CHAPTER XIV

CAUGHT IN AN ICE-QUAKE 

     March 20th is the day all Arctic travelers im­patiently await. It is the day the sun reaches the North Pole, not to go away again for six months. Up near the Pole this day marks the end of the dark period; though the sun continues to set for a few hours at midnight—gradually lessening the diurnal duration of his disappear­ance till he remains above the horizon night as well as day—a fast-diminishing twilight is the only semblance of darkness we have above the 80th parallel after March 20th. As I have said, we were going along very well to the north­ward, and I had begun to feel quite proud of the progress I could make with my sledge and dog team. 

     But pride goeth before a fall. On this very morning which marked the end of the Arctic night and the dawn of the brighter day, a little accident happened. It was a trivial thing in itself, tremendous in its consequences. My sledge, carrying 500 pounds of weight, had stuck in a rough place. As usual, I called to the dogs and threw my weight into the harness A lunge forward, and down into a little crack in the ice—a tiny little crack such as we had crossed every day by the scores—went my right leg. The mo­mentum threw me forward upon my face, and my shin bone received the full force of the thrust. At first I thought the leg was broken in two or three places, so great was the pain. For a few moments I felt faint. But when I had picked myself up and found that I had nothing worse than a bruise and sprain, I counted my­self very lucky, and went on my way as con­tented as if nothing had happened. 

     Next morning of course I was sore and lame, and the prudent thing would have been to stop for a week or ten days and 'get all right again. But I kept going, the leg getting worse and worse, and I suppose I should have been rash enough to go so far that I never could have gotten back had not something else happened. 

     Fortunately, this other thing did happen, and it came down upon us like a thief in the night, in the shape of an ice-pressure which acted just like an earthquake under our camp and destroyed sledges, dogs, stores and instruments in the twinkling of an eye, and came within an ell of getting all of us. 

     It was a strange disaster which overtook us. We had covered about 140 of the 700 statute miles which lay between our winter headquarters and the Pole, and felt confident of our ability to cover a good deal of the remaining distance before turning back—for at this time there was no realization of the fact that the injury to my leg was so severe. Retreat at once was impera­tive if my life was to be saved. We had no thought of retreating; the leg would be better to­morrow or the day after; and if the fates had not interposed, it is certain we should have gone on and on to the north—so far that at least one of us could never have returned. But the fates did intervene with what at the moment seemed a most cruel hand to save us from worse things beyond. March 22nd was a day of storm from the northeast, and we could not make the dogs face the blast. By evening the wind had died away, but as the nights were still pretty dark, we crept into our sleeping-bags at six o'clock, with orders for breakfast at three in the morn­ing and an early start. At midnight we were aroused by the ominous sound of ice crushing against ice, accompanied by a slight jarring of the frozen crust which lay between us and the sea. In an instant all five of us were outside the tent. We could see nothing. The storm had blown up again, and the air was filled with drifting snow. Two men were detailed to make a reconnaissance, the others creeping back into the tent out of the blast. But in two or three seconds there came another movement of the ice; another low, sullen, rumbling sound. 

     A crack had opened directly under our sleep­ing-bags, and in its black depths we could hear the waters rushing and seething. Running out of the tent into the darkness, one of us stepped into an opening, wetting his foot, and no sooner had he withdrawn his leg than the crack closed like a vice, and with such force that the edges of the blocks were ground to fragments and the debris was pushed up into a quivering ridge. Ten feet away lay a dog with his head cut clean off by a similar opening and closing of the ice upon which he had been sleeping. How the animal had managed to get caught in the trap we could not imagine; but there he was, as neatly beheaded as if an executioner had done the job. 

     The remaining dogs were howling dolefully. Some of our sledges, with their precious stores, were already toppling into the waters where the ice had upheaved underneath them. Under our feet and all around us the ice was shaking and breaking—here pushing up, there sinking down—and the violently agitated sea was spout­ing through the openings. We were caught in an ice-quake. 

     For a few moments, oddly enough, we did not fully realize our danger. To none of us was an ice pressure a new thing, and familiarity had doubtless bred in us, if not contempt for the ice-king, certainly a somewhat superfluous confidence in ourselves. But when, a few moments later, the very pieces of ice upon which we stood reared up and assumed angles of from thirty-five to forty-five degrees; when our entire camp started revolving as if it were in a maelstrom; when we saw our tent, sleeping-bags, and cooking-kit threatened by a rushing mass of sludge and water, we knew that whatever was to be done must be done right quickly. 

     There was no panic. There was not the slightest sign that any one of us was even ex­cited. We cut the harness of such dogs as we could get at, that they might save themselves. In the very nick of time three of us sprang out upon the floe which held the tent, tilted though as it was with one edge down in the boiling sea and the other up in the air, and after a sharp struggle, we succeeded in rescuing the precious sleeping-bags, the cooking-outfit, and the tent itself. 

