doctor, putting on his spectacles. “To be sure – yes! Axes, quick!”
He took one himself, gave the block of ice a sharp blow, split it in halves, and, to our utter astonishment, a strange-looking animal like a woolly dog lay before us, frozen, of course, perfectly hard.
“A prize!” said the doctor; and we, under his orders, made a good-sized fire, laid the perfectly preserved animal by it, and at the end of a couple of hours had the satisfaction of seeing it move one leg, then another, and, at last, it rose slowly on all fours, raised one of its hind legs, scratched itself in the most natural way in the world, and then seemed to sink down all of a heap, and melt quite away, leaving some loose wool on the snow.
“Well,” said Scudds, rolling his one eye, “if I hadn’t ha’ seen that ’ere, I wouldn’t ha’ believed it!”
“Only a case of suspended animation, my man,” said the doctor, calmly. “We shall make more discoveries yet.”
The doctor was right; for this set all the men hunting about, he giving them every encouragement, so that at the end of an hour we had found another dog; but in dislodging the block of ice in which it was frozen, the head was broken off, so that the only good to be obtained by thawing it was the rough wool and some of the teeth, which the doctor carefully preserved.
“Isn’t it much colder here, doctor?” I said, for the wind seemed to go through me like a knife.
“Hush!” he whispered; “don’t let the men hear, or they’ll be discouraged. It’s perfectly frightful; the thermometers are stopped!”
“Stopped?” I said.
“Yes; the cold’s far below anything they can show. They are perfectly useless now. Let’s get on?”
I stood staring at him, feeling a strange stupor coming over me. It was not unpleasant, being something like the minutes before one goes to sleep; but I was startled into life by the doctor flying at me, and hitting me right in my chest. The next moment he had a man on each side pumping my arms up and down, as they forced me to run for quite a quarter of an hour, when I stopped, panting, and the doctor laid his hand upon my heart.
“He’ll do now!” he said, quietly. “Don’t you get trying any of those games again, captain.”
“What games?” I said, indignantly.
“Getting yourself frozen. Now, then, get on, my lads – we must go ahead!”
For the next nine days we trudged on, dragging our sledge through the wonderful wilderness of ice and snow. At night we camped in the broad sunshine, and somehow the air seemed to be much warmer. But on the tenth day, when we had reached the edge of a great, crater-like depression in the ice, which seemed to extend as far as the eye could reach, the intensity of the cold was frightful, and I spoke of it to the doctor, as soon as we had set up our little canvas and skin tent.
“Yes, it is cold!” he said. “I’d give something to know how low it is! But let’s make our observations.”
We did, and the doctor triumphantly announced that we were within one degree of the Pole.
We were interrupted by an outcry among the men, and, on going to the tent, it was to find them staring at the spirit-lamp, over which we heated our coffee. The flame, instead of fluttering about, and sending out warmth, had turned quite solid, and was like a great tongue of bright, bluish-yellow metal, which rang like a bell, on being touched with a spoon.
“Never mind, my men!” says the doctor coolly. “It is only one of the phenomena of the place. Captain, give the men a piece of brandy each.”
“A little brandy apiece, you mean, sir.”
“No,” he said coolly; “I mean a piece of brandy each.”
He was quite right: the brandy was one solid mass, like a great cairngorm pebble, and we had to break it with an axe; and very delicious the bits were to suck, but as to strength, it seemed to have none.
We had an accident that evening, and broke one of the doctor’s thermometers, the ball of quicksilver falling heavily on the ice, and, when I picked it up, it was like a leaden bullet, quite hard, so that we fired it at a bear, which came near us; but it only quickened his steps.
In spite of the tremendous cold, we none of us seemed much the worse, and joined the doctor in his hunt for curiosities. There was land here as well as ice, although it was covered; for there was on one side of the hollow quite a hill, and the doctor pointed out to me the trace of what he said had been a river, evidently emptying itself into the great crater; but when he pulled out the compass to see in which direction the river must have run, the needle pointed all sorts of ways, ending by dipping down, and remaining motionless.
We were not long in finding that animal life had at one time existed here; for, on hunting among the blocks of ice, we found several in which we could trace curious-looking beasts, frozen in like fossils.
We had set up our tent under the lee of a great rock of ice, on the edge of the crater, which looked so smooth and so easy of ascent, that it was with the greatest difficulty that we could keep the doctor’s nephew from trying a slide down. He had, in fact, got hold of a smooth piece of ice to use as a sledge, when the doctor stopped him, and put an end to his enthusiasm by pointing down and asking him what was below in the distance, where the hollow grew deep and dark, and a strange mist hung over it like a cloud.
“If you go down, Alfred, my boy, you will never get back. Think of my misery in such a case, knowing that you have, perhaps, penetrated the mystery of the North Pole, and that it will never be known!”
The young fellow sighed at this arrest of his project.
Just then we were roused by a shout from Scudds, whom we could see in the distance, standing like a bear on its hind legs, and moving his hands.
We all set off to him, under the impression that he had found the Pole; but he was only standing pointing to a great slab of transparent ice, out of which stuck about ten inches of the tail of something, the ice having melted from it; while, on closer examination, we could see, farther in through the clear, glassy ice, the hind-quarters of some mighty beast.
“A mammoth —Elephas Primigenius!” cried the doctor, excitedly. “We must have him out.”
We stared at one another, while the doctor wabbled round to the other side of the great mass, where he set up a shout; and, on going to him, there he was, pointing to what looked like a couple of pegs about seven feet apart, sticking out of the face of the ice.
“What’s them, sir?” says one of the men.
“Tusks!” cried the doctor, delightedly. “My men, this is as good as discovering the North Pole. If we could get that huge beast out, and restore his animation, what a triumph. Why, he must have been,” he said, pacing the length of the block, and calculating its height, “at least – dear me, yes – forty feet long, and twenty feet high.”
“What a whopper!” growled Scudds. “Well, I found him.”
“We must have him out, my men,” said the doctor again, but he said it dubiously, for it seemed a task beyond us, for fire would not burn, and there was no means of getting heat to melt the vast mass; so at last we returned to the camp, and made ourselves snug for the night.
In the morning, the doctor had another inspection of the mammoth, and left it with a sigh; but in the course
