as I can speak easy. It was in '83 that it happened August of that year. Peter Carey was master of the SEA UNICORN, and I was spare harpooner. We were coming out of the ice-pack on our way home, with head winds and a week's southerly gale, when we picked up a little craft that had been blown north. There was one man on her a landsman.
Yes, the Atlantic had been successfully bridged by a heavier-than-air plane, and from the time of leaving France until this minute their feet had not once pressed any soil; for that ice-pack in mid-Atlantic could not be counted against them, since it too was nothing but congealed water. "But the poor old bomber!
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