by Garret Smith
Now and then a luckless one recoiled from the mass and fell on the ice, dead or sorely wounded from a spear-thrust. Several times a contending pair separated from the main group and fought an exchange of wild lance-thrusts until one or the other fell. The victor paused long enough to strip the fur garment from the fallen adversary and fasten it around his own waist as a trophy.
But gradually the fighting ceased as one by one the savages got what they fought for, a part of the beast’s carcass. Each successful one retired with his booty to a little distance, and, squatting on their haunches, began eating a chunk of the raw flesh, tearing it greedily with his teeth, a process you can well imagine was a nauseating one to us fastidious vegetarians watching from the ship. I know I was sick with mingled horror and fear.
“They’re human beings, no doubt,” said Hunter in a rather shaky voice at my elbow, “but they are of very low intelligence. They seem to have only the instinct to kill and feed. They are too stupid even to notice us so far. We must get out of here before they do take notice. We have no weapons, and know nothing of fighting. They’d slaughter every man of us for our clothing.”
He rushed into the cabin to start the ship’s motor. I saw at once that there was little chance of our extricating ourselves.
In a hurry from the pocket into which we had drifted just before our attention had been diverted by the savages. One side of the vessel was now crowded firmly against the margin of the very ice-field on which the savages held their ghastly feast. All about her were quantities of floating pieces of ice that were every moment wedging more tightly into our narrow, blind channel, and already beginning to freeze together into a solid sheet.
We were in a critical position. I doubted not that these strangely nonchalant savages had noted at a distance, even before we saw them, that we could not escape and intended to ignore us until they had eaten their fill. In no other way could I explain their strange indifference to our presence. After the exhibition we had just witnessed, what possible mercy could we expect from them?
With our very lives staked on the ship’s response to her driving feet, we waited breathlessly for the first sound of the motor.
It came, and the powerful feet churned and ground at the ice. Our gaze was bent over the rail upon the channel’s margin in hope of some sign of progress. But none came. Instead, after a moment there was a crash within the bowels of the ship and the motor stopped altogether. The strain of fighting the ice had proven too much, and one of the main shafts had finally parted.
We lay absolutely at the mercy of the savages. And at the same instant it seemed evident that the quality of their mercy was to put to the test.
For just as the motor broke down they seemed suddenly aroused by the sounds from our vessel and taking note of our presence for the first time. As one man, they dropped their filthy food, seized their spears, and leaped to their feet. For a moment they stood tensely silent, as if listening.
Then one gave a low cry, as of direction. They turned our way and in grim silence began advancing upon us with set spears, as we had seen them but a little time ago closing in on the doomed beast.
We watched them in hypnotized horror while they advanced a matter of twenty paces, those dead men’s faces becoming every instant more distinct and more gruesome.
And then we realized all at once what had lent the crowning horror to those faces.
Not one of them had eyes!
INSTINCTIVELY our ship’s company drew around Hunter in desperate, wordless hope that somehow he had foreseen this peril and was prepared to save us from these eyeless and ruthless fiends.
But for once our leader seemed without foreknowledge and without inspiration. While that uncanny semicircle of blind murderers advanced another twenty paces, he stood clutching the rail, studying the hideous faces as if in those blank masks he might find an answer to his problem.
“If I had only a little time!” he groaned. “I should have been prepared for this!”
An age it seemed to us before we saw his eyes light with a flash of hope.
“We’ll try the gong,” he whispered. “It may scare them off. If I can gain a little time, we will be safe.”
He stepped swiftly into the motor-cabin, turned on the electric gong-control, and the harsh, melancholy clamor tore the air.
It seemed for a moment that this might have the desired effect. At the first clang of the heavy hammer the oncoming horde recoiled as if from a blow in their sightless faces. A few turned to flee, but stopped some paces back and stood, heads bent toward us as though concentrating their sense of hearing in an effort to analyze the strange tumult.
But evidently creatures who so recklessly faced violent death in search of food and in haphazard quarrels over its possession were not to be greatly dismayed at mere clamor, however unfamiliar.
Again the guttural order from one of their members who seemed to be a leader. The line stiffened at once. The half-fearful ones returned to their places. The slow, silent and relentless advance against our devoted company was resumed. However they might fly at each other’s throats in dividing prey once won, they evidently acted in concert while stalking it.
At that our nerves snapped. Panic seized us. Our only thought was flight, we knew not where, or much cared. The darkness of the open ice-fields seemed for the moment a welcome refuge.
But the side of the ship away from the savages, over which we would have instinctively fled, lay next to the channel whose surface of loose ice offered no footing. As it was, many of our company would have leaped blindly into this freezing flood and perished had not some few of the cooler heads among us recovered a little self-possession in time to realize this danger and herded them over the opposite rail.
There was still a considerable open space left between us and the fast advancing foe, and there was time to slip around the end of the blind line, if we did not betray ourselves to their marvelously acute sense of hearing, which seemed largely to replace sight. We counted on the noise of the gong to cover our movements.
