The Argosy, Christmas 1912 — page 32: what you’re looking at

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

18 of the sky. If the northern regions can have a long day it can have black mo- ments. All around us the wind whistled and moaned and played weird tunes against the icy wall. I shivered as I thought of what might have happened had we gone to the upper surface and been caught in a heavy ‘snow-storm, which seemed what was promised us. We must have waited twenty hours at least in the semidarkness. We could hear the roar of the troubled sea be- yond the barrier that was at once our protection and our menace. Then suddenly a blinding sheet of sleet and snow smote us in our retreat, and a whistling sound preceded what would certainly be worse. “The battle is on,’ said Ordway calmly. “ May the strongest win.” CHAPTER IX. A SAIL, IN SIGHT. THIS was not my first visit to Nor- way and the northern waters. True, I had never been as far north on the sea as we were at that moment, nor had I ever experienced such a storm. We had congratulated ourselves on the fact that the grotto faced the sun. It now faced the storm, which was quite a different matter, and had no qualifying comforts. The wind, blowing down on us from the back of the fragment, hit into our bones and caused us the utmost misery. Our teeth chattered as we tried to talk, and finally we gave up the effort. The sleet and snow jammed in upon us, and covered everything with a thick coating of ice. For hours this continued. <A long silence was broken by Ordway. He placed his lips to my ear, and bawled at the top of his voice to overcome the roar of the storm: “T'm hungry!” I made a trumpet of my hands and yelled back: “So amI. What are we going to do about it?” THE ARGOSY. “Fat,” he returned in a voice that should have shaken the berg. This was all right, saying we would eat. Eat what? Raw dolphin? The water was gone. There was none left for coffee. It was a question if we could make the stove burn, anyway. But the pangs of hunger will spur the benumbed mind to activity if the goods are there, and we had plenty. I scraped up a lot of the freshly fallen snow, and picked out a large, heavy blanket. “ Hold this up as a wind-break,” I shouted in Ordway’s ear. He grinned, took the blanket, and, with outspread arms, held it between the storm and me as I worked over the stove. Fortunately we had plenty of matches. Several flickered and went out before the stove was lit. - But, finally, we had it going, and, while Ordway still stood with the shielding blanket extended, I built a barricade of boxes round the stove on the weather side, to prevent the wind from blowing out the fire. Then I proceeded to cut out a piece of the dolphin, and, after some effort, we made a good meal. The falling snow was so dense we could not see what the fragment was doing. We could see nothing beyond the confines of the grotto. Then, after hours had passed, we heard a crunching and grinding in the channel. The big piece was closing in upon us. That was a terrible period of wait- ing. There was absolutely no way even to guess what would happen. The coming impact of ice against ice might prove to be a good thing for us, or it might be our destruction. All we could do was wait hour after hour. The crunching and grinding con- tinued. From the sound I judged that the broken ice in the channel was being piled up and solidified as the ponderous weight of our lost fragment kept on its slow but imperious way to rejoin its parent berg. “There goes the Northbird!” yelled Ordway. CoOMmicbook CO