Cast Away in the Cold Part 14

Here William, who was, as we have seen, of an inquiring turn of mind, interrupted the Captain to ask if he would not be so good as to mention again how dark it was in this polar winter.

"Dark as midnight," replied the Captain, promptly.

"Dark all the time, did you say, Captain Hardy?"

"Yes, dark all the time, my lad,--dark in the morning, dark in the evening, dark at midnight, dark at noon, dark, all the time, as any night you ever saw; only, everything being white with snow, of course makes the night lighter than it does here, where the trees and the houses, and other dark objects, help along the blackness and make it more gloomy,--absorbing the light, you see, while the snow reflects it."

"But what," asked William, "did you do for light in this dark time, since you did not have a lamp?"

"Easy there, my lad," replied the Captain; "I'm just coming to that, you see. Somebody has said that 'necessity is the mother of invention,' or words to that effect; and darkness, I think, may be considered a 'mother' of that description. First we made an open dish of soapstone, and put some oil in it; and then we made a wick out of the dry moss, and set fire to it; but this was found to make so much smoke that it drove us out of the hut, and it was given up. But we did not throw away the dish, and after a while it occurred to us to powder the dry moss by rubbing it between the hands, and with this powdered moss we lined our soapstone dish all over on the inside with a layer a quarter of an inch thick. After smoothing this down all around the edge (this dish, which we called a lamp, was much like a saucer, only rougher and much larger), we filled it half full of oil, and again set fire to it all around the edge; and this time it worked beautifully,--smoking very little, and giving us plenty of light."

"How cunning!" exclaimed the children, all at once.

"Rather so," replied the Captain, "but hardly more so than the two little drinking-cups we carved out of the same kind of soapstone that we made the lamp and pot of."

"It must have felt very queer, Captain Hardy," said Fred, inquiringly, "to be in darkness all the time. I can't imagine such a thing as the winter being all the time dark,--can you, Will?"

"No, I can't," replied William,--"can you, Sister Alice?"

"Yes, I think I can," said Alice, quickly.

"Why, how's that, my little dear?" asked the Captain, greatly interested.

"O," said Alice, in her gentle way, "I've only to think of poor blind Jo going round with his little dog, begging from door to door, and never seeing anything in all the world,--no sun, no moon, no stars, no any light to him at all. Poor Jo's bright summer went out long ago; and both light and warmth were gone, never to come back again, when old Martha died! and all's night to Jo,--and that's how I know what it is to be in darkness all the time"; and as little Alice made this little speech about poor blind Jo, the beggar-man, her lovely face looked thoughtful beyond its years; and, as she finished, the Captain saw a tear stealing from her soft blue eye for poor Jo's sake; and he caught her in his arms right off, without stopping to think at all what he was doing, and he kissed away the tear; and, as he did it, a much bigger one came tearing out of his own great hazel eye, and hurried down into his s.h.a.ggy beard to hide, as if it were quite frightened at what it had been doing with itself.

"Spoken like the little lady that you are, my dear," broke out the Captain; "always thinking of the unfortunate. And you are very right, my child. Poor blind Jo's darkness is much worse than ours ever was, up in the Frozen Sea, upon the lonely island,--far worse indeed, poor man! for you must know that the stars were shining brightly there upon us all the time; and then the moon came every month; and when it came, it came for good and all, and never set for several days; and then sometimes the aurora borealis would flash across the heavens, and clear away the darkness for a little while, as if it were a huge broom sweeping cobwebs from the skies, and letting in the light of day beneath the stars. O, what a splendid sight it was!"

"O, tell us all about it, Captain Hardy, won't you?" asked all the children, with one voice.

"Of course, I will," replied the Captain, "only I can do no sort of justice to that species of natural scenery, don't you see? That's a touch beyond John Hardy's powers of description, as I can well a.s.sure you."

The children all declared that they never could think anything beyond John Hardy's powers, and they believed it too.

