The Giant of the North: Pokings Round the Pole

They rose instantly and rambled away in opposite directions, absorbed in contemplation—the one of the earth, and the other of the sky.

Three days after that, Captain Vane and his party approached the shores of Great Isle. It was low like the other islands of Flatland, but of greater extent, insomuch that its entire circumference could not be seen from its highest central point. Like the other islands it was quite destitute of trees, but the low bush was luxuriantly dense, and filled, they were told, with herds of reindeer and musk-oxen. Myriads of wild-fowl—from the lordly swan to the twittering sandpiper—swarmed among its sedgy lakelets, while grouse and ptarmigan were to be seen in large flocks on its uplands. The land was clothed in mosses and grasses of the richest green, and decked with variegated wild-flowers and berries.

The voyagers were received with deep interest and great hospitality by the inhabitants of the coast, who, it seemed, never quarrelled with the neighbouring islanders or went to war.

Makitok dwelt in the centre of the island. Thither they therefore went the following day.

It was afternoon when they came to the valley in which dwelt the angekok, or, as Red Indians would have styled him, the medicine-man.

It was a peculiar valley. Unlike other vales it had neither outlet or inlet, but was a mere circular basin or depression of vast extent, the lowest part of which was in its centre. The slope towards the centre was so gradual that the descent was hardly perceived, yet Captain Vane could not resist the conviction that the lowest part of the vale must be lower than the surface of the sea.

The rich luxuriance of herbage in Great Isle seemed to culminate in this lovely vale. At the centre and lowest part of the valley, Makitok, or rather Makitok’s forefathers, had built their dwelling. It was a hut, resembling the huts of the Eskimos. No other hut was to be seen. The angekok loved solitude.

Beside the hut there stood a small truncated cone about fifteen feet high, on the summit of which sat an old white-bearded man, who intently watched the approaching travellers.

“Behold—Makitok!” said Teyma as they drew near.

The old man did not move. He appeared to be over eighty years of age, and, unlike Eskimos in general, had a bushy snow-white beard. The thin hair on his head was also white, and his features were good.

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

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.

“Most beautiful!” said Leo, who sat beside the Captain and his friends on the North Pole enjoying the view through the open doorway of the hut, and sipping a cup of coffee.

“It reminds me,” said Alf, “of Buzzby’s lines:—

“‘The snowflakes falling softly    In the morning’s golden prime,Suggestive of a gentle touch    And the silent flight of Time.’”

“Behold a more powerful reminder of the flight of Time!” said Benjy, pointing to the aged Makitok, who, with white beard and snow-besprinkled person, came slowly towards them like the living embodiment of “Old Father Christmas.”

“Come,” said Leo, hastening to assist the old man, “let me help you up the Pole.”

Leo, and indeed all the party, had fallen in with Benjy’s humour, and habitually referred thus to their mound.

“Why comes the ancient one here through the snow?” said Captain Vane, rising and offering Makitok his seat, which was an empty packing-case. “Surely my friend does not think we would forget him? Does not Benjy always carry him his morning cup of coffee when the weather is too bad for him to come hither?”

“Truly,” returned the old man, sitting down with a sigh, “the Kablunets are kind. They never forget. Bunjee never fails to bring the cuffy, though he does sometimes pretend to forget the shoogre, till I have tasted it and made a bad face; then he laughs and remembers that the shoogre is in his pouch. It is his little way. But I come not to-day for cuffy; I come to warn. There is danger in the air. Blackbeard must take his strange things,” (thus he referred to the philosophical instruments), “away from here—from—ha!—from Nort Pole, and put them in my hut, where they will be safe.”

The Captain did not at once reply. Turning to his companions he said—

“I see no particular reason to fear this ‘danger in the air.’ I’ll go and consult Chingatok or his father on the point.”

“The ancient one, as you call him,” said Benjy, “seems to be growing timid with age.”

“The youthful one,” retorted the Captain, “seems to be growing insolent with age. Go, you scamp, and tell Amalatok I want to speak with him.”

Whatever faults our young hero had, disobedience was not one of them. He rose promptly, and soon returned with the chief of Poloeland.