Weaver and I were among the last to leave. We realized simultaneously that Hunter was still in the cabin, probably unconscious of the fact that his company were deserting the ship. We called to him frantically, and getting no answer, rushed in after him.
He was working calmly but quickly over his motor controls.
“Come!” I shouted. “They’re almost on us! The rest have gone!”
“Gone! Where?” he demanded.
“Out on the ice. We’ve just time. Come!”
“Call them back! Call them back!” he ordered excitedly. “I’ll have the ship out in another moment.”
But our taut nerves would brook no further dallying. We seized him between us without ceremony and, despite his indignant protests, dragged him bodily over the ship’s side.
He thanked us afterward for this show of mutiny, for so little margin of safety remained that we nearly brushed against the vile creatures at the end of the line as we stole trembling out of the closing trap.
Once, our uncertain footing was near to betraying us. Our feet had never before tested this treacherous frozen field, and we made sorry work of our effort to step without sound. Slipping, stumbling, again and again, one or more of us falling prone, we made our way till the last of us had nearly passed beyond immediate danger. Weaver was a pace behind Hunter and myself as we rounded the end of the savage line.
I heard a muffled thud behind me and turned to see Weaver lying full length on his back. His feet had slipped from under him suddenly, and he must have struck full on the back of his head, for he lay as if half stunned.
That fact saved his life. For even as I looked back, one of the blind savages at the end of the line, scarce three paces away, halted abruptly and bent a sensitive ear toward the spot where Weaver had fallen. Then, with spear upraised, he felt, his way shufflingly over the ice directly toward our prostrate companion. The fellow’s head was bent forward inquiringly and his thick, brutal nostrils dilated as he sniffed
the air like a wild beast. Even in my fright I noted that the sense of smell also aided the hearing in replacing the missing eyesight.
He had almost stepped on Weaver when he halted and drove his spear out with a short, powerful stroke. Had Weaver gained his feet promptly he would have been thrust clean through.
As it was, his daze left him Just as the savage struck. He rolled over, and before his assailant could locate him more definitely he had crawled on hands and knees out of his reach.
Again the great gong clanged, and while its reverberations still echoed and reechoed, we scurried away and halted only when we reached a point where the lights of our ship no longer illuminated the ice sufficiently to make further progress safe.
There we stood, a shuddering, panic-stricken group, waiting breathlessly to see what fate awaited our vessel.
By now the horde had reached it. In the very presence of the booming gong they suffered another fit of trepidation. Presently, however, they regained assurance, and one after another pressing forward, struck the side of the ship and felt it seriously. They thrust their spears at it as though they thought it might be some manner of beast. They poked their noses against it speculatively.
At length, one by chance touched the ladder by which we had made our escape and called excitedly to his fellows. They crowded around him, each feeling of this mysterious affair and discussing it excitedly.
AT length one bold spirit seized hold and cautiously mounted it till he stumbled over the rail on to the deck. Then he shouted volubly to those below, till one after the other the rest followed his example. Presently the whole crew were defiling the vessel with their filthy presence. We could see them prowling about from deck to deck, shouting excitedly at each new discovery.
“I have a scheme,” exclaimed Hunter suddenly. “Some of the bodies of those devils may not have been plundered. If so, some of us will put on their clothing, borrow their spears and steal back aboard ship. Then we’ll feel like one of them if any of them touch one of us, and those clothes ought to give us the right odor, too.
Maybe we can maneuver them below decks, and lock them in. Anyhow, we’ll have something to fight with.”
In a few moments we had found the spot where the fight had occurred, marked all too plainly by a welter of congealed blood, scattered fragments of the great beast, and the stripped bodies of the slain.
Controlling our squeamishness with an effort, we searched all about, but found only one body that had been overlooked, though there were a number of spears scattered here and there.
Hunter distributed the spears among those of us in whose untried physical prowess he had most confidence, and appropriated the dead savage’s furs for himself.
These strange garments he drew on over his own, and announced, to our consternation, that he would go alone aboard the vessel—we amateur spearmen to gather at the foot of the ladder, ready to rush to the rescue if he was beset.
We protested loudly and unanimously against such foolhardiness on his part, declaring that we might better rush the decks in a body, or at least that one of the rest of us should take the risk he proposed shouldering. We pointed out, too, that it would go hard with us should our leader be lost at this critical point. We all but resorted to physical force a second time to restrain him. But he remained firm.
“If we cannot save the ship we are lost, anyhow,” he insisted. “I stand the best chance of saving it.”
With that he led the way back to the vessel without further argument. With sick hearts we watched him disappear among the motley, wrangling horde.
Moment after moment passed, each seeming an age. At the ladder’s foot we stood tensely grasping our unfamiliar weapons and ready to dash into practically hopeless conflict.
Our uneasiness had increased to the point where we could not much longer restrain ourselves when suddenly our attention was diverted in most unexpected and startling fashion.