"Well, well! Now let me see, my dears, what I can do for you. First, you know the scientific chaps, especially my friend the Doctor, down in Boston, say that the aurora borealis is electricity broke loose, and tearing through the air, from pole to pole, for some purpose of its own.

It can't be caught, nor bottled up, as Franklin bottled up the lightning, nor a.n.a.lyzed;--in short, nothing can be done with it; and so it goes tearing through the skies, as I have said before, from pole to pole, just where it likes.

"Now this is what it is, so far as one can see. When you go away beyond the Arctic Circle, you see great fiery streams start up from a fiery arch that stretches right across the sky before you; and from this fiery arch the fiery streams of light shoot up, and then fall back again,--sometimes lasting for a little while, and waving in the sky, to and fro, like a silken curtain of many colors fluttering in the wind; and then again seeming to be phantom things playing hide-and-seek among the stars; sometimes like wicked spirits of the night, bent on mischief; sometimes like tongues of flame from some great fire in some great world beyond the earth, making one almost afraid that the heavens will break out presently in a roaring blaze, and rain a shower of living coals and ashes on his head.

"And O, how grand the colors are sometimes! The great arch of light that spans the sky is often bright with all the colors of the rainbow,--changing every instant. And from these flickering belts of light the fiery streams fly up with lightning speed,--green, and orange, and blue, and purple, and bright crimson,--all mingling here and there and everywhere above, while down beneath comes out in bold relief before the eye the broad, white plain of ice and snow upon the ocean, the great icebergs that lie here and there upon it, the tall white mountains of the land, and the dark islands in the sea; and then the flood of light dies away, and the dark islands in the sea, and the tall white mountains, and the icebergs, and the white plain around, all vanish from the sight, and the mind retains only an impression that the icebergs, with all these bright hues reflected on them from above, had come from s.p.a.ce and darkness, like the meteors, then to vanish, and leave the darkness more profound.

"And thus the auroral light and color keep pulsating in the air, up and down, up and down; and thus the icebergs seem to come and go; and the very stars above seem to be rushing out with a bold bright glare, and going back again as quickly, singed and withered, as it were, into puny sparks, and, utterly disheartened with the effort to keep their places in the face of such a flood of brightness, are at length resolved no more to try to twinkle, twinkle through the night.

"And that is all I can tell you about the aurora borealis, for that is all I know about it."

"O, isn't he a great one?" whispered William to Fred, who sat close beside him on the locker,--"isn't he, indeed?--to say he can't describe an aurora borealis, when he has blood, thunder, fire, and all creation on his tongue."

"But," went on the Captain, "in spite of this auroral light and the moonlight, the winter was dreary enough. At first we wanted to sleep all the time; and we had much trouble to keep ourselves from giving way to this desire. If we had done so, it would have made us very unhealthy and altogether miserable. We had to keep up our spirits, whatever else we did; and after a while, to help us with this, we got into regular habits; and we set a great clock up in the sky to tell us the time of day."

"A clock up in the sky!" exclaimed both the boys; "why, Captain Hardy, how was that?"

"Why, don't you see, my lads, the 'Great Bear' and all the other constellations of the north go round and round the Pole-star, which is right above your head; and it so happened that I knew the 'Great Bear,'

and the two stars in its side called 'the Pointers' because they point to the Pole-star. Now these two 'Pointers,' going around once in the four-and-twenty hours, pointed up from the south at one time, and up from the north at another time, and up from the east and from the west in the same way; and thus you see we had a clock up in the sky to tell us the time of day, for we had an iceberg picked out all around for every hour, and when 'the Pointers' stood over that particular berg we knew what time it was.

"We should have got along through the winter much more comfortably if we had had some books, or some paper to write on, and pen and ink to write with; but these things were quite beyond the reach of our ingenuity. So our life was very monotonous; doing our daily duties,--that is, whatever we might find to do,--and, after wading through the deep snow in doing it, we came back again to our little hut to get warm, and to eat and talk and sleep.

