CHAPTER XX
F-O-Y-N
Renaud lay where he had been flung, in a narrow trough of snow that wasalmost like a coffin. He scarce knew whether he was alive or dead. Atfirst the bitter cold had pierced him sharply. Now his arms feltnerveless, like some leaden weights. All sense of touch seemed to haveleft his hands. He hardly knew whether they were still attached to hiswrists or not.
Suppose he were dead? Suppose he were in his coffin? A pleasant stuporwas creeping, creeping over him.
He was dying. He was freezing to death.
Through his stupefied brain a tiny thought kept hammering desperately.Rouse--move--stir! So the tiny impulse kept throbbing, but slower, andslower now. It was the impulse of life resisting death to the very end.
The storm gale had spent itself, but a tag end of wind fluttered acrossthe wastes and hurled snow with a sudden vicious sting into Renaud'sface. Its cold slap roused the boy momentarily. He stirred. Hiscirculation set up its throb again. Life was calling. Lee forced himselfto a sitting posture. He must not give up. He must fight this temptationto abandon himself to this numbing, creeping cold. In slow movements, hefreed himself of the drift snow, forced himself to stand, began to putone numb foot before the other in shaky progress across the ice sheetand its swathing of snow.
At last he reached the splintered debris of the engine cabin. Two men inthe wreckage! Scotty was breathing. Lee could feel the faint movementwhen he laid his hands on the other's furred garment above the heart.Then Lee had his arms under Scotty's shoulders, shaking him, poundinghim, begging him to rouse, to live. In urging another back into life,Renaud strengthened his own muscles, hardened his own resolution tofight.
It took long labor from both Scotty and Renaud to revive Van Granger,the other engineer. He had been stunned by a blow on the head. The leftside of his face was all blackened and swollen from impact with the ice.Even after his two mates had lifted him, walked him, rubbed up hiscirculation with desperate, vigorous strokes, he was too weak to do morethan sit propped with his back to a snow mound near a tiny warming firethey had started with bits of the splintered wood from the cabin.
But they must have some kind of shelter against storm, sleet and cold.Here was plenty of material such as the Eskimos use for building theirround-topped igloos. But Scotty and Lee knew well enough that theiruntrained hands held no knack for setting snow blocks into the perfectdome of an igloo. Any dome-shaped snow carpentry of theirs was likely tocrash down on their heads at the first breath of wind. So they contentedthemselves with merely setting up straight thick walls of snow blocks.For roofing, they used material they salvaged from the wrecked gondola.Over their whole domicile, sides and top, they banked a warm blanket ofsnow, packed down hard and firm.
Every bit of food, broken machinery, pieces of wood and metal, werepainstakingly gathered and stored within or close beside their shelter.It was a jumbled medley, remnants of broken radio, a case of chocolate,bursted cans of fruit, bundles of fur garments. Scattered here and therein the wreckage were lumps of the rich specimen ore taken out of theArctic surface mine. To men marooned on an ice sheet, gold was amockery. Food, instead of gold, was treasure to them now.
Lee and Scotty worked on and on, gathering bits of wreckage, bankingdeeper their snow roof, pushing themselves to the point of exhaustion.For as long as they labored, they could force off thought. But finallythey had to give in to physical weariness, had to drop down to rest. Andall unbidden, thoughts marched blackly across their minds.
What could be the end? What hope could they have?
All they knew of the dirigible was that they had seen it still aloft,swept off in the gale. And then, later, that distant column of smoke.Had the silver hull of the Nardak gone up in flames? Or was thatwavering smoke line a beacon, lighted by their shipmates where they hadlanded? And should the Nardak still be safe, and navigable, how wouldher searching crew ever find the castaways, three minute dots on thevast sheet of ice? For, clad in their grayish white furs, they werescarcely discernible against the white background of ice and snow.
Lee Renaud burrowed his head between his hands, as though by pressure hewould stop the ugly round of thought. But thought swept on, ceaselessly.
