CHAPTER XV
SHAGUN
Facing a storm, a vessel at sea would have reefed sails and laid low forthe blow. But on this great elongated gas bag, there was nothing toreef. She could only turn tail and race the wind for her life.
Telegraph orders, rushed from control-room to engine quarters, broughtthe huge dirigible up short, rearing and plunging like a frightenedsteed. At touch of the engineers, the marvelous mechanism of drive-shaftand bevel gear tilted each propeller on its axis to throw the ship intoreverse and back it around. For so huge a bulk, she wheeled in hertracks with amazing speed.
There was need of speed!
Even in that short time while receiving the wirelessed warning out ofthe air and plunging into retreat, great banks of cloud had rearedthemselves on the horizon, looming black and sinister. With everypassing moment they rolled up, darker, heavier. With awful menace, agreat droning roar filled the air.
The Nardak was turning back on the very fringes of an onrushing stormthat seemed to leap out of the nowhere.
With a rumble the wind-clouds loosed their first furious gusts in a ragethat tore the clouds themselves into a jagged pattern. Ragged openingsgave vistas into the still more fearful storm that they had masked!
Through the barrage of thunderheads burst a three-headed tornado, threehuge twisting wind-spouts that seemed to reach from earth to sky.Writhing, speeding, twisting across the sky, they pursued the Nardaklike great devouring serpents. Devourers they were! Terrific windvelocity within those whirling storms could pluck the hair from thehuman head, could tear a man limb from limb, could wrench a greatairship into shreds and splinters.
With a rush and a roar, forerunners of the storm seemed to burst uponthe Nardak from all quarters, seemed bound to beat the great hulk intosubmission.
Gone was the smooth, swift gliding with which the Nardak had sweptnorthward for more than a thousand miles. In the fury of the gale, thehuge ship of the air rocked and plunged. Everything not built in orlashed into place was flung crashing about the hull. Lee Renaud andCaptain Jan were careened together and then dashed to the floor andflung hither and yon in a welter of broken furnishings.
"Is it the--the end? Will she capsize?" Lee managed to shout to CaptainJan.
"Heavy ballast--can't turn over. This pounding within, without, that'sthe danger." Even as Captain Jan spoke, came a thunderous crash offalling objects within the hull. "The struts--if they break, they'llslash the bags like knives!"
Like some hunted wild animal, the Nardak plunged on her way, riding theconstantly changing air currents, sweeping on the edges of the storm,dodging between gales, by a miracle of maneuvering never letting herselfbe completely swallowed in the maw of the storm monster.
Behind her, three snaky wind-spouts came together with a concussion thatrocked sky and earth. In the twinkling of an eye, the face of the landwas changed. Trees, boulders, a whole cliff were swept upward andreduced to powder in the grinding crush of the winds. A great air wave,like some tidal wave of the sea, flung the huge Nardak high as though itwere a bit of chaff, sucked it earthward to almost scrape the ground.
Then, as swiftly as it had roared into being, the tempest died away. Thewind muttered and rumbled low, and dropped into a strange calm.
For a little space the airship hung in this calm, quivering andtrembling like some spent runner that has barely survived a terrificrace.
By degrees, the apathy of exhaustion passed from the crew. Battered andbruised, with strained, white faces, the men rallied from theirterrifying experience and began to take up their tasks.
With apparent serenity, the Nardak went on her way. But in many andvaried places, men labored to repair the damages of the storm. Thethrashings of a broken strut had ripped the tough cloth-and-membranelining of one gas bag. It was a total loss--a loss that reduced thelifting power of the dirigible, but did not cripple the ship to anyappreciable extent. The builders had allowed an overplus of helium tomeet such an emergency. Much more alarming was the discovery of a defectin the propeller shaft and the flapping of wind-torn fabric on the portstabilizer fin.
Because Lee Renaud was cool-headed, as well as young and active, he tookhis part in the emergency repair work that now must be done.
There was no halting of the great dirigible on her flight. She simplywent into reverse, pointed her nose to the northwest, and took up herstorm-broken course once more. If possible, she must keep to herscheduled time of going into the Arctic. For the Arctic summer mightlast two months, and it might last only a week or so. Arctic summermeans a slight melting of snow in wind-swept valleys, means blackup-thrust of rock and cliff here and there where the snow-cap hasslipped. It is in this brief period, the only time when the contour ofthe terrain of this ice-locked land is even slightly exposed, thatgeologist and scientist and gold prospector must make their swift searchfor the treasure held in Arctic rocks.
So without ever slowing down, much less landing, the Nardak held to hercourse, while men, like tiny midgets, crawled perilously over her hull,within and without. In the crowded quarters of a motor gondola,mechanics repaired and replaced a propeller, all in the space of fourhours. That was a hot and heavy task. But the real danger came to thoseworkers suspended in a sort of harness against the outside of the greatdirigible to repair its dismantled fin, while the giant ship held to herspeed and to her height of a thousand meters in the air.
Young Renaud was one of those who let themselves be swung in a net ofropes between heaven and earth, while they plied great needles in thelatest thing in "dressmaking," seamstering for a new garment for thestabilizer fin. The tattered condition of the fabric of the port fin wasevidence of the suck and pull of the storm she had grazed. More than athird of it hung in shreds. Armed with a huge needle and a cord threadthat billowed in the wind, Lee did his share of sewing blankets intoplace as patching material on the exposed framework. This would have todo till the dirigible made her landing at that last outpost ofcivilization, Shagun Post on Hudson Bay.
