CHAPTER IV

Fears and Hopes

I turned in my seat and grinned at Jim and he grinned back. This was the first time that I had felt that life might still be worth living.

We were so near the north magnetic pole that a compass was almost useless. I found myself thinking that I would be guided by the sun as long as daylight lasted, and then suddenly realized that now the sun was stationary in the heavens.

I knew there was not much chance of missing an island fourteen hundred miles long if I flew anywhere in its general direction. I set a course of north-north-east with the idea of striking land somewhere about the settlement of Upernavik. I decided that it would be less likely to have been affected by the catastrophe than Godhavn, the capital of North Greenland. Godhavn was the largest town, but it was located on a small island off the coast, and I thought it might have been swept away by tidal waves. We found out later that every settlement on the coast had disappeared, except Upernavik.

It must be remembered that the Greenland of those days was very different from the present flourishing center of the world's government and civilization. Eighty-six percent of its 826,000 square miles was covered by an ice-cap which in some places was two thousand feet thick. There were frowning cliffs coming down to the ocean's edge and the center of the island was a high plateau. That was really all most people knew about it.

It was entirely by accident that I knew a little more. I had once a Danish mechanician working for me who had travelled from Iceland to Greenland before he finally landed in New York looking for a job. There is a mineral called _cryolite_ which is used in making a certain kind of porcelain and is found only in Greenland. A Pennsylvania concern held the mining concession and shipped the ore to Philadelphia. Jens Jensen came down on one of their steamers and hired out as a mechanician with the idea of getting a plane to fly back.

It seems he had discovered deposits of copper. He tried to interest me in developing them and he told me about Greenland. At first I did not believe him when he told of great stretches of country covered with shrubs and flowering plants and dwarf trees. When he said that there were four hundred varieties of plants and over a hundred types of birds I was so openly skeptical that he gazed at me reproachfully and then left the room. In a few minutes he came back with a volume of an encyclopaedia open at the article on Greenland.

So Jensen was responsible for my knowing more about Greenland than most people did. I knew there were about five hundred white people on the island, as well as fifteen thousand natives. With radio warning of what was about to happen, there was no reason why most of them should not have retreated to the central plateau and have escaped destruction.

As we flew, hour after hour, without sight of land, I began to get worried. The gasoline supply was getting low and there was nothing in sight but the tumbling ocean. It finally dawned on me that I must have set a course far south of the one I intended, unless Greenland had disappeared beneath the waves.

I wrote a note and passed it to Jim, telling him that I had probably made a mistake in direction and that I intended to turn at right angles to our present course and fly directly north. He nodded his head in approval after he had read the note, and I swept around in a wide curve for a final desperate effort to reach land.

I am not sure what the result would have been if we had not got help. I was staring steadily ahead when I felt a touch on my shoulder. I glanced back and saw Jim pointing to an object in the sky a few miles away, but approaching rapidly. For a moment I thought it was a bird, and then I saw it was a gigantic Fokker monoplane. It circled above us and I saw a man leaning out of the cabin window, making motions to us.

Jim handed me a piece of paper on which he had written, "I think he wants us to follow them."

I silently nodded my head and started in their direction. As soon as the observer noticed this he drew his head back into the cabin and the last stage of our journey began.

Following the big Fokker was a simple matter, as long as our gas held out. When an hour passed and then a second hour without sight of land, I began to get nervous. If we dropped into the sea there was not much chance of our being rescued.

When a blue haze appeared on the horizon and rapidly grew into a land of great frowning mountains, I breathed a sigh of relief. Greenland rose out of the ocean, with precipitous cliffs hundreds of feet high against which we could see immense breakers dashing themselves into spray.

* * * * *

We Start A Settlement

We continued to follow the Fokker, rising over range after range of mountains. Some of the peaks must have been about eleven thousand feet above the former sea level and stood out now bare and bleak with no covering mantle of trees and vegetation. From the earliest history of the world, they had been covered by the ice-cap, which had now melted. There were great rivers and waterfalls in the valleys, and in sheltered spots we could see masses of green which might be vegetation, though we were too high in the air to distinguish details.

Suddenly Jim touched me on the arm and pointed ahead to a spot he had been watching through field glasses. At first I could not see what had attracted his attention in the wide valley down which a river flowed. Then a moment later I saw houses.

The Fokker began to descend. We were passing over a fairly large settlement and making for what was certainly a landing field. There were hangars and dozens of planes in the open. Men began running toward us as presently we taxied down the field.

