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Page 2
But Bennett had more on his mind that morning than mock-moons and
auroras. To the south and east, about a quarter of a mile from the tent,
the pressure of the floes had thrown up an enormous ridge of shattered
ice-cakes, a mound, a long hill of blue-green slabs and blocks huddling
together at every conceivable angle. It was nearly twenty feet in
height, quite the highest point that Bennett could discover. Scrambling
and climbing over countless other ridges that intervened, he made his
way to it, ascended it almost on hands and knees, and, standing upon its
highest point, looked long and carefully to the southward.
A wilderness beyond all thought, words, or imagination desolate
stretched out before him there forever and forever--ice, ice, ice,
fields and floes of ice, laying themselves out under that gloomy sky,
league after league, endless, sombre, infinitely vast, infinitely
formidable. But now it was no longer the smooth ice over which the
expedition had for so long been travelling. In every direction,
intersecting one another at ten thousand points, crossing and
recrossing, weaving a gigantic, bewildering network of gashed, jagged,
splintered ice-blocks, ran the pressure-ridges and hummocks. In places a
score or more of these ridges had been wedged together to form one huge
field of broken slabs of ice miles in width, miles in length. From
horizon to horizon there was no level place, no open water, no pathway.
The view to the southward resembled a tempest-tossed ocean suddenly
frozen.
One of these ridges Bennett had just climbed, and upon it he now stood.
Even for him, unencumbered, carrying no weight, the climb had been
difficult; more than once he had slipped and fallen. At times he had
been obliged to go forward almost on his hands and knees. And yet it was
across that jungle of ice, that unspeakable tangle of blue-green slabs
and cakes and blocks, that the expedition must now advance, dragging its
boats, its sledges, its provisions, instruments, and baggage.
Bennett stood looking. Before him lay his task. There under his eyes was
the Enemy. Face to face with him was the titanic primal strength of a
chaotic world, the stupendous still force of a merciless nature, waiting
calmly, waiting silently to close upon and crush him. For a long time he
stood watching. Then the great brutal jaw grew more salient than ever,
the teeth set and clenched behind the close-gripped lips, the cast in
the small twinkling eyes grew suddenly more pronounced. One huge fist
raised, and the arm slowly extended forward like the resistless moving
of a piston. Then when his arm was at its full reach Bennett spoke as
though in answer to the voiceless, terrible challenge of the Ice.
Through his clenched teeth his words came slow and measured.
"But I'll break you, by God! believe me, I will."
After a while he returned to the tent, awoke the cook, and while
breakfast was being prepared completed his calculations for latitude,
wrote up his ice-journal, and noted down the temperature and the
direction and velocity of the wind. As he was finishing, Richard
Ferriss, who was the chief engineer and second in command, awoke and
immediately asked the latitude.
"Seventy-four-fifteen," answered Bennett without looking up.
"Seventy-four-fifteen," repeated Ferriss, nodding his head; "we didn't
make much distance yesterday."
"I hope we can make as much to-day," returned Bennett grimly as he put
away his observation-journal and note-books.
"How's the ice to the south'ard?"
"Bad; wake the men."
After breakfast and while the McClintocks were being loaded Bennett sent
Ferriss on ahead to choose a road through and over the ridges. It was
dreadful work. For two hours Ferriss wandered about amid the broken ice
all but hopelessly bewildered. But at length, to his great satisfaction,
he beheld a fairly open stretch about a quarter of a mile in length
lying out to the southwest and not too far out of the expedition's line
of march. Some dozen ridges would have to be crossed before this level
was reached; but there was no help for it, so Ferriss planted his flags
where the heaps of ice-blocks seemed least impracticable and returned
toward the camp. It had already been broken, and on his way he met the
entire expedition involved in the intricacies of the first rough ice.
All of the eighteen dogs had been harnessed to the number two sledge,
that carried the whaleboat and the major part of the provisions, and
every man of the party, Bennett included, was straining at the
haul-ropes with the dogs. Foot by foot the sledge came over the ridge,
grinding and lurching among the ice-blocks; then, partly by guiding,
partly by lifting, it was piloted down the slope, only in the end to
escape from all control and come crashing downward among the dogs,
jolting one of the medicine chests from its lashings and butting its
nose heavily against the foot of the next hummock immediately beyond.
But the men scrambled to their places again, the medicine chest was
replaced, and Muck Tu, the Esquimau dog-master, whipped forward his
dogs. Ferriss, too, laid hold. The next hummock was surmounted, the dogs
panting, and the men, even in that icy air, reeking with perspiration.
Then suddenly and without the least warning Bennett and McPherson, who
were in the lead, broke through some young ice into water up to their
breasts, Muck Tu and one of the dogs breaking through immediately
afterward. The men were pulled out, or, of their own efforts, climbed
upon the ice again. But in an instant their clothes were frozen to
rattling armor.
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