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The bearings as laid off on a small scale chart of gnomonic projection are very inaccurate, and here we are handicapped, as our chronometers have lost all regularity. Donolly and Grade are having quite a job with the iron platings on the rudder, but should finish the cutting to-morrow. A jury-rudder is nearly completed.
They are very fond of music; and it is by music that these chronometers strike the principal division of time. At every one of their hours, during their day, the sounds coming from all the time-pieces in their public buildings, and caught up, as it were, by those of houses or hamlets scattered amidst the landscapes without the city, have an effect singularly sweet, and yet singularly solemn.
"I meant once to find out all about chronometers; but before I got started something interrupted me and I forgot it. I wasn't much interested in them anyhow, I'm afraid." "And now you'd like a few points, eh?" "Yes. I know I shall get a great deal better idea of them if you tell me," was the reply.
Everybody exercised generously, whether by himself on ski, leading a pony, digging ice for the cook or ice to melt for the ponies' drinking water, or even with a whole crowd playing rather dangerous football on the sea ice north of Cape Evans. When the real winter came I used to walk, after winding the chronometers, until breakfast time to begin with.
All about are ancient warehouses, redolent of the Thames, with steep roofs and sometimes stairs outside, and with tall shutters, a crescent-shaped hole in each. There is a dealer in weather-vanes. Other things dealt in hereabout are these: chronometers, "nautical instruments," wax gums, cordage and twine, marine paints, cotton wool and waste, turpentine, oils, greases, and rosin.
The tramp had been creeping along some sea or other with a chart ten years old and the haziest sort of chronometers when she got into a fog just such a fog as we have now. Here the smoking-room turned round as one man, and looked through the windows. 'In the man's own words, "just when the fog was thickest, the engines broke down.
"My dearest madam, I do assure you, upon my honour, that you are under a mistake. I ordered Mr Forster to stop, not you." "Mr Forster!" replied the lady; "why, he was standing still the whole time!" It was not until the whole system of taking sights for chronometers had been satisfactorily explained that the lady recovered her good-humour.
A couch was to the left, the bed-place to the right; my writing-desk and the chronometers' table faced the door. It contained some lockers surmounted by a bookcase; and a few clothes, a thick jacket or two, caps, oilskin coat, and such like, hung on hooks. There was at the bottom of that part a door opening into my bath-room, which could be entered also directly from the saloon.
I knew that that was the right time to speak, but I was too greedy of every moment of happiness to break in on it with the story of my troubles, so when Martin proposed to show me over the ship, away I went with him to look at the theodolites and chronometers and sextants, and sledges and skis, and the aeronautic outfit and the captive balloon, and the double-barrelled guns, and the place where they kept the petroleum and the gun cotton for blasting the ice, and the hold forward for the men's provisions in hermetically-sealed tins, and the hold aft for the dried fish and biscuit that were the food for the Siberian dogs, and the empty cage for the dogs themselves, which had just been sent up to the Zoo to be taken care of.
There was an instrument on each of them, and from these separate wires ran on two series of poles and buried themselves at last in the heart of the charge of the great cannon. Beside the instruments were two chronometers synchronised from Greenwich and beating time together to the thousandth part of a second, counting out what might perhaps be the last seconds of human life on earth.
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