by W E Johns
In fascinated horror Ginger watched it go; he saw the damaged wing ‘balloon’ as the air rushed into it; saw it rip off at the roots and follow the rest sluggishly, like a piece of torn paper; saw the fuselage spin faster and faster; saw the half-breed flung off and go plunging down beside it, clutching vainly at the air...
He turned away and fell back weakly into the cabin, limp from reaction now that the danger had passed. He felt no sympathy for the two doomed men in the Weinkel, for the fate that was theirs was what they had intended for those in the Jupiter. The poetic justice of it could not be denied. Dragging himself into his seat he turned a white face to Biggles and saw that he was looking down out of the side window, and the roar of the engine died away. From the angle of the floor he knew that the Jupiter was going down. Following Biggles’s eyes he was just in time to see the Weinkel hit the snow and crumple to a thousand fragments. A great pillar of fire leapt heavenwards.
Biggles turned an expressionless face to Ginger. ‘They got what they asked for,’ he said grimly. ‘It’s no use our risking a landing.’
His hand went to the throttle; his engines burst into their full throated bellow again and the nose of the Jupiter crept up until it was level with the horizon. With the machine levelled out Biggles turned again to Ginger. ‘Good work, laddie,’ he said. ‘You’ll find some hot coffee in the thermos; you look as if you need it.’
Down in a Frozen World
FOR SOME MINUTES neither of them spoke. Ginger literally gulped the hot coffee, for he was so cold that his lips were stiff and numb. Then he began a vigorous massage of his face and hands to restore the circulation.
He did not expect any great praise from Biggles for what he had done; nor did he get any—which did not mean that Biggles did not appreciate it. Biggles himself did whatever circumstances demanded; Algy did the same, and this example Ginger had learned to follow.
At last Biggles spoke. ‘Even now I can hardly believe that McBain would put over a show like that,’ he observed bitterly. ‘I knew he was pretty bad, but I thought there were limits to how far he would go. Well, it’s taught me a lesson. I’ll never move without a machine-gun in future. That devil Sarton deliberately waylaid us. But we had better start looking out for Eskimo Island; we can’t be far off it, but how on earth we are going to tell where it is or which it is I’m dashed if I know. In some silly way I had imagined that we were going to see an island with water round it, but everything seems to be frozen up. Some snow must have fallen, too, so we can’t tell which is land and which is water. Judging by its extent, and the flatness of it, I should say that that’s ice under us now. Those humps ahead should be land, but they may be icebergs frozen into the pack-ice. I don’t know. This is going to be a lot more difficult than I thought. I’m half sorry I started. Keep a sharp look-out; I’m not going to hang about long and risk running out of juice. This sort of landscape gives me the heeby-jeebies.’
Ginger, somewhat restored, caught his breath as he looked down at the scene of appalling desolation and loneliness underneath them. He was about to remark on it, to say that they must be off their course since it was inconceivable that a man should leave civilization with all its comforts for such a dreadful place, when one of the engines spluttered, picked up, and then spluttered again.
Biggles was already turning. ‘A pretty spot for an engine to pack up,’ he muttered viciously. ‘I—’
Whatever he had been going to say was left unsaid, for at that moment the port engine cut out dead. But it was not that alone that caused Ginger’s lips to part in dismay. The other engine was also spluttering.
A horrid suspicion flashed into his mind. Throwing open the narrow door that led into the freight compartment, he darted in, but was back in an instant, face ashen. ‘It’s petrol,’ he cried, in a high-pitched voice. ‘There is petrol everywhere; it’s slopping over everything. One of Chicot’s bullets must have holed the main tank.’
Even as he spoke the second engine, after a sullen backfire, died out. Both propellers stopped, and a weird silence fell, an unnerving silence broken only by the faint whine of the wind over the wings.
Biggles pumped frantically at the hand-pump that filled the gravity tank; but it drew its supply from the main tank, and the main tank was empty. Nothing happened, so he abandoned the useless task and concentrated his attention on bringing the machine down; it was, of course, already gliding towards the frozen wilderness below.
