“Let’s have it,” said Nancy, and Dick gave her pocket-book and pen together. She plumped down on the floor of the loft, scribbled down the letters of the alphabet, and over each letter drew a figure showing how flags should be held to signal that particular letter.
“I’ve shoved a face in once, just to remind you which way you’re supposed to be looking when you make the signal. If you get that wrong, everything else is wrong, too.”
Dick watched with interest.
“Which matters most?” he said. “This or Morse?”
“You ought to know both,” she said. “You can’t mix them up because one is dots and dashes and moving about all the time, and in the other each letter stays still while you make it, or at least you stay still while you’re making a letter.”
“We’ll do it,” said Dick, “but it’ll take some time. That’s two whole codes and the signals between here and Holly Howe.”
“Those don’t count,” said Nancy. “They just hang and you can be as slow as you like about looking them up.”
“What about signalling to you?”
Nancy looked out from the loft, across the lake, beyond the islands.
ANOTHER PAGE FROM DICK’S POCKET-BOOK
“It’s too far,” she said, “except with lights. You could do it with a lantern. We will some time or other, when you’ve learnt Morse. Anyway, there’s not much point in it because we come to Holly Howe every day and we’ll be signalling from there. But I’ll tell you what,” she went on. “The day we’re all going to the North Pole, I’ll yank a flag up on the Beckfoot promontory so that everybody can see it . . . Over there, beyond the islands, running out into the lake on the far side . . . No . . . farther along . . . Woods behind, at the back of it, then just heather and rock. You can see our old flagstaff near the point.”
Dick was looking through his telescope.
“Not a very big one,” he said.
“Big enough to hang a flag on,” said Nancy. “Yes. I’ll hang one up to mean ‘Starting for the Pole.’ They can see it from just above Holly Howe and you can see it from here.”
“I’d better write that down,” said Dick, and at the bottom of a page of notes, mostly scientific, he scribbled, “Flag at Beckfoot = Start for Pole.”
“If only the snow would come,” said Nancy, “and give the Arctic half a chance. If it comes quick there might still be a bit of ice round the edges. And anyway, with snow, we can use the sledge. Beastly going to the North Pole over plain grass. Hullo, what’s that brat trying to signal?”
Everybody else was back on the tarn, looking up towards the observatory and beckoning to Nancy and Dick to come down and join them. Roger had got hold of one of the flags, and, standing on the ice, was busily flapping a message. Nancy read the letters out as they came. “L-A-Z-Y-B-O-N-E-S.” “Shiver my timbers,” she said. “What cheek. He means us. Well. Come on. Let’s have one more good go of skating before going home.”
She went racing down the stone steps and away to the tarn to put on her skates, while Roger, his arms whirling like the sails of a windmill by way of helping his legs, was getting himself as far out of reach as the ice would allow. Dick followed her. But there was no more talk of signals that day. Susan thought Titty and Roger had done about enough skating. It was time to go home. And that night there were no lantern signals from Holly Howe or the observatory. The sky was clouded over and the astronomer and his assistant sat in the farm kitchen, trying to learn the Morse code by writing letters to each other in dots and dashes. Softly, at first, as if it hardly meant it, the snow began to fall.
CHAPTER VI
SNOW
DOROTHEA woke with a dreadful fear that she had overslept. The room was full of light. The ceiling gleamed white. The blue flowers that made a pattern on the wall-paper (in slanting lines, in straight lines up and down, and in straight lines from side to side, whichever way she chose to count them) were somehow brighter than they had been on any other morning. Had the sun been up a long time? And then, looking at the window, Dorothea saw the white snow deep across the sill. She leapt out of bed and ran to the window. There was a new world. Everything was white, and somehow still. Everything was holding its breath. The field stretching down to the lake was like a brilliant white counterpane without a crinkle in it. The yew trees close by the farm-house were laden with snow. The lower branches of the old fir were pressed right down to the ground by the weight of snow they were carrying. The island was a white island, except where the rocks rose straight up out of the still water. The snow seemed to have spread downwards from the tops of the hills until everything was covered. It lay like a slab of icing on a slice of cake along the stone wall of the garden. The grey outhouses had thick white roofs. And then there was this magical brightness in the air. At home, in the town, Dorothea had seen snow more than once, where it lay for a few hours in the streets, growing grimier from the smoke, until it was swept into dirty heaps along the gutters. She had never seen anything like this.