To make matters worse, it was drift ice they were on, a great sheet thatconstantly changed its position. In a gale, it might be pounded into athousand pieces and become little pans that would scarce support a man'sweight.
Scotty, a short, heavy-set fellow, wearing spectacles that miraculouslyhad not broken in his fall, worked continually with the remnant of hissun compass and a small magnetic compass. From position, checked bythese, and by the loom of some far, white mountain peaks he hazarded aguess that they were in the drift somewhere to the west ofSpitzbergen--and their nearest land would be the island of Foyn, anuninhabited speck in the polar sea, unvisited even by whalers, unlessstorm drove them there.
Spitzbergen--Foyn! Land that guarded the European gateway to the Pole!How mighty was the river of the winds! Caught in its currents, anexploration expedition had been hurled from the American Arctic, acrossthe top of the world, to the polar regions above Europe.
"If the wind carries the drift aright," Scotty pointed to a distantwhite height, "we may come near Foyn Island and we may be able to makeit to that piece of land by crossing from floe to floe."
"Foyn--land--uninhabited! This nearest land might be the South Pole, forwhat good it'll do us!" thought Lee Renaud bitterly. Why had he forcedhimself to live? Why hadn't he let himself go in that first quick,merciful stupor? What if they did ever reach that barren, ice-sheathedisland? They might eke out their little store of food to last a fewweeks. They might catch seals, shoot a bear--get food for a month, for ayear. But in the end starvation, exposure, death must claim theseforlorn castaways.
Need to work for another helped Renaud shake off some of the blackhopelessness that enveloped him. Granger, who was ill, had to be warmedand fed, and made comfortable as far as was possible on this insecurehaven of drifting ice. Cooking a scanty meal, melting snow for water,cutting a crude eye-shade out of wood to protect Granger's vision fromthe snow glare--just such homely tasks as these braced Lee Renaud andset him on his feet. Shame for the weakling thoughts in which he had lethimself indulge now swept over him. He was young, he had strength. Hewould keep his courage up. If he had to die--well, he would die. But hewould go like a man, master of himself.
Determination and courage seemed to color the pitiless, white frozenwaste with some glow of hope. The frozen drift felt solid to the feet,anyway. They were here, and they were alive. Might as well settlethemselves in what comfort they could, and hold on to life as long aspossible.
Out of the jumbled mass of wreckage, he and Scotty picked such things asmight add to the comfort of their Arctic housekeeping.
"Well, here are knives and forks for our banquets." Scotty Mac held upsome aluminum splinters gathered from around the crashed gondola. "Witha little twisting and bending, we might convert 'em into fish hooks, ifthat'd be more to the point."
"And here's something we'll convert into a drinking glass for ice water.My, aren't we magnificent up here in the Arctic!" Renaud laughingly dugout a glass shade that had once adorned a light in the Nardak's lostcabin. "Cut glass and very chic! Bet when it made that pleasure triparound the world, it never dreamed it would some day be turned upsidedown to hold drinking water for a trio of derelicts on an ice island!This felt, from under the engine base, might--might--" What he was goingto do with the strip of felt, Lee Renaud failed to say. Something elsecaught his attention. "Why--why--" the boy gasped, then went to digginginto a mass of chocolate and tinfoil wrapping. Something had burieditself down in the very midst of that great bundle of brown sweet.
Lee worked his hands into the mass, then lifted out some tubes, cappedin a white metal.
"My radio accumulators!" he shouted. "Thought every fraction of thething was smashed--but here's this much, anyway!" He carefully wipedthe
m off, ran his hands over every part, shook them. The liquid withinwas safe.
The finding of those metal tubes wrought a vast change in Lee Renaud.His first thought, after regaining consciousness when he had crashed onthe ice, had been to signal for help with radio. Then he had found hismechanism smashed, an utter wreck. That, most of all, had knocked theheart out of him. He had counted so on radio.