Ginger looked down to see where they were going. In a subconscious way, without actually thinking about it, he was quite certain that they were as good as dead. He did not lose hope easily, particularly since they had found a way out of so many tight corners, but try as he would, he could think of no possible way out of their present dilemma. Suppose Biggles did manage to put the machine down without breaking anything; what then? The only thing that could get them into the air again was petrol, and that was something they would certainly not find where they were going. To walk all the way back to Moose Creek, a matter of four hundred miles, across such country as they had flown over, was so utterly out of the question that he did not even think of it.
The Jupiter continued to sink with that curious floating feeling customary in such cases, accompanied by the usual soft whine of wind blowing past the wings. As they sank lower it grew perceptibly darker, until, near the ground, the plane was moving through a peculiar twilight, dim, yet light enough to see clearly and for a considerable distance.
The need to choose a landing-place did not arise. The ground was all the same, a never-ending expanse of snow in all directions as far as the eye could see; only to the north a jagged ridge—ice or rock, they knew not which—showed clear and hard against a sky of dark, steely blue.
Ginger braced himself as Biggles flattened out to land. He could see no obstruction, but he had a feeling that the dead-flat surface looked almost too good to be true. Again, there was no way of telling if the snow was hard or soft; if it was very soft, then the wheels of the now lowered undercarriage would certainly sink into it and cause the machine to pull up so suddenly that it would inevitably tip up on its nose.
Nothing of that sort happened. The wheels bumped softly, running through the snow with a gentle hissing sound; then, very slowly in the still air, the tail dragged and the machine came to rest.
For a little while neither of them spoke. Biggles yawned and rubbed his eyes. ‘Lord! ‘ he muttered, ‘I’m tired. I could go to sleep easily.’
‘From what I can see of it we shall shortly be going to sleep for a long, long time,’ answered Ginger bitterly. ‘Strewth! What a place! If I’d just woke up I should have thought I was on the moon.’
Biggles grinned. ‘It isn’t exactly what you’d call a hive of activity, is it?’ he said evenly, feeling for his cigarette case. Then, the reek of petrol warning him of the danger of lighting a match where he was, he opened the door and jumped down.
Ginger followed him, noticing that their feet rested on black ice under an inch or two of snow. Looking about him, he was appalled by the stark desolation of the scene. They might have been the only people on earth. The only familiar object he could see was a narrow rim of the sun, blood-red, just showing above the horizon. But it was the silence that affected him most; it seemed to worry the eardrums, and the noises of Biggles’s match, as he struck it to light a cigarette, sounded like a crash.
Biggles nudged his arm. ‘Look! ‘ he said.
Half a mile away two whitish-grey shapes, one large and the other small, were moving in a tireless lope towards the south. Ginger started back in alarm as he recognized them for polar bears, a mother and a cub, but he recovered his composure when he perceived that they took not the slightest notice of them. They might have been accustomed to seeing aeroplanes standing on the ice all their lives. At a perfectly even speed they continued on their way, leaving a faint wake of smoky breath hanging in the air to mark their passage. Presently they seemed to fade into the surrounding gloom, and were seen no more. To Ginger
they seemed like the living spirit of the frozen north, and he shivered as he turned back to Biggles, for the cold was intense.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘what do we do next?’
‘To tell the truth, laddie, I was just wondering,’ replied Biggles. ‘There doesn’t seem to be an awful lot we can do, does there? But we needn’t give up hope. The position may not be so bad as it appears at first sight.’
‘Well, that’s comforting, anyway,’ muttered Ginger. ‘How did you work it out?’
Biggles blew a puff of smoke into the still air before he replied. ‘First of all, we’ve got enough grub inside to last us a long time. I’m afraid it’s going to be a bit tough on Angus if we eat it, but since he is never likely to find us here, and we are unable to find him, we should be fools to starve ourselves to death on that account. We have also got the cabin to sleep in. It isn’t much protection against this perishing cold, but it’s better than nothing.’
