Chapter 32 Chapter 32 Back to the "Forward"

At around 6:00 in the morning, the wind stopped and immediately turned to the north, driving the clouds in the sky. The thermometer indicated -37℃.The first rays of evening gilded the horizon with silver, and a few days later with gold. Hatteras approached his two exhausted companions, and said in a tone of tenderness and mournfulness: "My friends, we are more than sixty miles from the point appointed by Sir Edward Bilcher, and we shall not have enough food until we get back on board. Go any further, and we shall surely perish, and it will do no one any good. Let's go back."

"That is a very good idea, Hatteras," replied the doctor, "and I will follow you wherever you will take me; but our bodies are getting weaker and weaker; we can hardly go any further. ; I'm all for the plan to go back." "Is that what you mean, Bell?" asked Hatteras. "Yes, Captain," answered the carpenter. "Okay," said Hatteras again, "we'll rest for two days, not too long. The sled will have to be repaired. I think we'll build a snow house, and we'll build up our strength in it." Having made this decision, the three of them began to work with enthusiasm; Bell tried his best to ensure the stability of the snow house, and soon built a pretty good shelter in the depths of the canyon, where they carried out Final rest.

Hatteras no doubt had a hard time deciding to call off his expedition.So much pain and exhaustion for nothing!A useless expedition at the cost of one man's life!Go back to the ship without a piece of coal!What about the crew?What did they do at the instigation of Richard Sandon?But Hatteras could no longer fight the mind. All his strength was expended in preparing the return; the sled was repaired and its load reduced to less than two hundred pounds.They mended frayed, torn, snow-soaked, frozen-hard clothing, and replaced old, useless snowshoes and moccasins with new ones.These tasks took up the day of the 29th and the morning of the 30th; after all, the three travelers tried to rest as much as possible to recharge their batteries for the future.

During the 36 hours spent in the igloos and on the icebergs of the canyon, doctors observed Duck, whose strange behavior seemed unnatural; The common center; this is a place of higher ground, and the bulge of the ground is caused by the accumulation of various ice layers; Duck yelled carefully around this point, wagging his tail impatiently, watching him The master seems to have something to ask. The doctor thought for a moment and attributed this state of anxiety to the presence of Simpson's body, which his companions had not yet had time to bury. He decided to preside over that sad ceremony that very day.As soon as the twilight light appeared tomorrow morning, they set off.

Bear and the doctor walked towards the bottom of the canyon with pickaxes, and Dak found a good place to put the body with his clever nature; it must be buried deep so that the bears would not dig it out. The doctor and Bell began to shake off the upper layer of soft snow, then they tapped on the hard ice; the third pick went down, and the doctor touched something hard, which broke; Fragment of a glass bottle. Bell's side finds a hard bag containing perfectly preserved cookie sheets. "Huh?" said the doctor. "What's going on here?" Bell stopped what he was doing and asked.

The doctor called Atlas, and he came shortly. Dak screamed desperately, trying to dig deeper into the ice with its claws. "Maybe we've come across a food stash?" said the doctor. "Possibly," Bell replied. "Go on," Hatteras said. A few more scraps of food were picked up, a quarter of dried meatloaf in a box. "If it's a food hiding place," said Hatteras, "the bears must have been here before us. Look, there's not all the food." "That's the worry," replied the doctor, "because..." He hadn't finished speaking; he was interrupted by a cry from Bell; the latter removed a mass of ice and found a stiff, frozen leg protruding from a crevice in the iceberg.

"A corpse!" cried the doctor. "This is not a place to hide food, this is a grave." The body was uncovered, a sailor in his thirties, in fairly good condition; he was wearing an arctic sailing suit; the doctor could not say when he died. But next to this corpse, Bell found another corpse, a man in his fifties with a painful expression on his face. "These bodies were not buried!" cried the doctor. "These unfortunate people, as we have seen, died suddenly!" "You have a point, Mr. Crawburn," answered Bell. "Go on! Go on!" said Hatteras.

Bell almost didn't dare, who knows how many corpses will be buried in this ice mound? "These are the victims of an accident that nearly fell on us," said the doctor; "their igloo has collapsed. See if any of them are breathing!" The place was quickly cleared, and Bell dragged out a third body, a man of forty years old; he appeared to have no cadaveric features; the doctor leaned over, feeling as though he had caught something alive. "He's alive! He's alive!" he cried. Bell and he carried the man into the igloo while Hatteras stood motionless observing the collapsed structure.