     Obviously it was imperative that we run away from this convulsed spot as quickly as possible. But whither should we go? In the darkness and storm it was impossible to see anything around us but the shaking, quaking ice-blocks. I asked Paul and Emil to go hunt a sound floe, if such a thing remained in the Arctic Seas, upon which we could take refuge. They instantly set out, scrambling over the rolling, shaking slabs, and as they disappeared in the gloom I said to my­self: "Well, that's the last I shall ever see of those boys." Yet I was not much concerned about it. For some reason, which I never expect to understand, I was unable to get up more than an indifferent sort of interest in what was going on. The most acute sensation I had was in a thought of how much more pleasant it would be back in the snug bag, and whether it was really worth while to stay out in this bitter wind trying to save things. 

     In a few moments Paul and Emil returned with word that twenty or thirty rods away they had found a floe which appeared to be sound and safe. Then, for the first time, we all began to feel that there was something worth hurrying for. Laying hold of a sledge, we hastened with it over the quaking pieces and across a chasm in which the water was running like a mill-race, to a place of safety upon the large floe beyond. Three trips there and back we made, each time finding the chasm considerably wider than be­fore. 

     It was all we could do to get the third sledge over, and when we attempted to return for the fourth there was before us a river—a mad-rush­ing, ice-strewn current. The spot where our camp had stood, and where but a few moments before we had all been at the work of rescue, was in a volcanic state of eruption. Masses of ice were gushing up into the air like flames. The brittle blocks were crushing, grinding, snarling, biting at one another. The sea was rushing wildly through and over the debris. From within this swirling maelstrom of ice and water came the doleful howling of a number of dogs, whose fastenings we had been unable to cut. 

     We stood at the margin of the upheaval and listened. The volume of cry from the dogs be­came fainter and fainter. Soon it dwindled to the moan of a single dog. A second more and there was no sound to be heard save the cracking, crunching of the ice, the swishing, hissing of the waters. As I stood there in the storm by the wreck of a great hope I noticed how strangely like the roar of a fierce conflagration were the mutterings of this Polar paroxysm. 

     Without a word we turned back to our res­cued sledges, moved them farther on, and, as soon as we felt quite secure, stopped and put up the tent to escape the force of the wind. While cook was preparing coffee and oatmeal we made an inventory of our losses. One-third of our dogs and all of our dog food were missing; also 300 or 400 pounds of bacon and condensed food; bags of reserve clothing and footwear; all our ski and our canvas canoe; and worst of all, our basket of instruments. The Polar dash was at an end. It would be nothing but suicide to go on. 

     When the light returned and the storm had abated, we walked back to the place where our camp had been. A strange scene lay before us. Where our tent had been pitched there were now masses of pressed-up ice, rising in places thirty feet above the level of the sea. The solid crystal sheet, from eight to fifteen feet in thick­ness, had been shattered into a million fragments, turned bottom up, block packed on block, and in between the elevation were pockets of debris—the powdered pulverized detritus produced by these Titanic forces. 

     Now all was still and calm, and where the sea had rushed up and formed little pools in the sludge, new ice was forming in the thirty-de­grees-below-zero temperature, and all was shin­ing brilliantly in the morning sun. Not a trace of sledge, or dog, or canoe, or ski, or any­thing whatsoever that had been ours, was to be seen in the wreck. Had the strongest ship that was ever built been caught in this convulsion, it would been ground into kindling wood and the kindling wood into powder.  

     Now we could plainly see the cause of the dis­aster, hitherto inexplicable. We had pitched our camp about half a mile from an enormous iceberg, fragment of a glacier, that had drifted here perhaps years before and grounded. It was about as big as a modern New York or Chicago "sky-scraper," rising forty feet above the surface of the water with its feet upon the earth perhaps 150 feet below. There it stood, like a mountain, now only a hundred yards away. The storm that blew up while we slept had started the whole field of ice in motion. It had driven the ice down upon the great berg just as the sawyer moves his board against the saw, or as you may push a piece of cardboard against a fixed knife. And our camp had been in the line of the cut! 

      It was all plain enough. The mountainous berg had sawed the ice-sheet, and into the chan­nel thus formed—here, as elsewhere, nature will have no vacuum—the pressure of billions of tons, coming from rear, right, left, had jammed, rolled, revolved, uplifted, down-thrust, crunched, crushed, powdered the fragments of floes into a death struggle for mere place to exist. 

     All along that coast, as far as we could see this bright morning, the one spot—the one lit­tle rood out of all these millions of acres—where our camp could have been pitched only to be destroyed was the very spot where it had been pitched. All other spots for miles and miles were just as they had been. Start an ant crawl­ing across a newspaper. Take a pair of shears, shut your eyes, make one random clip, and cut the insect in two. We were the ant creeping across the surface of this great ice-sheet, and that is what chance did for us—the one out of millions that saved at least one human life.