Somewhere far off to the left, outside the reach of our lights, came a resounding crash. Even as we looked at each other aghast, the ice-field heaved under our feet. A great wave of water tore down the channel amid a roar of grinding ice. Our vessel was torn from its mooring against the ice-field and swept out into mid-channel. The wave overran the ice where we stood, drenching us waist deep with its icy flood.
From the direction whence this terrific disturbance started one of those towering ice mountains floated majestically into sight, drifting slowly but relentlessly down the channel, throwing back the ice-field on either side like a powerful flow tossing up soft soil.
Directly in its path lay our crippled vessel and heroic leader.
Powerless now to aid him, we turned and fled from the heaving margin of the channel. We had run perhaps a hundred paces when without an instant’s warning the lights of the vessel went out, and the gong ceased ringing. We stopped in our tracks, in the grip of complete despair.
There we were in total darkness on an unstable field of ice in the heart of the region of endless night, without ship and without leader, the unthinkable cold biting our drenched bodies to the bone.
GRADUALLY the thundering and crashing of breaking ice died away. The dizzy heavings of slippery flooring subsided.
Now we stood huddled together in the blackness, listening breathlessly for some sound in the direction of the channel to lend us hope that our ship and its master still survived, but in vain.
Absolute, deathly silence reigned!
The men about me began to stir nervously, to chafe their numbed limbs, as much as anything to break the awful spell of the soundless and sightless world.
Now and then I caught a hushed word, but for the most part we were restrained by the horror of the darkness. We knew not what monstrous thing might be drawn our way by any careless sound.
We were for the moment as helpless as a herd of panic-stricken domestic animals left without keeper.
Presently I heard Weaver murmuring my name and, working around the group, guided by each other’s voices, we soon got together and withdrew a little from the rest.
Weaver was a capable seaman and a man of resourcefulness used to directing men. He had joined the expedition as master mariner and first lieutenant to Hunter.
From the first moment I had laid eyes on him during the demonstration in the market-place, he had appealed to me strongly. Ere our ship had been three sleeps on its way, we had become friends.
Now that, with Hunter’s removal, the responsibility for the company rested on his shoulders, he naturally turned to me for council. It was not, I must confess, because I was of any real value as an advisor in, time of emergency, but because in his perplexity he felt the need of a confidant.
“I’m afraid there is nothing we can do, Scribner, but wait for the end,” he admitted. “We have no food or shelter or light, and no chance of getting them. We can’t survive long. I am a man of action only. When it comes to carefully worded speech, that is your craft. So I am going to give you the task of breaking to our comrades, as gently as possible, the facts of our situation, and prepare them to face death calmly. They are a brave company, or they would not be here, but their nerves are shaken by what they have just been through, as I confess are mine.”
“I am myself certainly in no better frame of mind than the rest,” I admitted, “but I’ll talk as courageously as possible.”
So I got the ear of the company and stated Weaver’s conclusions.
“Strange things have happened, however, in this bewildering place, since we entered it,” I added in conclusion. “It may be, then, that some miracle may save us. So let’s not despair as long as we breathe, but be ready to take advantage of such fortunate chance if it occurs.”
This last remark was sheer bravado, and I think it was recognized as such by the comrades.
A murmur of comments followed my speech, then all fell silent again. Even our uneasy movements ceased for the time being.
The biting air hung motionless. Not a sound came out of the darkness.
; I, for one, was offering prayer to the Over Spirit, and I knew instinctively that every member of our band was doing likewise.
Presently I was conscious that I had ceased praying and was listening again, my whole soul concentrated in my ears, searching out the uttermost depths of that black, horrible quiet.
It was as though all the universe had been blotted out save one little island of absolute, lifeless cold, to which our lost souls clung for a brief moment, before we, too, merged with the silence and became nothing.
I felt that I must hear some sound from without or lose my reason.
And then it came!
At first I could not be sure but that it was a trick of my overwrought fancy.
A little back of me, I seemed to hear it, a faint shuffling as of padded feet. My first thought, when I became convinced that I had really heard a sound, was that I was listening to one of our own party moving about, and that I had lost my bearings. For I had not realized that I had turned around while talking to Weaver, and I supposed the rest of our group were directly in front of me, so near that I could reach out and touch them.
I started to turn toward the sound when, somewhere off to the right this time, I heard it again. Then, as I listened in bewilderment, it came from somewhere in front of me, and was immediately repeated off to the left.
“Weaver,” I whispered, “did you hear that? Are our men going mad with this, and scattering? Weaver!”
But no answer came from Weaver. I called again a little louder, but again without reply.
Weaver and I had been talking shoulder to shoulder only a moment before, his hand resting on my arm. I had not heard him move away.
Wondering at his failure to reply now, I reached out to touch him, but encountered nothing. Thinking still that I might be confused as to direction, I turned slowly about with hand outstretched. Then I turned in a timid circle, still feeling the empty air.