As the repair crew made its way up dizzy aerial ladders, back to thesafety of the interior of the hull, and walked down the long catwalkthat led between rows of fuel tanks, Lee ran his hand through hisupstanding black hair and laughingly remarked, "Whew! I'm hunting amirror. Want to see how many gray hairs I got, swinging out there inthat hundred-mile breeze. From the way my knees still tremble, bet it'sall--"
"Ha-ooo! Ha-ooo! Ha-ooo!" A strange pitiful wail changed Lee's jokinginto an astonished gasp.
It was a wail that came up from the dim, lattice-work shadows of theship's bottom, some sixty-odd feet below.
"Man overboard--I mean, lost in-board!" someone shouted.
"Must've gone down from the walk here, in the plunge of the storm. Awonder he can still holler, after being hung down there all this time!"said Olof Valchen.
"Ropes!"
"Down the ladder there!"
"We're coming!"
A jumble of shouts echoed through all parts of the ship.
Lee was one of the first men to go swinging down a long narrow ladderinto the shadowy interlacing of beams and girders. Above the catwalkwere lights, but down here was semi-darkness, and a maze of struts thatmust be threaded.
The thin wailing guided him. The gleam of his pocket flashlight glintedon a pair of eyes far below.
Then he was there, all the way to the ship's bottom, and touching hishands to a body wedged between girders. As Lee's hands made contact, hegasped at what he found. And Olaf Valchen, who was the next man to getthere, echoed his gasp.
Then the two of them, sung out: "We've got the rope on! Haul away!"
What the men on the planking far above hauled up to safety and a placein the friendly glow of lights, was no man at all, but Yiggy, the littledog. A battered and banged-up Yiggy, but all there and very much alive,as the wagging of his stub of a tail indicated.
* * * * *
Wireless calls be
gan coming in to the Nardak from the distant north."What has happened? You are overdue here already!" These calls were fromthe radio operator at Shagun, the wilderness settlement that would bethe dirigible's only halting place on its way to the Arctic.
A relay of supplies had been shipped here, the end of both railroad andcivilization. The Nardak was to take them aboard so as to enter upon thelast lap of her journey as fully fueled and provisioned as possible.
Seven hours behind her schedule, the great silver Nardak drifted intothe sky above Shagun.
The boom of guns and the lighting of a line of signal fires greeted her.These were to call together a landing-crew to lend their aid in bringingto earth the first dirigible ever seen in these parts.
For a time, the Nardak hung motionless, then by the use of movableplanes and sliding weights, by which the center of gravity was shifted,she slowly began to nose down towards earth.
Waiting in a spreading, wedge-shaped formation were two long lines ofnearly a hundred men. Not nearly so many were really needed. But everyhusky denizen of Shagun wanted to have a hand at manning the pull ropesof this monster visitor. Slowly the great ship of the air was drawn toearth in the vast clearing which Lomen Larsen, the Factor of the ShagunPost, had prepared ahead of time for the reception of the sky ship.Here, of course, was no cement landing field and ironringed cement poststo receive mooring ropes, but the ground had been smoothed, and treesserved as mooring posts.
As Lee stepped off the ship, he felt that he had stepped off into theLand of Contrasts. Here at Shagun ended the shining lines of steel railsover which traveled the mighty engines and loaded cars of the GreatNorthern. And here at Shagun began primitive transportation by birchbarkcanoe, shoulder-pack and dog-sled by which necessities were carried oninto the North. Bearded white men, Indians, a few slant-eyed Eskimoswith cotton garments of civilization donned incongruously atop theirnative furs, moved along the trails and in and out the low-roofed logshacks. And above these primitive folk loomed the high aerial and mightymasts of a modern powerful radio sending station!
But not for Lee Renaud, nor for anyone else of the expedition, was theremuch time to stand day-dreaming over the strangeness of the long arm ofradio reaching out to touch this primitive settlement on the Arcticfringes. For it seemed the great Nardak landed in her open-air dock oneminute, and the next the work of loading her new cargo and of furtherrepairing began.
Men fell to with a vim. Men learned in geology and meteorology donneddungarees and entered upon a brand-new career of stevedoring. Aperspiring aerial photographer and an equally perspiring slant-eyedEskimo tugged a huge box to the hold opening. Indian trappers and theengineers of the latest thing in air engines labored together at themountain of bales and barrels and tanks to be put aboard. A dozen timesYiggy escaped his quarters and rushed joyously underfoot to enterbattle-royal with shaggy sled huskies that could swallow him at amouthful--and a dozen times Yiggy had to be rescued from battle, murderand sudden death.
Muscles ached, but men joked and bantered and worked all the harder.Then at last it was all aboard--eight hundred pounds of oil, seven tonsof gasoline, a thousand pounds of chocolate, pemmican, coffee and hardbiscuit, which were to provision this great adventure.
Ground lines were loosed, the Nardak rose slowly. A clamorous ovationsaluted her from the watchers. Shouts rose in four different languages,the bell of the little log mission clanged its farewell. Lomen Larsentouched off a row of powder-flares in a final uproarious salute.
Higher and higher rose the Nardak, then sped northward on her last greatstretch of flight.
What would happen in this unexplored land? Only the future could answer.