She listened. It could not be late, or Mrs Dixon would have waked her, even if Dick had not. Ah! There was the clink of the hot-water can, and Mrs Dixon’s counting, “Eight and nine and ten and eleven and twelve and that’s the dozen,” as she reached the landing.
“Well, and what do you think of this?” said Mrs Dixon. “It’s been snowing half the night.”
Dorothea could hardly say what she thought. She was thinking of people looking out of windows at Holly Howe, and of Nancy and Peggy rowing across the lake, from one white shore to another. This was just what they had wanted.
Dick came thundering at her door. “It’ll be a real igloo to-day,” he said. “I wonder if it’ll be cold enough for the snow not to melt when they’ve got the fire going inside. I say, there are tracks in the snow. I can see a bird’s, thrush, I think, and Roy’s across the yard, and two rabbit tracks in the field.”
“Pity you’re going so soon,” said Mrs Dixon. “With a fall of snow like this, and no wind, we’ll be having ice on the lake if the frost holds.”
“If only we could,” said Dorothea.
“Where’s Mr Dixon?” she asked a little later, coming downstairs and finding nobody but Mrs Dixon about.
“Up on the fell,” said Mrs Dixon. “Him and Silas, looking for outlaying sheep. Snow’s good for the land, right enough, but it’s a peck of trouble when you’ve sheep on the fells, and we’ve more’n a few.”
After breakfast, Dorothea and Dick packed their knapsacks (with skates, milk bottle, cake and sandwiches) and set off for the observatory. The snow came up to the top of their boots as they crossed the road, and there was little of the cart track to be seen, but Silas and Mr Dixon had gone that way, looking after their sheep, and Dorothea and Dick stepped carefully in those footprints, so very much larger than their own. Close to the barn the big, deep prints turned away to the right, straight up towards the high fells.
“I thought so,” cried Dick, looking down at the gabled end of Holly Howe, white and today hard to see against the snow-laden trees and the white fields above and below it. “I thought so. It’s a diamond all by itself. It’ll be something like an igloo today. Come on, Dot.” He climbed the steps to the loft, leaving sharp footprints on each step, and came down again with the whitewashed wooden square John had left.
“I’ve got to hoist one too, to show we’ve got the message, but they’ve probably started already.”
He hooked the square on the halyard by a hole in one of its corners and hoisted it up the wall of the barn. It hung there on the dark grey wall like a big white diamond.
“Come along,” he said, anxious to see what it looked like from a little distance.
But Dorothea could not make herself hurry. The snow had changed everything. Almost she felt like walking on tiptoe through this new sparkling world. A whole jumble of things was in her mind, Good King Wenceslaus, the Ice Queen, Ib and Little Christina, and the little girl who sat on her wedding chest in the winter forest, waiting for the coming of Frost. It was not much
good talking about these things to Dick, whose mind worked differently. Why, the first thing he had done that morning when they had run out into the glittering snow had been to put a scrap of snow on a bit of glass, so that he could look at the crystals under his microscope. And then he had stuck a bit of stick upright in the snow and made a notch on it, and taken it indoors to borrow Mrs Dixon’s measuring tape to see exactly what depth of snowfall there had been. And now, she knew, he was eager to get to the igloo, to see how the snow covering would stand the heat of the fire inside. Dorothea was thinking more of Captain Nancy. Well, here was the snow she had hoped for. Already, long before they were anywhere near the igloo, Dorothea could almost feel Nancy stirring things up and filling the air with adventure.
“It won’t be very good skating with all this snow,” said Dick, as they stepped out on the smooth white blanket that covered the tarn.
“But it looks a good deal more like the Arctic,” said Dorothea. The ice was slippery under the snow, but it was easier going on the other side. They waded through the snow-covered bracken, and turned at last into the path up the wood.
