On a Torn-Away World Part 28

"Don't care if I did," replied Jack. "See yonder!"

The others followed the direction of his pointing arm with their gaze.

Off beyond the headlands at the mouth of the river rose a column of thick black smoke. It was as big a smoke as though some great forge or factory was working overtime in that direction.

"Hurrah!" cried Mark, re-echoing his chum's delight.

The entire party was delighted. Yet not knowing who the people were who made the smoke, nor under what circ.u.mstances they would find them, the dead sea lions were packed aboard the sleds before they continued their way down the river.

"That smoke lies a good way beyond the mouth of the river," said Phineas Roebach. "I believe it is on the sea."

"A vessel afire?" proposed Mark.

"It's a fire on a vessel," said the professor, suddenly. "I believe that is the smoke of the trying-out works on a whaler."

"You've hit it, Professor," agreed Andy Sudds. "It's a whaler for sure.

There's more than _you_, Phineas, hunting for oil up in these regions."

"A whaling ship on this island in the air," murmured Jack. "What will they do with the whale oil? They will never get back to San Francisco again."

"We do not know that," said the scientist, gravely.

The last few miles, during which they could not see beyond the high ice-shod banks of the estuary, were traversed slowly enough. They all grew anxious to know what the column of black smoke meant.

Finally they came to the open mouth of this branch of the river. The sight they beheld almost stunned them.

Instead of an ocean, rolling up in great surges upon the beach on either hand, they beheld a vast sink through which the partly ice-bound river crawled as far as the eye could see. They knew that this was the old bed of the Arctic Ocean; but the waters of that cold sea had receded and left little but ice-bound pools here and there.

"Fo' de goodness gracious sake!" cried Wash. "Does yo' mean ter try ter mak' me beliebe dat disher place is whar' de great an' omniverous ocean once rolled? Dat de hugeous salt sea broke its breakers on dem ice-bound sh.o.r.es? Git erlong, chile! Yo' is tryin' ter bamboozle me, suah."

"That is where the Arctic Ocean rolled, all right," growled Phineas Roebach. "I can swear to that. I have been here before. Something has certainly happened to it."

"I declare!" chuckled Jack Darrow, who could not miss the joke, despite the seriousness of their situation. "Somebody has removed the ocean without permission." Behind a great fortress of rock which had once been an island they saw the same column of smoke. But it was something nearer to them on the bed of the Arctic sea that more particularly attracted their attention.

"Look at that thing! That monster!" cried Mark, pointing.

"And there is another!" shouted Jack.

"Whales!" yelled the excited Andy Sudds. "Those are whales as sure as shooting--there's a school of them here."

And they had no more than made this discovery when a party of men, all dressed in furs and some dragging great sleds behind them, came out from behind the pile of rocks which had certainly once been an island in the ocean.

These new-comers did not see our heroes and their friends, but they approached the whale stranded nearest to the rocks. This huge leviathan, like all the others of the herd, was long since dead. The men attacked him with blubber-saws and axes and began to cut him up in a most workmanlike manner.

"A whaling ship, sure enough," declared Professor Henderson, who seemed the least astonished by these manoeuvres. "We will be among friends soon. And we will hope that the ship--despite the fact that her crew has come whaling ash.o.r.e,--will have her keel in deep water." The party ran their sleds ash.o.r.e on the right bank of the river at its old mouth.

Then they started at a round pace for the spot in the old bed of the ocean where the crew of the whaler were cutting up their prize.

CHAPTER XXVIII

ON THE WHALING BARK

It was several miles from the brink of what had once been the polar sea to the spot where the whalers were at work. Jack Darrow, Mark Sampson, and their friends found it a difficult way to travel too.

Naturally they had abandoned the sleds. The ice on the stream which flowed out of this mouth of the Coleville River was so broken that they could no longer use it as a highway. The bottom of what had once been the ocean was only partly ice-covered. There were enormous rocks to climb over, or to find a path around. Reefs and ledges reared their heads fifty feet and more high. There were sinks, too, in the floor of the old ocean; but these were mostly covered with ice.

The Arctic Ocean must have receded at the time of the upheaval which had flung this island into the air so rapidly that many of the sea's denizens, beside the school of whales, could not escape.

Here, in one big pool, lay frozen in the ice a monster white shark.

It had battered itself to death against the rocks in trying to escape.

Through yonder blow-hole in another pool there suddenly appeared an enormous bewhiskered head, with great tusks like the drooping mustache of a soldier.

"A walrus!" exclaimed Jack, recognizing the creature.

"And yonder are seals playing in the open pool," said Mark.

"These pools, or lakes, are still of salt water," said the professor, thoughtfully. "Ah! what would I not have given to have been on that headland yonder at the moment the ocean went out."

"Not me! Not me!" cried Phineas Roebach. "I'd gone completely off my head then, for fair--I know I would!"

"Mr. Roebach is not quite sure now that he isn't suffering from some form of insanity," said Jack, chuckling.

"Den it suah is too bad dat we nebber kin fin' dat chrisomela bypunktater plant ter cure him wid," declared Washington White, dolefully.

"But, by the piper that played before Pharaoh!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Phineas Roebach, at last brought to a point where he _had_ to admit that no reasonable explanation would fit the conditions confronting them, "tell me this: What has become of the Arctic Ocean?" "You can search me!" drawled Jack. "I can a.s.sure you, Mr. Roebach, that I haven't seen it. Have you got it, Mark?"

"The question of what has become of this great sea which once washed the sh.o.r.e we are now leaving," said Professor Henderson, seriously, "is a remarkably interesting one. The ocean may have merely receded for a few miles at the time of the volcanic eruption and earthquake which threw off this new planet."

Phineas Roebach shook his head at this, but said nothing.

"It may be," pursued Mr. Henderson, "that that part of our old world that was shot into s.p.a.ce did not include much of this Arctic sea. We may find beyond here," pointing, as he spoke, ahead, "instead of the receded ocean, no ocean at all. We cannot believe that this island in the air is spherical like our own old earth. It is a ragged form which will show on what we may call the _under_ side the very convolutions and scars made by its breaking away from the old earth. Do you get my meaning?"

"Yo' suttenly is a most liquid speaker, Perfesser," declared Washington White. "Yo' was sayin' dat w'en disher new planet broke off de earf, she slopped over de whole Arctic Ocean."

"Perhaps that puts it quite as simply," said Professor Henderson, smiling grimly. "The ocean 'slopped over'. It was either left behind to partly fill the cavity left by the departure of this torn-away world we are living on, or it has receded into the valleys and sinks upon the other side of this small planet."

Phineas Roebach threw up both hands and groaned.

"It's as clear as mud!" he cried. "I don't understand a thing about it."

But the old professor went on without heeding him, knowing that his pupils, Jack and Mark, were deeply interested in the mystery of this torn-away world, or island in the air.

"It is a moot question whether or not the weight of the water which lay in this vast sink, before the eruption, was not needed, and is not needed right now, for the balancing of this tiny planet we are living on. Nature adjusts herself to every change more quickly than human intelligence. How much of the crust of the earth, extending up into the polar regions, was broken away from our old world, we do not know.

But that it is now perfectly balanced we can have no doubt--that balance is proved by the fact of the regularity of the recurrence of night and day."

These and many other observations Professor Henderson spoke as the party continued its rugged advance over the more or less dry bottom of the ocean. In two hours the party was observed by the crew of the whaler at work on the carca.s.s of the great whale. The sailors signaled to them, and when the boys and their friends drew near, some of the whalemen ran forward to welcome them.