‘And when the grub’s all gone?’ prompted Ginger.
‘Don’t be so confoundedly pessimistic,’ Biggles chided him. ‘I haven’t finished yet. As I see it, we’ve got two fairly sound chances. The first is, obviously, that Algy and Wilks will come to look for us in Wilks’s Rockheed. We should hear their machine a great way off in this atmosphere, and if we lit a fire—we could, easily—they could hardly fail to spot it. The place doesn’t exactly bristle with illuminations, as you can see. The second chance is that we shall see or hear something of Angus. We must be somewhere near Eskimo Island, and we must be pretty close to the track he would follow if he started off to meet Mose. Not knowing the facts, he might think that he’d had a mishap, and come looking for him.’
‘That’s true enough,’ acknowledged Ginger. ‘Gosh! It’s cold! I’m going—’ He broke off, staring at the sky. He raised a quivering forefinger. ‘Why—look! There’s a searchlight,’ he cried. ‘It must be Algy. There’s another—three—four—why, there’s a dozen. What the dickens is going on?’
Biggles looked round sharply, then laughed. ‘I’ve never seen it before in my life, but having read about it I should say it’s the aurora borealis.’
Ginger nodded. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think of that. My goodness! Look how the colours change. I could watch it for a long time.’
Biggles grinned. ‘Well, you’ll have plenty of opportunity,’ he observed cheerfully.
‘But that isn’t the aurora borealis, I’ll swear,’ cried Ginger emphatically, pointing in the direction of the distant ridge. ‘That’s a fire, or I never saw one in my life.’
Biggles turned quickly. ‘Where do you mean?’ he asked tersely.
‘Well, that’s funny. It’s gone now,’ said Ginger in a puzzled voice. ‘You see those two extra sharp peaks a little to the right? It seemed to be at the foot of those.’
‘Are you sure you’re not imagining things?’ asked Biggles doubtfully.
‘I’m absolutely certain I saw a light,’ declared Ginger. ‘It just flared up, remained steady for a moment, and then went out again. It was as if somebody had opened the door of a lighted room and then shut it again.’
‘I hope you are right,’ said Biggles. ‘If you are, it can only mean one thing—Angus. It is unlikely that there are two men up here. Those peaks must be Eskimo Island! What a stroke of luck.’
‘What shall we do?’
‘It’s no use staying here,’ answered Biggles. ‘I wonder if Angus is keeping watch for Mose to return. Let’s light a fire. We shall soon get an answer if he spots it, in which case we’ll load up some food and make for the shack. He’ll probably help us to fetch the rest. Come on, let’s get a fire going.’
With some pieces of petrol-soaked rag and packing-paper they soon had a bright fire burning at a safe distance from the machine, all the time watching the steely-blue haze that seemed to hang at the foot of the peaks, obscuring the physical features of the island—if, indeed, it was the island.
Nothing happened. There was no answering flame.
‘He must have gone inside,’ muttered Ginger in a disappointed voice.
‘I should feel happier if I had seen the light myself,’ said Biggles.
‘You can take it from me that there was one,’ returned Ginger.
‘It wasn’t a reflection of the aurora on a piece of ice, or anything like that?’
‘Definitely not. What I saw was yellow lamplight.’
‘All right. I’ll take your word for it. If Angus won’t come to us we had better go to him. It’s not much use staying here.’ Biggles turned towards the machine.
Nothing more was said. They both loaded themselves up with as many of the food boxes as they could conveniently carry, and then set off towards the distant peaks. How far away they were was difficult to judge. Ginger said two miles. Biggles guessed five. As it turned out, he was the nearer of the two, but he was a good deal out in his reckoning.
A Desperate Meeting
‘WELL, I DON’T KNOW, but those hills seem no nearer to me now than when we started.’
It was Biggles who spoke, and they had been walking for a good hour when he made the observation.