The doctor undressed the poor buried man; he found no wound on the man; he rubbed him, with the help of Bell, with the rubbish of the rubbish, and he felt that he was coming to life, but this The unfortunate man was in a state of utter exhaustion, unable to utter a word; his mouth was frozen against his palate.The doctor searched in his pockets.The pockets were empty, and there appeared to be no papers, and he asked Bell to rub for him, and went to Hatteras himself. The latter came to the hole in the igloo, dug the ground carefully, and came up with a fragment of a half-burned letter in his hand.You can also see words like this:

... tamon ... "Herboise" W - approx. "Altamon!" cried the doctor, "of the Perleboise! ​​From New York!" "An American!" Hatteras said coldly. "I'll bring him back to life!" said the doctor. "I promise we shall know the answer to this dreadful riddle." He returned to Altamon, where Hatteras was brooding.After some effort, the doctors brought the unfortunate man back to life, but without regaining consciousness; he couldn't see, hear, or speak, but he came alive anyway! The next morning Hatteras said to the doctor:

"We still have to go." "Let's go, Hatteras! The sledge is unloaded, and we lift the unfortunate man up on it, and we take him aboard." "Just do it," Hatteras said. "Bury these bodies before then." The two strange sailors were returned to the fragments of the igloo; Simpson's body replaced Altamon's. The three travelers put their last memories of their companions in prayer.At seven o'clock in the morning, they headed towards the ship. The two dogs that pulled the sled were dead, and Dak volunteered to pull the sled, and he did it with a Greenlandic conscience and tenacity. Within 20 days, that is, from January 31 to February 19, the route back was roughly the same as the route back.Only in February, the coldest month of winter.Hard ice was everywhere; the travelers suffered from the low temperatures, but there were no snowballs and no wind. For the first time since Jan. 31, the sun is out; every day its part above the horizon grows larger.Bell and the doctor were exhausted, nearly blind and with half a broken leg; the carpenter couldn't walk without a cane. Alpemond was alive, but in a state of total insensibility; sometimes they despaired of him, but careful care brought him back to life.And the honest doctor has to look after himself, for his health is failing with fatigue. Hatteras thought of the Forward, of his ship.What does it look like?What happened on board again?Can Johnson stand against Sandon and his cohorts?It was very cold.Will they burn the unfortunate ship?Are its masts and underwater parts still there? With this in mind, Hatteras stepped forward, as if he were about to see his March from the farthest distance. On the morning of February 24, he stopped suddenly.Three hundred steps in front of him, a bright red light appeared, and a huge gray-black smoke column was shaking above it, disappearing into the gray mist of the sky! "The smoke!" he shouted. His heart was beating like it was going to break! "Look! There! That smoke!" he said to his two companions who had caught up. "My boat is on fire!" "But we were more than three nautical miles away from him," Bell said. "It can't be 'Forward'." "No," said the doctor, "it is; it is a mirage that makes it seem nearer to us." "Run!" cried Hatteras, rushing ahead of his companions. The latter handed over the sled to Duck to take care of, and quickly followed along the captain's footsteps. An hour later, they were within sight of the boat!What a horrible sight!The ship burned among the ice floes, and the ice melted around the ship; the flames surrounded the hull, and the south wind sent a strange crackling sound to Hatteras' ears. Five hundred paces away, a man was waving his arms in despair; he stood, powerless, facing the fire that engulfed the March. This man was alone, and this man was old Johnson. Hatteras ran towards him. "My ship! My ship!" he asked, his voice changing. "You! Captain?" answered Johnson. "You! Stop! Don't go any further!" "What?" asked Hatteras in a tone of terrible menace. "Scumbags!" replied Johnson; "forty-eight hours they've been gone. They burned the boat before that!" "Damn it!" Hatteras yelled. Then there was a terrible explosion; a great earthquake rose; the iceberg fell on the ice-field; a column of smoke rose into the clouds, and the Forward exploded under the mighty force of her powder magazine, and was engulfed in flames. The doctor and Bell came to Hatteras at this time.The latter was immersed in despair and stood up all at once. "My friends," he said firmly, "the cowards have fled! The strong will succeed! Johnson, Bell, you have courage; Doctor, you have knowledge; I, I have faith! The North Pole is there ! Fight, fight!" At these majestic words, Hatteras' companions felt as if they had come to life. But the situation has become dire for these four men and this dying man, left without resources, alone and blind, here at 80°N, in this remote arctic region!