They paid no attention to the big Fokker, which made a good landing a hundred yards away, but raced toward us. Almost before we had stopped I threw open the cabin door and Jim and I climbed out. We had felt for some time the possibility that we were the only men left alive in the world. Now the mere sight of other men had become a wildly exciting adventure.

There was something familiar about the man nearest to us when we landed. I looked at him again.

"Billy Matthews!" I shouted. "How did you get here?"

I had gone to college with Billy and we had been in the same company in France. He had been connected with the government air mail service during the past few years.

He threw his arm around my shoulders. "I was afraid you'd gone like most of the boys, young fella." He stood off and looked me over. "You look pretty fit," he said.

"Oh, I'm all right," I said impatiently. "I want to know what happened? I've been stuck up in Labrador and don't know anything. This is Jimmy Nelson, by the way. He was wireless operator where I was stationed."

The two men shook hands. Meanwhile a crowd had gathered around us.

"There's no time to talk about that now. You come with me and get a little sleep, and then we'll have to put you to work."

I laughed. "All right. What kind of work?"

"Finding people who escaped the catastrophe and are now starving to death.

"No, not here, of course. We have plenty of supplies and are getting more all the time. This settlement is practically part of Upernavik. The town proper was too near the coast to be quite safe. All of us who could get away from the United States made for this point. The scientists agreed that there would be more chance of escaping here than any place else we could reach."

"How many got away?"

He shook his head. "No way of telling. People started in everything that could fly and came down all over. Most of them are done for. Those who succeeded in landing in out-of-the-way places are the ones we are trying to rescue now."

"How many reached here?"

"About three thousand."

"Everybody else in the United States dead?"

"Most of them, I'm afraid, though we don't know definitely yet. There are six hundred planes here, and we're using them to locate any people still living. That is, we're using about half of them for that. The others we have to use in getting fuel and supplies."

"Where are you getting them from?"

"Iceland and Spitzbergen. Neither island was seriously hurt. Of course there was no danger of our starving, even if we hadn't been able to get anything from outside. Greenland had a population of about twenty thousand people. They could easily take care of us."

"What's happened to Europe? I suppose it wasn't hurt as badly as the United States?"

Billy shook his head gravely. "We're not absolutely certain yet, of course, but we think it's all gone except northern Norway, Sweden and northern Russia."

By this time we had reached a house that had apparently not been damaged by the earthquakes. It was curious to see furniture again and a bed with mattresses and sheets. I wanted to hear more, but Billy insisted that we must get some sleep before we did anything else. I was inclined to rebel, but it did no good.

* * * * *

A New Danger

"There's something I didn't intend to tell you until tomorrow. We have a few astronomers and scientists here, and they brought some of their instruments. The seismographs have been acting funny for the past forty-eight hours."

"Well, what about it? What's another earthquake after all we've been through?" I asked flippantly.

Billy remained grave. "It's something more than that, but what we don't know. Two days ago the seismographs began to record a steady vibration which has been increasing in intensity hour by hour. We're probably all right for the next twelve hours. After that--" he paused significantly. "Anyhow, I want you fellows to get three hours' sleep. You'll need to be in good shape. I'll call you if things get worse."

I did not realize how tired I was until I threw myself on the bed. I had a vivid dream of hunting lions in Africa and wounding one. The lion was not killed and springing at me, caught my shoulder in his jaws. He was shaking me to and fro when I awoke and found Billy standing over me.

"I thought I'd never get you awake. Get up and come to the flying field."

I was suddenly conscious of a trembling beneath me, as if I were on the deck of a boat near the engine. Jim was already up and we both looked questioningly at Billy's grave face.

"What is it?" I asked.

"Possibly a new cataclysm that will wipe all surviving human beings from the face of the earth. You know about as much as any of us."

By this time I was wide awake. "What are we to do when we get to the flying field?"

"There is a dispute among the fliers as to whether it would be better to take to the air in the machines with as many passengers as they can carry, or wait developments here with the planes sheltered as much as possible. They want your advice."

A few minutes later we were making our way to the center of a gesticulating crowd of men. The majority seemed to think that the best thing to do was to take to the air and trust to luck that there would be no wind storms, as there had been during the previous calamity. I had done considerable writing on aeronautics and had a certain reputation as an expert. Both parties had agreed that my decision as to the best course of action would be accepted by all concerned.