And now like a reprieve from the death sentence had come the finding ofthese tubes, still intact. A couple of tubes,--little enough, but astart anyway.
"It's more than von Kleist had," Lee half whispered to himself. "Andthree hundred years ago von Kleist had the sense to take a bottle, anail and some salt water, and figure out a way to get an electric spark.It's more than Hertz had, either, and he figured out a way to sendelectric power through the air, for a tiny distance anyway. I can atleast rig up some wires and make a try at the thing."
It was a large order Lee Renaud was giving himself--to try to piece up aradio sending machine, the most delicate and powerful of all mechanisms,out of some smashed junk on an Arctic ice floe.
Not for nothing had Lee Renaud grown up with radio. Not for nothing hadhe followed the work of those old inventors making their way forward, astep at a time. In his own old workshop in the Cove, Lee had copiedthose steps in real, working mechanisms that, however crude they mighthave been, had yet achieved results. A modern, up-to-date inventor wouldbe used to a splendid laboratory, used to purchasing smooth, finished,machine-made products to help with the carrying out of his ideas. ButLee Renaud, like those oldtime pioneers in electricity, was used toseizing upon wood and wire, scrap metal and glass.
It was this crude, hard-bought training that now gave young Renaudcourage to face some scraps of broken metal and still to hope to build aradio here on drift ice.
Again and again Lee went through every vestige of the wreckage they hadsalvaged, laying aside such objects as might possibly be of use. Somelong strips of metal, a heavy base that had once been an enginesupport--here was a start on the antennae. He wired the strips to thebase, then wired them together at the top to insure stability. To hisantennae, Lee fastened a strip of torn flag that he had found in thewreck. A bit of Old Glory fluttering above some Arctic refugees! Leecould not know how often in the near future their eyes would be fixed onthat bit of cloth, their minds desperately wondering if the countrybehind that flag would not make some attempt to save them.
Working material was of the meagerest. Wires had to be soldered--butwith what? For a whole period between "two sleeps" (there was not yetany set day and night in this land of the midnight sun), Lee worked attwo coins, a tin box, and a tiny fire of their precious woodsplinters--and in the end achieved a rather creditable metal joining.The cut-glass shade, so very chic, now began a new duty as, combinedwith some tin, a wood stopper and a piece of wire, it served as abattery unit.
Lee Renaud hardly paused for eating or sleeping. Always his fingers wereat it, adjusting wires, tubes, battery jars, wiring the parts. He wouldcreep into his sleeping bag to rest, and in less than an hour, while theothers were deep in slumber, out he would crawl, to take up his workagain. A fever of labor burned within him. He could not lay this thingaside until he finished it, tested it, knew the best or the worst of thecase.
For the hundredth time, Renaud looked up at the bit of flag floating onhis Arctic aerial. The nation behind the Stars and Stripes would dosomething towards rescue if--if only America knew the fate of thegreatest dirigible that had ever left its shores.
It was to combat that "if" that Renaud squatted beside the tangled massof wires and jars and metal scraps which he prayed would act the part ofa radio sender. Anyway, the thing sparked! There was some power to it!
All in a tremble he raised his finger to tap the first code click overradio adrift in the Arctic. Foyn, the name of their nearest land, thatwas the first word to send.
"F-O-Y-N on the air, F-O-Y-N--" and that was all Renaud's radio clicked.For with a shout of anguish tearing up through his throat, he sprang tohis feet, overturning the radio in a tangled mass of loosed wire andbroken battery, and sped towards the ice edge.
Van Granger had been lying on a pallet of furs at the water's edge wherehe could entertain himself with trying for fish with a piece of twistedaluminum for a hook. Being still weak and sick, he had fallen asleep. Ina lane of sea water, not twenty feet from the sick man, Lee had glimpseda dark form gliding under the surface. In the next instant, thirty feetof sea monster rolled to the surface, all hideous saw-toothed blacksnout, and leaped high out of the water towards the ice edge.