3

A PUZZLE FOR DRAKE

"While we are waiting for Hansen," the Captain resumed, "I may as well tell you how he collected his photographs. As the blundering idiot will probably manage to lose himself between the gate and the back door, I have plenty of time."

"Is your mate Hansen so stupid as you make out?" Edith asked with genuine interest. "If so he must be worth studying."

"Stupider, Miss Lane. You never met his equal for cracked theorizing. Well, let us leave him to find his way here and get on with our business. I'll tell you what I want from you, doctor, when I reach the end of my story."

"Although you may not be aware of the fact," Dr. Lane replied shrewdly, "you have already told me. You want me to foot the bill for an expedition to track down those new oil fields in your name. Well, it's all right with me. I'll take the fossils and anything else in that line and you can have the oil. Convince me that I should go in heavily and you need have no worry about finances."

"Hansen's pictures will put the finishing touches to what I begin. Well, except for one thing, the morning after the shakeup was just like any other perfectly clear South Polar calm. The sea was still covered with heavy black oil to a depth of several feet. Only a long, even swell heaved it gently up and down in billows a mile long.

"During the night I had ordered the fires drawn. We dared take no chances with the oil-soaked decks and rigging. With the first light the mate and I got the men out to clean up the mess. We drove them like niggers to keep their minds off the oil. It wouldn't do when we reached port to have them blabbing to the first shark they met. Later we decided to take the whole crew in on the scheme. They are to get a third share of all profits if they keep their mouths shut. That seems to be the only safe way. They're as mum as clams.

"All that day we sweated to get the worst of the oil off or covered up so it wouldn't be noticed when we reached civilization. By nightfall we had done a pretty thorough job. I decided to explain the oil-soaked hull by saying it was an idea of Hansen's to use crude oil instead of paint as a weather defier. It sounds just like one of his theories.

"The next question was how to swim out of the soup. With steam up of course it would have been easy. But the mate and I agreed—for once—that it would be a fool's trick to start any kind of a fire. The air reeked of natural gas and oil fumes. A spark, and the whole sea would be hell. There was nothing for it but to trust to the sails. By dark we were fully rigged and whistling for the breeze.

"It came like a thunderclap from seven directions at once. All in all that was the worst blow I have weathered through in twenty years of dirty squalls from the equator to Cape Horn. The mate of course had a theory to account for the suddenness of the hurricane. Like most of his efforts it came five minutes late. I'll tell you of it presently.

"For the moment I didn't give a damn for theories, being more interested in trying to save our masts. Except for a few whistling ribbons like rags on a clothesline the sails were gone. The filthy black oil broke over the decks in buckets and hogsheads, smothering us whenever we attempted to make a line fast. All our deck tackle went by the board, knocked clean off the plates by the sledge-hammer kicks of the heavy pitch.

"After the first mad wrench the hurricane settled down to a steady, snoring gale from the north. The ship drove dead ahead for the ice barrier a hundred and twenty miles south of us. Nothing was to be done. We could only sit tight for the smash. Unless the wind fell we should ram the ice cliffs full tilt some time between midnight and dawn. The wind held.

"Tired of holding his breath, Hansen suggested that all hands join in prayer. He is always at it, before meals, at meals and after meals. I told him to go to hell and took the wheel out of his lily white hands. In the howling uproar he misunderstood the order. Evidently he thought I wished him to hold chapel in the forecastle. Anyway there is where I found him at daybreak with half the crew bellowing Norwegian hymns to beat the devil.

"Toward midnight I first noticed a cherry colored glow coming and going in the sky ahead of the ship. If I thought at all in the mad rush to the final smash I put the flickering down to an aurora, and tried to steer a course that would graze the ice when we struck. By my reckoning we should have been smashed about three o'clock in the morning. Four o'clock passed and still the ship staggered on through the oil under the terrific gale. I began to think I must have misjudged our speed. Five o'clock came, and with the first light the wind began to drop. In half an hour it was broad daylight over a sea with only a film of oil coating the waves, and not a sign of the ice barrier ahead. I left the wheel to hammer some sense into those hymn singing idiots of Hansen's.

"When they shot up on deck the wind was no longer a gale and the ship was manageable. Hansen said we had been saved by his bawling in the forecastle. About an hour later he sighted the volcano. Then he gave it the honor and glory for everything, including the wind.

"For a stretch of at least twenty miles the great ice barrier had been wiped out. Whether it had sunk, or whether it had been lifted up bodily by the eruption and tossed back on the continent I don't know. Hansen says the rock and ice just cracked apart that far in the earthquake. Anyhow the twenty miles of solid ice and rock was gone. In its place stretched a long broad inlet as straight as a street running clear out of sight into the continent.

"The wind dropped abruptly to a mere breeze, and the last of the oil film fell away in our wake. All about us the water was as white as milk, thick and soupy.

"When we came fully to our senses we noticed the unusual warmth. The air was as balmy as a spring day in California. It occurred to me to test the temperature of the water. One of the men drew up a bucketful of the milky soup. It was lukewarm.

