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He had no idea how the time transition was to be made, nor how one might step from the polar regions of the Western Hemisphere to the island of Britain lying off the Eastern. And it was a complicated business as he discovered. The transition itself was a fairly simple, though disturbing, process.
There were very few steamers in those latitudes then; and when they desired to leave this dead and drifting carcase, no ship came in sight. They had drifted south out of men's knowledge. They failed to attract the attention of a lonely whaler, and very soon the edge of the polar ice-cap rose from the sea and closed the southern horizon like a wall.
Shandon knew by experience the utility of these practices, and their influence on the mind of the crew; they are always employed on board ships that are intended to winter in the Polar Seas.
Happily, my instruments, &c., had been saved by the kayak-deck when she capsized. A hundred yards inland from the shore-rim, in a circular place where there was some moss and soil, I built myself a semi-subterranean Eskimo den for the long Polar night.
On the western side of the continent rises gradually from the Polar regions the mighty chain which runs throughout its whole length a distance of altogether 10,000 miles.
By now, however, I was less weighted with my ball of Polar clothes, and stood almost slim in a Lap great-coat, a round Siberian fur cap on my head. At midnight when I threw myself into my old berth, it was just as though the engines, subsided now into silence, were a dead thing, and had a ghost which haunted me; for I heard them still, and yet not them, but the silence of their ghost.
Between Lorette and the unexplored wilderness that stretches away to polar desolation there is but a narrow selvage of civilization.
This phantasm was the Reality. Standing beneath the wind-vane, his eyes fixed on the polar skies, he could not bring himself to realize that the Southland really existed, that at that very moment it was a-roar with life and action. There was no Southland, no men being born of women, no giving and taking in marriage.
"I don't know how it is, but I feel more like a coward," said Charley, "just before a thunderstorm than I think I should do in the arms of a polar bear. Do you feel queer, Harry?" "A little," replied Harry, in a low whisper. "and yet I'm not frightened. I can scarcely tell what I feel, but I'm certain it's not fear." "Well, I don't know," said Charley.
When the captain's shout reached the cabin Jim Crofts had just said: "I'll tell 'ee what it is, messmates, if this here state of things goes on much longer, I'll go out on the floes, walk up to the first polar bear I meet, and ask him to take his supper off me!"
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