The Giant of the North: Pokings Round the Pole

Our travellers were not disappointed with this strange recluse, who received them with an air of refinement and urbanity so far removed from Eskimo manners and character, that Captain Vane felt convinced he must be descended from some other branch of the human family. Makitok felt and expressed a degree of interest in the objects of the expedition which had not been observed in any Eskimo, except Chingatok, and he was intelligent and quick of perception far before most of those who surrounded him.

“And what have you to say about yourself?” asked the captain that evening, after a long animated conversation on the country and its productions.

“I have little to say,” replied the old man, sadly. “There is no mystery about my family except its beginning in the long past.”

“But is not all mystery in the long past?” asked the Captain.

“True, my son, but there is a difference in my mystery. Other Eskimos can trace back from son to father till they get confused and lost, as if surrounded by the winter-fogs. But when I trace back—far back—I come to one man—my first father, who had no father, it is said, and who came no one knows from where. My mind is not confused or lost; it is stopped!”

“Might not the mystery-bundle that you call buk explain matters?” asked Alf.

When this was translated, the old man for the first time looked troubled.

“I dare not open it,” he said in an undertone, as if speaking to himself. “From father to son we have held it sacred. It must grow—ever grow—never diminish!”

“It’s a pity he looks at it in that light,” remarked Leo to Benjy, as they lay down to sleep that night. “I have no doubt that the man whom he styles first father wrapped up the thing, whatever it is, to keep it safe, not to make a mystery of it, and that his successors, having begun with a mistaken view, have now converted the re-wrapping of the bundle by each successive heir into a sacred obligation. However, we may perhaps succeed in overcoming the old fellow’s prejudices. Good-night, Benjy.”

A snore from Benjy showed that Leo’s words had been thrown away, so, with a light laugh, he turned over, and soon joined his comrade in the land of dreams.

For two weeks the party remained on Great Isle, hunting, shooting, fishing, collecting, and investigating; also, we may add, astonishing the natives.

During that period many adventures of a more or less exciting nature befell them, which, however, we must pass over in silence. At the end of that time, the youth who had been sent for the Captain’s sextant and other philosophical instruments arrived with them all—thermometers, barometers, chronometers, wind and water gauges, pendulums, etcetera, safe and sound.

As the instruments reached Cup Valley, (so Benjy had styled Makitok’s home), in the morning, it was too early for taking trustworthy observations. The Captain therefore employed the time in erecting an observatory. For this purpose he selected, with Makitok’s permission, the truncated cone close to the recluse’s dwelling. Here, after taking formal possession and hoisting the Union Jack, he busied himself, in a state of subdued excitement, preparing for the intended observations.

“I’ll fix the latitude and longitude in a few hours,” he said. “Meantime, Leo, you and Benjy had better go off with the rifle and fetch us something good for dinner.”

Leo and Benjy were always ready to go a-hunting. They required no second bidding, but were soon rambling over the slopes or wading among the marshes of the island in pursuit of game.

Leo carried his repeater; Benjy the shot-gun. Both wore native Eskimo boots as long as the leg, which, being made of untanned hide, are, when soaked, thoroughly waterproof.[4 - The writer has often waded knee-deep in such boots, for hours at a time, on the swampy shores of Hudson’s Bay, without wetting his feet in the slightest degree.]

Oolichuk and Butterface carried the game-bags, and these were soon filled with such game as was thought best for food. Sending them back to camp with orders to empty the bags and return, Leo and Benjy took to the uplands in search of nobler game. It was not difficult to find. Soon a splendid stag was shot by Leo and a musk-ox by Benjy.

Not long after this, the bag-bearers returned.

“You shoots mos’ awful well, Massas,” said Butterface; “but it’s my ’pinion dat you bof better go home, for Captain Vane he go mad!”

“What d’you mean, Butterface?” asked Leo.

“I mean dat de Capp’n he’s hoed mad, or suffin like it, an’ Massa Alf not mush better.”

A good deal amused and surprised by the negro’s statement, the two hunters hastened back to Makitok’s hut, where they indeed found Captain Vane in a state of great excitement.

“Well, uncle, what’s the news?” asked Leo; “found your latitude higher than you expected?”

“Higher!” exclaimed the Captain, seizing his nephew by both hands and shaking them. “Higher! I should think so—couldn’t be higher. There’s neither latitude nor longitude here, my boy! I’ve found it! Come—come up, and I’ll show you the exact spot—the North Pole itself!”

He dragged Leo to the top of the truncated cone on which he had pitched his observatory.