I stood there bracing my feet firmly as the trembling of the earth increased and the rumbling became louder. I looked at the sky which had become overcast with fast hurrying clouds. If any sky ever indicated wind, that one did. I made my decision.

"Get the planes to sheltered valleys immediately. We won't be safe on land, but we'll be safer than we would be in the air, with the wind that's coming. Quick! There's no time to waste."

The crowd scattered, some of them joyously and more with sullen resentment expressed in their gloomy faces.

Jim and I hurried over to our place. The wind was rapidly rising as I started the motor, but it was a relief to get in the air away from the swaying earth.

We flew over the town and followed a number of other planes to make a rather hazardous landing in a narrow transverse valley which was almost like a ravine. The precipitous sides rose perpendicularly and it would be a bad place to be in a cloud-burst, but it afforded almost perfect shelter from wind. There was a chance that the rocky walls might precipitate themselves on us if the earth tremblings became much more violent.

The other aviators gathered around and we consulted as to the next thing to do. The planes were as safe as they could be anywhere, but none of us liked the idea of staying in the valley ourselves.

Finally after considerable discussion, one of the men who had his wife and a ten-year-old youngster with him announced, "You fellows can do what you want to, but it looks to me as if hell was going to break loose any minute now. If I get killed, it's going to be on top of this mountain instead of underneath it."

"There's nothing more we can do here now," I answered. "I guess we'd better all try to reach the top before things get any worse."

It was a hard climb, especially for the women, most of whom were pretty badly frightened. Both men and women were a selected lot, but all had been through so much recently that nerves had gone back on them. Besides, it was a very terrifying situation.

* * * * *

A New World Arises

We had got used to the constant light and heat of the sun. It was now covered by heavy clouds which were scurrying across the sky at hurricane speed. They had become so heavy and dark that we could hardly see one another a few feet apart. All heat from the sun seemed to have been shut off and the temperature had fallen so rapidly that we were suffering from the cold.

The roaring of the wind was now so loud that we could not hear each other's voices, unless we shouted. The trembling and swaying of the earth was becoming more pronounced every minute, and some of the people actually became seasick.

Jim and I lay flat on our faces on the highest point we could reach. The swaying of the earth had made even my stomach feel a little uneasy. My scientific ardor was momentarily dampened by my physical discomfort. Therefore Jim got the first glimpse of what was happening.

"Good Lord, look!" he suddenly exclaimed in an awed voice.

I raised my head and then rubbed my eyes. The whole central Greenland plateau seemed to be rapidly sinking, and all around the horizon great mountain ranges were lifting themselves toward the sky. We were lying on a rock, two infinitely small insects, watching a new continent being born.

As far as scientists have since been able to determine, the central Greenland plateau was not lowered, but the effect was caused by the entire surrounding region being forced out of the ocean high into the air. Then we did not know what was happening. It was at least a week later before the first trip in a plane showed us that the entire ocean floor, extending from Labrador to Norway and northward to the pole, had been elevated to an average height of ten thousand feet above sea level. The continent thus formed is the seat of present day civilization.

The swaying of the earth gradually ceased and all went back to the town. Again we took hope that the worst was over and we were going to survive. This time, our faith seems to have been justified. The final upheaval was a successful effort of the mass of the earth to attain a position of equilibrium. Five years have passed, and there have been no evidences of further convulsions.

We have organized our life on the assumption that terrestrial conditions are now reasonably stable. Our country is a great island extending from the region of the former Ural mountains to the former Hudson Bay. It includes northern Russia, Finland, northern Norway and Sweden, Iceland and Greenland and part of Canada. It extends northward to the pole and it is bounded on all sides by the great mountain ranges which rose from the sea.

Our civilization is largely English speaking, and the seat of government is Upernavik in Greenland. Our population is small, considering the geographical extent of the country, and we are encouraging in every way the production of large families.

The catastrophe which destroyed our old world was so overwhelming that it is impossible to grieve over the smaller things that we have lost. We are all working cheerfully to build a better world.

The world we are living in is a very interesting one. Even the most adventurous among us have learned little about it as yet. The entire Pacific region has never been visited since the moon crashed. Jim and I often speculate about the conditions on the other side of the earth. We are having a huge metallic dirigible constructed, and when it is completed we intend to go on an exploring expedition. We expect to be the first to look upon the destroyed world.

Of course, no one can tell what dangers we may encounter, or even whether we will survive. It is for that reason I have related our experiences at the time of the great catastrophe, so they may be preserved in case neither Jim nor I return.

THE END.