Amalatok confirmed the wizard’s opinions, and both opinions were still more powerfully confirmed, while he was speaking, by a gust of wind which suddenly came rushing at them as if from all points of the compass, converging at the Pole and shooting upwards like a whirlwind, carrying several hats of the party with volumes of the now wildly agitated snow up into the sky.

There was no room for further hesitation.

“Why, Massa Bunjay, I thought my woolly scalp he hoed up ’long wid my hat!” cried Butterface, leaping up in obedience to the Captain’s hurried order to look sharp and lend a hand.

In a short time all the instruments were removed from the observatory and carefully housed in Makitok’s hut. Even while they were thus engaged the storm burst on them with excessive violence. The snow which had been falling so softly, was caught up by the conflicting winds and hurled high into the air, or driven furiously over the valley in all directions, for the gale did not come from any fixed quarter; it rose and swooped and eddied about, driving the snow-drift now here, now there, and shrieking as if in wild delight at the chaotic havoc it was permitted to play.

“Confusion worse confounded!” gasped Leo, as he staggered past Alf with the last load on his shoulder.

“And yet there must be order everywhere,” observed Chingatok, when, after all were safely housed in Makitok’s hut that evening, he heard Leo repeat that sentiment.

“Why do you think so, Chingatok?” asked the Captain with some curiosity.

“Because there is order even in my hut,” returned the giant. “Pingasuk, (referring to his wife), keeps all things in perfect order. Is the World-Maker less wise than Pingasuk? Sometimes, no doubt, when Pingasuk is cooking, or arranging, things may seem in disorder to the eye of my little boy Meltik and the small one, (referring to baby), but when Meltik and the small one grow older and wiser, they will see that it is not so.”

While Chingatok was speaking, a gust of wind more furious than ever struck the hut and shook it to its foundations. At the same time a loud rumbling sound was heard outside. Most of the men leaped up, caught hold of spears or knives, and rushed out. Through the driving drift they could just see that the observatory, which was a flimsy structure, had been swept clean away, and that the more solid hut was following it. Even as they gazed they saw its roof caught up, and whirled off as if it had been a scroll of paper. The walls fell immediately after, and the stones rolled down the rocky cone with a loud rattling, which was partially drowned by the shrieking of the tempest.

For three days the storm lasted. During that time it was almost impossible to show face in the open air. On the night of the third day the fury of the wind abated. Then it suddenly became calm, but when Butterface opened the door, and attempted to go out, he found himself effectually checked by a wall of snow. The interior of the hut was pitch dark, and it was not until a lamp had been lighted that the party found they were buried alive!

To dig themselves out was not, however, a difficult matter. But what a scene presented itself to their view when they regained the upper air! No metamorphosis conceived by Ovid or achieved by the magic lantern; no pantomimic transformation; no eccentricity of dreamland ever equalled it! When last seen, the valley was clothed in all the rich luxuriance of autumnal tints, and alive with the twitter and plaintive cry of bird-life. Now it was draped in the pure winding-sheet of winter, and silent in the repose of Arctic death. Nothing almost was visible but snow. Everything was whelmed in white. Only here and there a few of the sturdier clumps of bushes held up their loads like gigantic wedding-cakes, and broke the universal sameness of the scene. One raven was the only living representative of the birds that had fled. It soared calmly over the waste, as if it were the wizard who had wrought the change, and was admiring its work.

“Winter is upon us fairly now, friends,” said Captain Vane as he surveyed the prospect from the Pole, which was itself all but buried in the universal drift, and capped with the hugest wedding-cake of all; “we shall have to accommodate ourselves to circumstances, and prepare for the campaign.”

“I suppose the first thing we shall have to do is to build a snow-house,” said Benjy, looking ruefully round, for, as usual, he was depressed by first appearances.

“Just so, Benjy; and the sooner we go to work the better.”

Now, the reader must not hastily conclude that we are about to inflict on him or her a detailed narrative of a six months’ residence at the North Pole. We have no such fell design. Much though there is to tell,—much of suffering, more of enjoyment, many adventures, numerous stirring incidents, and not a few mishaps—we shall pass over the most of it in total silence, and touch only on those points which are worthy of special notice.

