Seven Frozen Sailors Part 4

"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 ma.s.s, 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 compa.s.s 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, gla.s.sy 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 ma.s.s, 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 ma.s.s; 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 of the day we found traces of dozens of the great beasts, besides the remains of other great creatures that must have been frozen-in hundreds or thousands of years before; and the place being so wonderfully interesting, the doctor determined to stay there for a few days.

The first thing, under the circ.u.mstances, was to clear the snow away, bank it up round us, and set up the tent in the clear place under the shelter of the big mammoth block.

We all went at it heartily, and as we sc.r.a.ped the snow off, it was to find the ice beneath as clear as gla.s.s.

"Ah!" said the doctor, sitting down and looking on, after feeling the mammoth's tail, knife in hand, as if longing to cut it off, "it's a wonderful privilege, my lads, to come up here into a part of the earth where the foot of man has never trod before!--Eh! what is it?" he cried, for his nephew suddenly gave a howl of dread, dropped the sc.r.a.per he had been using, jumped over the snow heap, and ran off.

"What's he found?" said Scudds, crossing to the place where the young man had been busy sc.r.a.ping, and staring down into the ice. "Any one would think--Oh, lor'!"

He jumped up, and ran away, too, and so did another sailor; when the doctor and I went up to the spot, looked down, and were very nearly following the example set us, for there, only a few inches from us, as if lying in a gla.s.s coffin, was a man on his back, with every feature perfect, and eyes wide open, staring straight at us!

"Wonderful!" exclaimed the doctor.

"Then some one has been here before?" I said.

"The ice must have drifted up," said the doctor. "We are the only men who have penetrated so far. Quick, my lads; we must have him out!"

The boys didn't like the task, and Scudds was almost mutinous; but the doctor soon had us at work, cutting a groove all round the figure; and, after about five hours' chipping, we got out the great block with the figure inside perfect, and laid it down in the sun, which now exercised such power in the middle of the day that the ice began to thaw, just as we awoke to the fact that the cold was nothing like so intense, for the spirit-lamp on being tried burned freely, and the brandy, instead of being like rock, showed signs of melting.

At first the men held aloof from the operation; but after a few words from the doctor, Scudds suddenly exclaimed, "No one shall say as I'm afraid of him!"--and he rolled his eye wonderfully as he helped to pour hot water over the figure, which, far from being ghastly as the ice grew thinner, looked for all the world like one of our own men lying down.

In about twelve hours we had got all the ice clear away, and the fur clothes in which the body was wrapped were quite soft. We were then so tired, that, it being night, the doctor had the figure well wrapped up in a couple of buffalo robes, and, in spite of a good deal of opposition, placed beside him in the tent, and we lay down to rest.

I don't know how long we'd been asleep, for, with the sun shining night and day, it bothers you, but I was awoke by somebody sneezing.

"Uncle's got a fine cold!" said young Smith, who was next to me.

"So it seems!" I said; and then there was another sneeze, and another, and another; and when I looked, there was the doctor, sitting up and staring at the figure by his side, which kept on sneezing again and again. Then, to our horror, it sat up and yawned, and threw its arms about.

Every fellow in the little tent was about to get up and run away, when the frozen sailor said, in a sleepy fashion, "Why, it's as cold as ever!"

I tried to speak, but couldn't. The doctor answered him, though, by saying, "How did you get here?"

"Well," said the figure, drowsily, "that means a yarn; and if I warn't so plaguey sleepy, I'd--Heigho!--ha!--hum!--Well, here goes!"

We sat quite awe-stricken, not a man stirring more than to put a bit of pigtail in his mouth, while the English sailor thus spun his yarn:--

CHAPTER TWO.

THE ENGLISH SAILOR'S YARN.

You see, I haven't the trick of putting it together, or else, I dare say, I could spin you no end of a yarn out of many a queer thing I've come across, and many a queer thing that's happened to me up and down.

Well, yes, I've been wrecked three times, and I've been aboard when a fire's broken out, and I've seen some fighting--close work some of it, and precious hot; and I was once among savages, and there was one that was a kind of a princess among 'em--But there, that's no story, and might happen to any man.

If I were Atlantic Jones now, I could tell you a story worth listening to. Atlantic Jones was made of just the kind of stuff they make heroes out of for story books. He _was_ a rum 'un was J. If I could spin a yarn about anything, it ought to be about him, now. I only wish I could.

Why was he called Atlantic? I can't rightly say. I don't think he was christened so. I think it was a name he took himself. It was to pa.s.s off the Jones, which was not particularly imposing without the first part for the trade he belonged to. He was a play-actor.

I don't think he had ever done any very great things at it before I met with him; anyhow, he was rather down on his luck just then, and shabby-- well, anything nearer rags, and yet making believe to have an air of gentility about it, I never came across. I don't remember ever having a boot-heel brought so directly under my observation which was so wonderfully trodden down on one side. In a moment of confidence, too, he showed me a hole in the right boot-sole that he had worn benefit cards over, on the inside--some of the unsold ones remaining from his last ticket night.

I was confoundedly hard up myself about that time, having just come ash.o.r.e from a trip in one of those coffin-ships, as they call them now.

"Run" they wanted to make out, but it wasn't much of a run, either. The craft was so rotten, there were hardly two planks sticking properly together, and the last man had scarcely got his last leg into the boat, when the whole ricketty rabbit-hutch went down, and only as many bubbles as you could fill a soup-plate with stayed a-top to mark the whereabouts. But the owners wanted to press the charge, and for a while I wanted to lie close, and that's why I came to London, which is a big bag, as it were, where one pea's like another when they're well shaken up in it.

You'll say it was rather like those birds who, when they hear the sportsman coming, dive their heads into the sand, and leave the other three-quarters of them in full view to be shot at, thinking no one else can see it, because they don't happen to be able to see it themselves.

You'll say it was like one of them, for me, a sailor, wanting to keep dark from the police, to go skulking about in waterside taverns and coffee-houses Wapping and Rotherhithe way; well, perhaps it was.

It was at a coffee-house in Wapping I met Atlantic Jones, and he scared me a bit the first time I met him. It wasn't a pretty kind of coffee-house, not one of those you read about in that rare old book, the _Spectator_, where the fops, and dandies, and bloods, "most did congregate," where they "quaffed" and "toasted" in the good old style, which, by the way, must have been somewhat of an expensive old style, and, thank goodness, even some of us third or fourth-raters, nowadays, can spend an odd half-hour or so from time to time very much as the biggest n.o.bs would spend it, though we have but a few silver pieces in our pocket.

To the good old style of coffee-house my fine gentleman, with the brocaded coat-tails, dainty lace ruffles, and big, powdered periwig, would be borne, smoothly (with an occasional jolt or two that went for nothing) in a sedan chair; and on his arrival there, if it were night-time, would call for his wine, his long pipe, his newspaper, and his wax-candles, and sit solemnly enjoying himself, while humbler folks blinked in the dim obscurity surrounding him, for most likely it was not everybody frequenting the place who could afford to be thus illuminated.