“They’ve got a sledge,” cried Dick. “Just look at the tracks.”
Presently they heard a noise as if someone were beating the ground with a cricket bat. People were talking, too, and they heard Nancy’s cheerful, ringing voice. “Go it, skipper! Flatten it in good and hard.”
“It really is like coming to an Eskimo settlement,” said Dorothea.
“I say, just look at it!” cried Dick.
It was worth looking at. The rough stone hut with the roof of old corrugated iron held down by a few big stones, had vanished under the magic of snow that had changed all the rest of the world. Instead, there was a great white mound of snow, a real igloo in which any Eskimo would be very pleased to live. The old stovepipe stuck up through the snow and a steady stream of smoke was pouring from it. Even the rough doorway looked now like the entrance to a snow tunnel. A long sledge with high, trestled runners was standing close by with the last of a load of snow. And there were John and Nancy hard at work with spades, piling more snow on the mound and beating it firmly together.
“Come on, you two,” shouted Nancy as soon as she saw them. “This is what it ought to be like. I told you it only needed a little snow.”
“What’s it like inside?” said Dick.
“Good and stuffy,” said Nancy. “They always are.”
They crawled in, Dorothea first, to find the lantern lit, Susan and Peggy busy with a big iron pot, and a basket full of carrots and potatoes, and Roger and Titty sitting by the fire, putting their boots on.
“Have you gone through the ice?” said Dorothea.
“Only snow,” said Roger, “tobogganing. Dry enough now.”
“You wouldn’t have been wet at all if you’d dusted the snow off before letting it melt into your stockings,” said Susan.
Dick took off his spectacles and blinked while he wiped the steam that had settled on them as he crawled in out of the cold air. He put them on again and looked round. It was much better even than he had thought. He had forgotten that sheet of iron that lay across the roof. He had been thinking that the roof would be dribbling all over with melted snow working through the larch poles. But the middle of the igloo was perfectly dry. Of course, nobody could help the steady sizzling in the fireplace as the snow melted round the chimney pipe and found its way down into the fire. Now and again the smoke seemed to think twice about going up the chimney. But the wood smoke had a fine smell and Dick felt sure that in an igloo in Greenland his eyes would have smarted just the same.
“We’re going to sweep the tarn,” said Titty. “Captain Nancy says it’s no good having skating practice till we’ve swept away some of the snow.”
“We’re taking the sledge,” said Roger. “It won’t be only sweeping.”
“What are you going to sweep with?” asked Susan. “Who’s going down to Holly Howe for brooms?”
“Not me,” said Roger. “Nobody is. We’re going to have brooms like the one you and John made in Swallowdale.”
The four younger ones poured out of the igloo into the snow, leaving Peggy and Susan to their cooking.
THE IGLOO IN SNOW
“We’re ready for those brooms,” said Roger, and John and Nancy left their spades and went off with Roger and Titty, breaking twigs from the bare trees, shaking the snow off, and splicing them firmly in bundles to the ends of stout sticks. Meanwhile Dick and Dorothea took the spades and did a little work in shovelling up snow and adding it to the thickness of those massive walls.
“Shiver my timbers,” said Nancy, when she came back to the clearing and saw the igloo gleaming under the trees, a great shining mound of white snow. “Shiver my timbers, but isn’t it beastly to be going away so soon and leaving it to the sheep.”
“It’s pretty good,” said John, who had been helping to tie the new brooms on the top of the sledge.
“But it’s all coming just too late,” said Nancy. She took her spade from Dorothea, went to the side of the clearing, dug it savagely into the snow, lifted an enormous spadeful, came back and battered it down on the top of the igloo. “It doesn’t bear thinking about,” she said. “The lake was only waiting for this snow to begin to freeze. Everybody says it’s going to freeze all over, and instead of being at the North Pole we’re going to be back at school messing about with Magna Carta . . .”
John said nothing, but took up his spade and went on with his work.
“Come on,” said Roger, “there’s a rope for each dog, and we can all jump on when it’s going downhill.”
