Part 5 (2/2)

I aimed my gun for his heart, and I touched the trigger. He held up his left hand.

'Stop,' he said, 'stop.' (He was one of the coolest of men ordinarily.) 'There is no gallows on the _Boreal_, but Clark could easily rig one for you. I want to kill you, too, because there are no criminal courts up here, and it would be doing a good action for my country. But not here--not now. Listen to me--don't shoot. Later we can meet, when all is ready, so that no one may be the wiser, and fight it all out.'

As he spoke I let the gun drop. It was better so. I knew that he was much the best shot on the s.h.i.+p, and I an indifferent one: but I did not care, I did not care, if I was killed.

It is a dim, inclement land, G.o.d knows: and the spirit of darkness and distraction is there.

Twenty hours later we met behind the great saddle-shaped hummock, some six miles to the S.E. of the s.h.i.+p. We had set out at different times, so that no one might suspect. And each brought a s.h.i.+p's-lantern.

Wilson had dug an ice-grave near the hummock, leaving at its edge a heap of brash-ice and snow to fill it. We stood separated by an interval of perhaps seventy yards, the grave between us, each with a lantern at his feet.

Even so we were mere shadowy apparitions one to the other. The air glowered very drearily, and present in my inmost soul were the frills of cold. A chill moon, a mere abstraction of light, seemed to hang far outside the universe. The temperature was at 55 below zero, so that we had on wind-clothes over our anoraks, and heavy foot-bandages under our Lap boots. Nothing but a weird morgue seemed the world, haunted with despondent madness; and exactly like that world about us were the minds of us two poor men, full of macabre, bleak, and funereal feelings.

Between us yawned an early grave for one or other of our bodies.

I heard Wilson cry out:

'Are you ready, Jeffson?'

'Aye, Wilson!' cried I.

'_Then here goes!_' cries he.

Even as he spoke, he fired. Surely, the man was in deadly earnest to kill me.

But his shot pa.s.sed harmlessly by me: as indeed was only likely: we were mere shadows one to the other.

I fired perhaps ten seconds later than he: but in those ten seconds he stood perfectly revealed to me in clear, lavender light.

An Arctic fire-ball had traversed the sky, showering abroad, a sulphurous glamour over the snow-landscape. Before the intenser blue of its momentary s.h.i.+ne had pa.s.sed away, I saw Wilson stagger forward, and drop. And him and his lantern I buried deep there under the rubble ice.

On the 13th March, nearly three months later, Clark, Mew and I left the Boreal in lat.i.tude 85 15'.

We had with us thirty-two dogs, three sledges, three kayaks, human provisions for 112 days, and dog provisions for 40. Being now about 340 miles from the Pole, we hoped to reach it in 43 days, then, turning south, and feeding living dogs with dead, make either Franz Josef Land or Spitzbergen, at which latter place we should very likely come up with a whaler.

Well, during the first days, progress was very slow, the ice being rough and laney, and the dogs behaving most badly, stopping dead at every difficulty, and leaping over the traces. Clark had had the excellent idea of attaching a gold-beater's-skin balloon, with a lifting power of 35 pounds, to each sledge, and we had with us a supply of zinc and sulphuric-acid to repair the hydrogen-waste from the bags; but on the third day Mew over-filled and burst his balloon, and I and Clark had to cut ours loose in order to equalise weights, for we could neither leave him behind, turn back to the s.h.i.+p, nor mend the bag. So it happened that at the end of the fourth day out, we had made only nineteen miles, and could still from a hummock discern afar the leaning masts of the old Boreal. Clark led on ski, captaining a sledge with 400 lbs. of instruments, ammunition, pemmican, aleuronate bread; Mew followed, his sledge containing provisions only; and last came I, with a mixed freight. But on the third day Clark had an attack of snow-blindness, and Mew took his place.

Pretty soon our sufferings commenced, and they were bitter enough. The sun, though constantly visible day and night, gave no heat. Our sleeping-bags (Clark and Mew slept together in one, I in another) were soaking wet all the night, being thawed by our warmth; and our fingers, under wrappings of senne-gra.s.s and wolf-skin, were always bleeding.

Sometimes our frail bamboo-cane kayaks, lying across the sledges, would crash perilously against an ice-ridge--and they were our one hope of reaching land. But the dogs were the great difficulty: we lost six mortal hours a day in harnessing and tending them. On the twelfth day Clark took a single-alt.i.tude observation, and found that we were only in lat.i.tude 86 45'; but the next day we pa.s.sed beyond the furthest point yet reached by man, viz. 86 53', attained by the _Nix_ explorers four years previously.

Our one secret thought now was food, food--our day-long l.u.s.t for the eating-time. Mew suffered from 'Arctic thirst.

Under these conditions, man becomes in a few days, not a savage only, but a mere beast, hardly a grade above the bear and walrus. Ah, the ice!

A long and sordid nightmare was that, G.o.d knows.

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