Part 35 (1/2)

Stirling nodded and swung the spokes a quarter turn. They came back against the palm of his hand, and he peered through the snow. The moon had a double ring, and it awoke a verse from the girl who stood wrapped in her furs:

”That orbed maiden, with white fire laden, Whom mortals call the moon, Glides glimmering o'er my fleece-lined floor, By midnight breezes strewn.”

Stirling turned his head slightly and smiled with the snow dripping from his lips. The girl glanced ahead and shuddered as a drifting cloud obscured the moon. The way was mantled with falling ice particles, and the s.h.i.+p's rigging showed up ghostlike. The m.u.f.fled Russians on the forepeak moved about in the gloom like walruses that had climbed aboard.

The _Pole Star_ hurtled on. Stirling sensed the true direction with the skill of a master pilot and dodged looming ice floes by fathoms. He swung the s.h.i.+p toward the magnetic west and reached for the high land which towered there, then sheered from this into the channel made by the inky waters. The _Pole Star_ glided eastward along the meridian, and thrust her sharp stem through a lane of seething waves which marked the open reaches of Lancaster Sound.

The way to the south-north by the magnetic compa.s.s-was also open.

Stirling sensed that it would be possible to drive through the Gulf of Boothia, and this route might take him to Hudson Bay and Hudson Strait.

He chose the easterly pa.s.sage and set his feet wide apart as the floes dashed down upon the staunch s.h.i.+p.

Helen Marr leaned over the wheel and watched the binnacle. The compa.s.s whirled and was never still. They were over the true magnetic pole, and north was south; only the sense of direction told Stirling the course to steer, but he held on grimly, with his jaw set to a block. The Russians on the forepeak shouted warnings, waves came over the jib boom and the forecastle, and the churning vortex of cross currents and storm dashed the s.h.i.+p like a chip in a whirlpool, while the snow fell in circling clouds.

The pa.s.sage led to the lee of North Somerset Island, and a towering headland of basalt protected the s.h.i.+p from the fury of the south wind. A calm spot showed ahead, through which moonbeams shone.

Stirling released one hand from the wheel and pointed. ”See,” he said.

”See, that is Somerset! We're heading for North Devon Island and Lancaster Sound. We are already in the Strait. I never knew it was open!”

Open it was, as the girl saw. The moon revealed the serrated outlines of the land to the southward, where the sharp teeth of the coast range, which b.u.t.tressed the sh.o.r.e, stood out bare of ice or snow. It seemed a huge saw cutting across the top of the world.

Stirling breathed deeply and studied the compa.s.s, then sheered to the true north, crashed through a ledge of locked ice, and won the way to an open lane which led toward the east and Baffin Bay.

The girl turned as a light struck across the churning waters, and cried out as she saw the orange disk of the sun rising in the south. It had broken through the snow flurry. It revealed the land and Sound, which were coated in places with the recent snow, and brought out the flying clouds as they scudded before the south wind.

She reached and clasped Stirling's arm. ”The sun!” she exclaimed. ”See, our beacon! We shall win through to open sea!”

Stirling brought the wheel up and steadied it, smiling down into the girl's glowing face. She watched him as he braced his legs and threw back his head, then he turned away from her with a regretful jerk and leaned down over the binnacle. He straightened up again as she quoted:

”The sanguine sunrise with his meteor eyes And his burning plumes outspread, Leaps on the back of my sailing rack When the morning star s.h.i.+nes dead.”

”The morning star,” Stirling said. ”It's up there!” He pointed toward the zenith, and Helen Marr followed the direction of his steady arm, widening her eyes in amazement as she noted the lodestar almost overhead. She waited for a cloud to pa.s.s and traced out the light points of the Great Dipper. She saw then that what she had taken for overhead was fourteen or fifteen degrees from the true vertical line.

”We're in about seventy-six degrees,” she said, with certainty. ”Almost to the Pole!”

Stirling unclasped one hand from the spokes of the wheel and touched the frosted gla.s.s over the binnacle compa.s.s. ”Run your eyes along the south line and you'll be looking toward the Pole. It's a long way down there, Miss Marr. We're trying to work in the other direction.”

The s.h.i.+p had covered the worst of the pa.s.sage and the parting floes showed the road to open sea. Stirling had made no mark of time, but he realized dimly that Slim and the others who had gone below were getting the utmost out of the boilers. The screw thrashed at its best speed, and the smudge of smoke which drifted toward the north blotted out the view of North Devon Island along which the course had led them.

Stirling breathed for the first time, sure of himself. He turned and smiled at Helen Marr. ”Cape Hay,” he said, ”is somewhere over there!”

The girl had never heard of Cape Hay, but s.h.i.+elding herself by the ice-coated shrouds of the mizzen rigging, she strained her eyes toward the south and east. Clouds showed beneath the silver reflection of the moon, and a darker line was below the clouds. It rose in one point to a headland.

She came back across the slippery deck and nodded. ”I see it,” she said into his ear. ”It's a long way off, Mr. Stirling.”

Stirling smiled and nodded toward the binnacle. ”We're on the course,”

he said. ”How about a little coffee, Miss Marr?”

She was gone across the quarter-deck and down the cabin companion in an instant.