The Wreck of the South Pole and Other Strange Tales — page 15: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

8 The Wreck of the South Pole. scarcely moving by the gentle waves, with golden sun- shine falling all around, looking upward tornadoes, rain and snow will be seen raging among the upper cliffs. But there is another harbor on this island of quite a dif- ferent character. Capt. Reynolds and his crew anchored in Frenchman’s Bay and there found a house built of ship’s cabin timber, every inch of which was carved with the history of four men, who had been lost off Cape Horn and their vessel carried by the current to this island. They had been lost twenty years before, and had lived in this house for seven- teen years, according to the records which they carved upon its walls. After the seal rookery had been visited, the captain or- ganized a volunteer investigation party to explore the in- terior. Coming to the top of a mountain range, they let down John Sands, who was lost in the Arctic Ocean on | the ill-fated Narvach, to find a path for them. He called back that he thought a way could be found, but they had better leave the rope hanging in case they were obliged to return by it. The whole party descended, but soon were obliged to repeat the performance, and when they reached the valley, half a dozen ropes were hanging down the mountain side. It was well they left them, for on examining the valley into which they had descended, they found that it was walled in by precipitous mountains, and that this one point upon which they had stumbled by accident or by fate was the only place they could be crossed. And if those ropes Gomicbook (E(o)