Ginger stopped and set his load down on the thin blanket of snow that covered the ice under their feet. ‘I didn’t like to mention it, but I also had noticed that,’ he said, massaging his lips, on which his breath had caused a film of hoarfrost to form. He turned and looked at the Jupiter, standing alone and forlorn at a distance which he would have judged to be not more than half a mile, although he knew from the length of time they had been walking, and the pace, that it could not be less than three miles.
There was just a hint of anxiety in Biggles’s voice when he spoke again. ‘Judging by the distance we must be from the machine, those hills ahead must be ten miles away. Still, it’s no use sitting down; that won’t get us there. Let’s keep going.’
Ginger picked up his luggage again.
Biggles was watching him. ‘What’s the matter—tired?’
‘Just a bit,’ admitted Ginger.
They said no more, but trudged on towards the still distant hills.
Another hour passed.
‘Angus doesn’t seem to be about,’ observed Ginger. ‘I wish he’d show that light again. It would—sort of—cheer one up.’
‘By the clock it’s somewhere about the middle of the night,’ Biggles told him. ‘He’s probably fast asleep in bed.’ He glanced up at the sky.
‘What do you keep looking up at the sky for?’ asked Ginger. ‘That’s the twentieth time you’ve done it.’
‘I was just looking at the stars,’ answered Biggles. ‘It may be my imagination, but it struck me that they weren’t quite so bright as they were.’
Ginger glanced up. ‘They’re not,’ he said shortly. ‘What’s that a sign of?’
‘I don’t know,’ confessed Biggles. ‘I know nothing about the meteorological conditions in this part of the world, but if I was nearer home I should say that there’s snow on the way.’
‘Then we’d better move a bit faster,’ rejoined Ginger. ‘Things won’t look too rosy if we get caught out here in the snow.’
Biggles did not answer, but, picking up his luggage, set off at an increased pace.
At the end of another hour it was apparent that the peaks towards which they were marching were definitely nearer. They could no longer see the Jupiter; it had merged into the vague background.
‘Not much farther,’ said Biggles brightly, taking a surreptitious glance at Ginger, for he had noticed for some time that he was lagging. This did not surprise him, for he, too, was conscious of an increasing weariness.
They toiled on again, both of them dragging their feet through the snow, whereas at first their trail had been clear cut. Biggles took one of the largest parcels from Ginger’s pile and added it to his own. Ginger started to protest, but Biggles silenced him with a word. ‘When in a jam, all pull on the same rope,’ he added. ‘I’m as fresh as when I started.’ This was not strictly true, but Ginger
was too tired to argue. His hands and feet had begun to pain him.
Another half-hour brought them to their objective, and as Ginger looked at it his heart sank. It was darker than when they had started; the world was bathed in a sort of cold blue twilight, dim, yet sufficient to reveal the silent crags that rose straight up from the frozen sea, and formed the coast-line of the solitary island. The silence was unnerving; so profound was it that it seemed to Ginger that it should be possible to hear the stars twinkling. Nothing else moved. All around was a land of death, as devoid of life as the earth must have once been.
Biggles eyed the cliffs with disfavour. ‘I’ve seen more cheerful spots in my time,’ he remarked lightly. ‘We can’t climb that stuff; we’d better walk along the base until we come to a break.’
They set off again, now following the foot of the cliff, and soon afterwards came to a gigantic gorge, like a vast split in the rock’s face. It was not very wide, but the sheer walls were nearly a thousand feet in height, so that the airmen, as they stood at the entrance, looked like two microscopic insects in comparison.
Biggles regarded the chasm doubtfully. Nothing moved. Not a bush or a blade of grass grew; only, here and there, on the rock, a sort of grey lichen or moss. Not a sound broke the eerie silence but their laboured breathing. ‘It doesn’t seem possible that a human being would willingly exist in such a dreadful place as this,’ he said quietly. ‘But in the absence of any other way into the island, this must be—what did Mose call it?—Muskeg Bend. If it is, is the shack on the top or at the bottom? Well, I suppose we might as well go in a little way; we can always come back if we find we are wrong.’