"And much talking we did, as I can a.s.sure you, about each other, and each other's life, and what great things we would do when we got away from the island, hopeless though that seemed. Thus we came gradually to know each other's history, and thus there came to be greater sympathy between us, and more indulgence of each other's whims and fancies, as we got better and better acquainted.

"The Dean had quite a story to relate of himself. He told me that he was born in the great city of New York. His father died before he could remember, and his mother was very poor; but so long as she kept her health she managed, in one way or another, to live along from day to day by sewing; and she managed, too, to send the Dean to school. She loved her bright-haired little boy so very, very much that she would have spent the last cent she could ever earn, could she only give her darling Dean a little knowledge that might help him on in the world when he grew to be a man. And so she stinted herself and saved, all unknown to her darling Dean; and she had not clothing or fire enough to keep her warm in the bleak winter, when the Dean was out, though she had a fine fire when the Dean came back. All would have been well enough if the poor woman had not, with her hard work and her efforts to save, become thin and weak, and then grown sick with fever; and now there was nothing for her but the hospital, for there was no money to pay for medicines, or doctor's bills, to say nothing of rent and fire and clothes.

"And now for the first time the Dean began to realize the situation; and a vague impression crossed his mind, that the poor, pale woman, now restless with pain on a narrow bed in a great long ward of a dreary hospital,--his own dear mother, suffering here with strange hands only to comfort her,--had been brought to this for his sake; and when she grew better, after a long, long time, but was still far from well, he thought and thought, and cried and cried, and prayed and prayed, and wished that he might do something to show his grat.i.tude, and make amends.

"By and by he got into a factory, and worked there early and late, until he too grew sick, and was carried to the hospital, and was laid beside his poor sick mother, on a narrow bed. But he soon got well again, though his mother did not, and then (he could do nothing else) he went to sea as cabin-boy of a ship sailing to Havana; and he came back too; and, with a proud heart beating in his little breast, he carried a little purse of gold and silver coins that the captain gave him to his poor sick mother; and then he went away again on the same ship, and came back once more with another purse of money, twice as big as the first; but the good captain that had been so kind to him, and rewarded him so well, fell sick, and died of yellow fever on the pa.s.sage home, and the mate, who got command of the ship, being a different sort of man, disliked the Dean, and told him not to come back any more. And so the poor Dean didn't know what to do; until one of his old shipmates met him in the street, and took him off to New Bedford, and shipped him as cabin-boy of the _Blackbird_. 'And now here I am,' said the poor little Dean, 'and all the rest you know,--cast away in the cold, in this awful place, while my poor sick mother has no money and no friends in all the world, and is thinking all the time what a wretch I am to run away and desert her, when, G.o.d knows, I meant to do nothing of the sort!' and so the Dean burst out crying, and, to tell you the truth, I could not help crying a little too.

"But the Dean was a right plucky little fellow, I can tell you; and so full of hope and ambition was he, that nothing could keep him down very long; and nothing, I believe, could ever make him despond for a single minute but thinking of his mother, sick and far away, without friends or money, lying on a narrow bed, all through the weary, dreary days and nights, in the dreary ward of a crowded hospital. Poor Dean! he had something to make him cry, and something always to make him sad, if he had a mind to be; but what had I in comparison?--I who had gone away from home with no good motive like the Dean's.

"After the recital of this story of the Dean's, we were both very sad, until the Dean suddenly roused himself, and said, 'Let's go and look at our traps, Hardy'; and so we sallied out into the moonlight, and waded through the snow, to see if there were any foxes for us. To get outside our hut was not so easy a matter now as it was when we first built it; for, in order to keep the cold winds away, we had made a long, low, narrow pa.s.sage, with a crook in it, through which we crawled on our hands and knees, before we reached the door.

"We walked all the way around the island, and visited all our traps, of which we had seventeen, but only two of them had foxes in them; the others were either filled with snow, or were completely covered over with it, for the wind had been blowing very hard the day before.

"As we got farther and farther into the winter, we met with some very strange adventures,--altogether different from anything I have told you of before; but you see the sun will soon be going down behind the trees, and we are a good long way from the 'Mariner's Rest,' so 'up anchor' 's the word now, my dears, and 'under way' again."