Let us leap, then, into the very middle of the Arctic winter. It is continuously dark now. There is no day at all at the Pole; it is night all round. The last glimmer of the departing sun left them months ago; the next glimmer of his return will not reach them for months to come. The northern Eskimos and their English visitors were well aware of that, nevertheless there was nothing of gloom or depressed spirits among them. They were too busy for that. Had not meat to be procured, and then consumed? Did not the procuring involve the harnessing of dogs in sledges, the trapping of foxes and wolves, the fighting of walruses, the chasing of polar bears; and did not the consuming thereof necessitate much culinary work for the women, much and frequent attention and labour on the part of the whole community, not to mention hours, and sometimes days, of calm repose?

Then, as to light, had they not the Aurora Borealis, that mysterious shimmering in the northern sky which has puzzled philosophers from the beginning of time, and is not unlikely to continue puzzling them to the end? Had they not the moon and the stars, which latter shone with a brilliancy almost indescribable, and among them the now doubly interesting Pole star, right overhead, with several new and gorgeous constellations unknown to southern climes?

Besides all this, had not Captain Vane his scientific investigations, his pendulum experiments, his wind-gauging, his ozone testing, his thermometric, barometric, and chronometric observations, besides what Benjy styled his kiteometric pranks? These last consisted in attempts to bring lightning down from the clouds by means of a kite and cord, and in which effort the Captain managed to knock himself down, and well-nigh shattered the North Pole itself in pieces!

Moreover, had not Leo to act the part of physician and surgeon to the community? a duty which he fulfilled so well that there never had been before that time such a demand for physic in Flatland, and, it is probable, there never will be so many sick people there again. In addition to this, Leo had to exercise his marvellous powers as a huntsman. Benjy, of course, played his wonted rôle of mischief-maker and jack-of-all-trades to the entire satisfaction of everybody, especially on that great occasion when he succeeded in killing a polar bear single-handed, and without the aid of gun or spear or any lethal weapon whatever;—of which great event, more hereafter. Anders, the southern Eskimo, made himself generally agreeable, and Butterface became a prime favourite, chiefly because of his inexhaustible fund of fun and good humour, coupled with his fine musical qualities.

We have not said much on this latter point hitherto, because we have been unwilling to overwhelm the reader with too sudden a disclosure of that marvellous magazine of power which was latent in our band of heroes; but we feel it to be our duty now to state that the negro sang his native melodies with such pathos that he frequently reduced, (perhaps we should say elevated), the unsophisticated Eskimos to floods of tears, and sometimes to convulsions of laughter. As, at Benjy’s suggestion, he sometimes changed his moods abruptly, the tears often mingled with the convulsions, so as to produce some vivid illustrations of Eskimo hysteria.

But Butterface’s strong point was the flute! No one who had not witnessed it could adequately conceive the poutings of thick red lips and general contortions of black visage that seemed necessary in order to draw the tones out of that simple instrument. The agonies of expression, the hissing of wind, and the turning up of whites of large black eyes,—it is past belief! The fruitless efforts of the Eskimos to imitate him were as nothing to the great original, and their delight at the sound was only equalled by their amazement at the sight.

Alf assisted the Captain scientifically and otherwise. Of course he was compelled, during the long winter, to lay aside his geological hammer and botanical box; but, then, had he not the arrangement and naming of his specimens? His chief work, however, was to act the unwonted, and, we may add, unexpected work of a lawgiver.

This duty devolved on him thus:

When Grabantak recovered health—which he was very long in doing—his spirit was so far subdued that he agreed—somewhat sulkily, it is true—to all that his prime minister had done while he held the reins of government. Then he was induced to visit Great Isle, where he was introduced to his mortal foe Amalatok, whom he found to be so much a man after his own heart that he no longer sighed for the extraction of his spinal marrow or the excision of his liver, but became a fast friend, and was persuaded by Alf to agree to a perpetual peace. He also took a great fancy to Chingatok, who begged of Alf to read to the chief of Flatland some of the strange and new ideas contained in his little book.