Dorothea grabbed her rope. They were off, the four of them, towing the sledge, jostling each other as they squeezed between the bushes with the sledge at their heels, plumping sideways on the top of it as it threatened to run away from them down a slope, hauling with the ropes over their shoulders as they climbed a rise.
“It’s a very good sledge,” said Dick, “built just like a bridge.”
“It’s a Beckfoot sledge,” said Titty. “We haven’t got one of our own. Nancy and Peggy brought it across when that first lot of snow came.”
“They hunted for another one for us, but they couldn’t find it,” panted Roger.
They charged down through the bracken, and out on the smooth, snow-covered ice. Sweeping began, but did not go on for very long. There was too good a slope between the observatory and the shore of the tarn. It was soon found that if the sledge were started close under the observatory wall it flew down the slope, shot out on the ice, and across it, very nearly to the other side. The sweepers stuck their brooms upright in clumps of heather so as not to lose them. Again and again four dogs with lolling tongues dragged the sledge up to the old barn. Again and again four human beings, astraddle on the sledge, flew down again.
“It’s all good practice,” said Roger.
“You see, there isn’t time for the lake to freeze,” said Titty, “but if the snow lasts we’ll be able to toboggan a good bit of the way.”
They were standing by the barn, resting after the hundredth climb. Time had gone at the terrible pace at which it always goes during the last few days of the holidays, and everybody was startled when Peggy’s red cap showed on the ridge. She had brought a flag with her, and began to signal.
Dorothea and Dick, trying to remember what they had learnt the night before, stared hard.
“Long and two shorts. D. I know that one,” said Dick.
“Two shorts,” said Dorothea.
“I,” said Titty.
“D-I,” said Roger. “I know the message before she’s flapped it. It’s dinner.”
“But it can’t be dinner already!” said Dorothea.
“Why not?” said Roger.
And dinner it was.
Peggy waited for no answer, but was gone. The four of them had a last wild rush down the slope and over the ice, picked up their brooms, tied them on the sledge, and went back to the igloo at the gallop. There they found the
four elders cooling down after work indoors and out. John and Nancy could do no more to the igloo, which was now a perfect dome, with a trodden path leading to the door. Susan and Peggy had been making a hot-pot, with potatoes, onions, and carrots, and a whole tin of bully beef (known by the Swallows and Amazons as pemmican). The pot itself was cooling down outside the igloo, because it was too hot for anybody to eat, and Susan was prodding at the potatoes with a fork through clouds of steam, though she had really made sure everything was ready before taking the pot off the fire.
“It’s sure to be all right, Susan,” said Nancy. “Let’s get at it.”
It was taken back into the igloo to be eaten. The explorers sat round it on benches and logs under the light of the lantern that was hanging from one of the poles of the roof. They had not enough spoons and forks for everybody, but fingers, as Roger said, came in useful once somebody with a fork had helped by getting something out. Dick and Dorothea were, of course, invited to share the hot-pot with the others. “After all,” said Peggy, “a hot-pot’s a hot-pot, and sandwiches are just . . .” She stopped, but Roger helped her out. “Sandwiches,” he suggested, and, catching Susan’s eye, added, “Why not? They are.” The sandwiches came in very useful for everybody, as plates that could be eaten up after the juice had soaked into them and they had served their first purpose.
And then, when they had just got well started with dinner, they heard steps outside the door.
“Polar bear,” said Roger. “Smelt the food.”
But if it was a bear it was too much out of breath to be a fierce one.
“It’s mother!” cried Nancy, looking out. “Come on in. We’ve got room for one Eskimo, and you’re the one.”
“Thank you for that,” said a voice, and through the low doorway Mrs Blackett came crawling into the igloo. She was a very little woman, and rather plump, and she had a cheerful, clear voice very like Nancy’s. “Well,” she said, “I must say you’ve made a very good hut for yourselves. But, pouf, isn’t it hot? Open-air life indeed! It’s like an oven. And what a pull up from Holly Howe. Easy enough to find you with all those tracks in the snow. But if I’d remembered how far it was I’d . . . I’d have sent you a message to come down and pull me up on the sledge.”