“There, look round you,” he cried, taking off his hat and wiping the perspiration from his brow.

“Well, uncle, where is it?” asked Leo, half-amused and half-sceptical.

“Where! why, don’t you see it? No, of course you don’t. You’re looking all round it, lad. Look down,—down at your feet. Leonard Vandervell,” he added, in sudden solemnity, “you’re on it! you’re standing on the North Pole now!”

Leo still looked incredulous.

“What I you don’t believe? Convince him, Alf.”

“Indeed it is true,” said Alf; “we have been testing and checking our observations in every possible manner, and the result never varies more than a foot or two. The North Pole is at this moment actually under our feet.”

As we have now, good reader, at last reached that great point of geographical interest which has so long perplexed the world and agitated enterprising man, we deem this the proper place to present you with a map of Captain Vane’s discoveries.

“And so,” said Benjy with an injured look, “the geography books are right after all; the world is ‘a little flattened at the Poles like an orange.’ Well, I never believed it before, and I don’t believe yet that it’s like an orange.”

“But it is more than flattened, Benjy,” said Leo; “don’t you see it is even hollowed out a little, as if the spinning of the world had made a sort of whirlpool at the North Pole, and no doubt there is the same at the South.”

Chingatok, who was listening to the conversation, without of course understanding it, and to whom the Captain had made sundry spasmodic remarks during the day in the Eskimo tongue, went that night to Amalatok, who was sitting in Makitok’s hut, and said—

“My father, Blackbeard has found it!”

“Found what, my son?—his nothing—his Nort Pole?”

“Yes, my father, he has found his Nort Pole.”

“Is he going to carry it away with him in his soft wind-boat?” asked the old chief with a half-humorous, half-contemptuous leer.

“And,” continued Chingatok, who was too earnest about the matter to take notice of his father’s levity, “his Nort Pole is something after all! It is not nothing, for I heard him say he is standing on it. No man can stand on nothing; therefore his Nort Pole which he stands on must be something.”

“He is standing on my outlook. He must not carry that away,” remarked Makitok with a portentous frown.

“Boh!” exclaimed Amalatok, rising impatiently. “I will not listen to the nonsense of Blackbeard. Have I not heard him say that the world stands on nothing, spins on nothing, and rolls continually round the sun? How can anything spin on nothing? And as to the sun, use your own eyes. Do you not see that for a long time it rolls round the world, for a long time it rolls in a circle above us, and for a long time it rolls away altogether, leaving us all in darkness? My son, these Kablunets are ignorant fools, and you are not much better for believing them. Boo! I have no patience with the nonsense talk of Blackbeard.”

The old chief flung angrily out of the hut, leaving his more philosophic son to continue the discussion of the earth’s mysteries with Makitok, the reputed wizard of the furthest possible north.

Chapter Twenty Eight.

Tells, among other Things, of a Notable Discovery

Soon after this, signs of approaching winter began to make their appearance in the regions of the North Pole. The sun, which at first had been as a familiar friend night and day, had begun to absent himself not only all night, but during a large portion of each day, giving sure though quiet hints of his intention to forsake the region altogether, and leave it to the six months’ reign of night. Frost began to render the nights bitterly cold. The birds, having brought forth and brought up their young, were betaking themselves to more temperate regions, leaving only such creatures as bears, seals, walruses, foxes, wolves, and men, to enjoy, or endure, the regions of the frigid zone.

Suddenly there came a day in October when all the elemental fiends and furies of the Arctic circle seemed to be let loose in wildest revelry. It was a turning-point in the Arctic seasons.

By that time Captain Vane and his party had transported all their belongings to Great Isle, where they had taken up their abode beside old Makitok. They had, with that wizard’s permission, built to themselves a temporary stone hut, as Benjy Vane facetiously said, “on the very top of the North Pole itself;” that is, on the little mound or truncated cone of rock, in the centre of the Great Isle, on which they had already set up the observatory, and which cone was, in very truth, as nearly as possible the exact position of that long-sought-for imaginary point of earth as could be ascertained by repeated and careful observations, made with the best of scientific instruments by thoroughly capable men.

Chingatok and his father, with a large band of their followers and some of their women, had also encamped, by permission, round the Pole, where, in the intervals of the chase, they watched, with solemn and unflagging interest, the incomprehensible doings of the white men.

The storm referred to began with heavy snow—that slow, quiet, down-floating of great flakes which is so pleasant, even restful, in its effect on the senses. At first it seemed as if a golden haze were mixed with the snowfall, suggesting the idea that the sun’s rays were penetrating it.