The merry little yacht was not long in carrying the merry little party over to the Captain's favorite anchorage; and then they were all soon ash.o.r.e, and after many merry and many pleasant speeches, our little friends parted from the ancient mariner once more, leaving him standing in the shadow of the great tall trees, with a string of fish in one hand; while Fred and William, with Main Brace to help them, and with merry Alice running on ahead, each carried off a string for their next day's breakfast,--a trophy to be proud of, as they thought.

CHAPTER XIV.

Proves the Ingenuity of Seals, and Shows That the Great Polar Bear Is No Respecter of Persons.

"When we were last time cruising in the _Alice_, I think I told you all about the Arctic winter,--did I not?" said the ancient mariner to his little friends, when they were met once more.

"Yes," answered William (who was always ready to act as spokesman for the party),--"yes, Captain Hardy, all about the Arctic winter, and the aurora borealis, and the wonderful moonlight, and the darkness, and how you and the handsome little Dean lived through it, and what you talked about, and how you pa.s.sed the time, and what a doleful life you led, and what a dreadful thing it was, and how it made you shiver now to think of it; and--all that, and a great deal more."

"Certainly," replied the Captain, "certainly, that's it,--all told off nicely, my lad, just as if you were boxing the compa.s.s or repeating the multiplication table;--all about how we protected ourselves from cold, and kept ourselves from hunger, and prepared a home for ourselves on the Rock of Good Hope. And this seemed likely to be our home for life too,--so far, at least, as we could see; for it appeared clear enough to us that our condition would never change except with death, which we, like everybody else, whether they have ever been cast away or not, wanted to put off as long as possible, having no wish at all to die, and not liking either to freeze or starve: so you see we had good motives for energy and patience."

Here little Alice, in her quiet way, interrupted the Captain to say that the aurora borealis had troubled her dreams all night, and that she would like to know, if the Captain pleased, why anything should have such a strange name.

"That I will tell you with pleasure, my dear," answered the Captain; "I'll tell you all about it,--of course I will. Aurora borealis,--that means northern light; and the name comes from a pagan G.o.ddess called Aurora, who was supposed to have rosy fingers, and to ride in a rosy chariot, and who opened the gates of the East every morning, and brought in the light of day; and thus, in course of time, any great flush of light in the heavens got to be called Aurora. And then there was a pagan G.o.d called Boreas, who was the North Wind, and had long wings and white hair, and made himself generally disagreeable. So you see Boreas, from being the pagan name for north wind, got to mean the north; and Borealis, from that, became Northern, and Aurora Borealis became Northern Light."

"Thank you, Captain Hardy," said little Alice; and Fred and William said "Thank you" too; while, as for the Captain, he looked very wise and solemn, like other great philosophers, appearing as if he would say, "Don't be surprised, for that's nothing to what I could do if I had a mind," every word of which the children would have believed, you may well be sure. However, the Captain hastened on with the story (which is more to our present purpose) without giving any further proof of his learning.

"When the winter had fairly set in," said he, "our field of operations was much enlarged; and, although the birds had all flown away, we were hardly worse off than before, as you shall see; for all through the summer we had been kept close prisoners on the island; but now, when the ice was solid all over the sea, we could walk out upon it, and this we did as soon as it would bear. Once the Dean broke through, being a little careless of where he was stepping; but I got him out, with no more harm coming to him than a cold bath and a fright.

"Soon after this we made a valuable discovery. Some of the seals have a habit, when the sea is frozen over, of cutting holes through the ice with their sharp claws, in order that they may get their heads above the water to breathe,--the seals not being able, as I have told you before, to breathe under water, like fish. They can keep their heads under water about an hour, by closing up their nostrils, so that not a drop can get in; and, during that time, they do not breathe at all; but at last they must find the open sea, or a crack in the ice, or else dig a hole through the ice from below, and thus get their heads to the surface in some way, or they would drown.