"A yell from that excitable idiot Hansen made me drop the bucket. He was pointing up the inlet to a huge pillar of ink billowing up like the smoke from a burning oil well. I judged it must have been at least fifty miles from where we were. But I had no means then of making more than a crude guess.

"As we stood gaping at it the whole mass of ink was suddenly sucked down out of the sky. Only a dirty brown mist marked the place where it had been.

"'It's an eruption,' Hansen was good enough to explain. He meant well, but who ever saw an eruption acting down instead of up? There was no time to argue it out with him, for while we were looking the show began in earnest.

"First an enormous black smoke ring teetered crazily up and mushroomed out over the sky line like an umbrella. Then a solid pillar of red flames gushed up after the smoke. My common sense was working in spite of me, for I found myself counting off the seconds. When I got to fifty-eight, the fist of the explosion struck us with all its force. Being ready for it I was braced against the funnel with my hands over my ears. Hansen, theorizing as usual, wasn't prepared. Nor were the men. For an hour after they had picked themselves up they went about staring like owls.

"If my count was right the volcano must be two hundred fifty to three hundred miles inland. At that distance I had no fears for the ship.

"The next thing to do was to get out before something started under our keel. Before doing so I could not resist the temptation of lowering a boat to see what had happened ashore—if anything was to be seen without dangerous delay. I decided to take Hansen and two men to pull the oars. When he understood what was doing—he was still deaf, like the rest of the theorizers—he made a dive below to bring up his everlasting camera and a bale of films.

"The pull through that beastly warm milk to the shore was both pleasant and disgusting. How these society women can bathe in hot milk—as I understand from the Sunday newspapers they do—beats me! That by the way, however. I see Miss Lane is blushing. Our landing was as easy as a picnic on a river. We at once tramped inland over the level snowfields to see what was to be seen.

"Hansen saw it first. About a mile ahead of us he made out a black dot on the snow. We made for it as fast as the loosely crystallized surface would let us. Coming up to it we found a chunk of black rock the size of a cow. At least that was all of it above the ice and snow. The rest lay buried in the star-shaped pit which its fall had dented through to the ice and underlying rock.

"One side of the rock was smooth. The rest was just a jagged nothing. Hansen took a photograph of the smooth side.

"I don't blame him for wanting to find another of the black chunks. Nor do I criticize him for stopping to take its picture. If the camera had been mine I should have been just as unreasonable. He dragged us over that forsaken wilderness of snow and ice for ten mortal hours hunting black rocks. There was no returning to the ship until he had shot his last roll of films. In all he got twelve dozen first-class negatives.

"Once I got him aboard our normal relations were resumed. He recovered his mind and obeyed orders. We steamed out of that photographer's heaven without another picture."

"Are you sure, Captain Anderson," Edith smiled, "that your mate's craze for photography isn't by your orders too?"

"Oh, quite. Still, I admit that Hansen is the keeper of my artistic temperament. Otherwise I should be mincing about Rio de Janeiro in pale lavender kid gloves instead of boiling blubber on Kerguelen like a Christian."

"What was Hansen's explanation of the storm?" Dr. Lane asked.

"The common-sense one, for a wonder. The sudden rise in temperature over the land caused the cold air from the sea to rush in toward the volcano and take us with it."

"In Hansen I recognize a brother," the Doctor laughed.

"You won't when you see him," the Captain prophesied grimly. "He looks like a fat barrel that has been well hammered down. Hullo, here's one of your mandarins."

The diplomatic Wong announced in faultless English that a gentleman by the name of Ole Hansen awaited the Doctor's pleasure.

"Show him up, Wong."

Hansen entered, as red as a lobster and shaped like a brandy keg.

"I've brought the photographs," he announced after the introductions.

"Dump them on the table and let the Doctor see for himself. They need no explanation—"

"But," Hansen expostulated, unburdening himself of his twelve dozen masterpieces, "I have a theory. If you will let me—"

"I won't, so don't try."

Giving his Captain a red explosive look, Hansen sat on the safety valve and obeyed orders. Heaven only knows what clouds of theories he generated under the suppression of all that superheated steam. A man of less robust build must have burst into a thousand hypotheses. The barrel-shaped Hansen merely swelled and held his peace.

Meanwhile Dr. Lane was devouring the photographs of the black rocks with feverish interest. Occasionally he passed one to Edith with a terse suggestion to "take a look at that." Each picture was that of a smooth black surface, in many cases badly fissured by the violence of the explosion which had disrupted the mass from its matrix, densely incised with pictograms.

"Call up Drake," the Doctor ordered before he had worked half through the pile, "and tell him we have a puzzle here that makes the Bolivian inscriptions look like A. B. C."

Edith reported that Drake would join them as fast as his legs would let him.

"Captain Anderson," the Doctor said, rising, "I'm in with you on this to the limit of my means. You can have the oil, I'll take the rest. It's worth more."