We made time, now. We were not creeping up-stream, delayed by slow-moving barges. We were going with the tide and all handicaps had been removed. In less than thirty hours, including all stops, we had covered the distance that it had taken us days to ascend, and camped once more in the violet fields above the rapids. I had taken an observation at this point, and by taking another now I was able from the position of the sun and a reference to my charts to establish the date and, approximately, the hour. My calculation showed that it was November the Ninth. Seven weeks had elapsed since our departure from the Billowcrest. It seemed as many ages.

The purple flowers that had welcomed us to the enchanted land were withered, but their leaves remained, and in every direction showed as a level carpet of green. Reaching the rapids we once more removed our boat from the water. The snow on the hillside was gone, but we trundled our craft down over the bare rock and shale without serious 294difficulty, and launched it again in the swift current below. Neither was there any snow on the barren lands ahead as far as we could see, and it was not until some hours later that it began to show along the banks.

The ice, too, seemed entirely gone from the river, but as the snow deepened along the shores we knew we must ere long reach the point where the current plunged beneath the eternal barrier into that darksome passage by which so many of the Antarctic dead had found their way to the Land of the Silent Cold.

The walls of ice and snow on either side of us deepened rapidly. Soon we were sweeping through a chill canyon down whose glittering sides dashed crystal streams from the melting snow above. Here and there appeared places by which it seemed possible to ascend to the snow level, but no one as yet spoke of halting. It would mean the deserting of our boat, which three of us could hardly attempt to push up the homeward incline, and the bundling upon our backs of such supplies and comforts as we could carry, to toil with them across the drifted wastes that lay between us and the Billowcrest. And at the end of that journey—if we ever reached the end—lay the huge perpendicular wall down which we must still find our way. In fact, neither our prospect nor our surroundings were conducive 295to conversation, and with the increasing cold, and the black, semi-transparent walls becoming rapidly loftier, we said not many words, and these in low voices, as if we were indeed among the dead.

“Do you suppose any of their funeral boats ever get down those rapids without being upset?” whispered Gale, at last.

“It is possible,” I said, “it is only a question of avoiding the rocks. No doubt many of them do. They are of course sunken in the tunnel afterwards. The tide must fill it for a good way up, you know.”

“Nick,” said Gale suddenly, “what would you think of us trying to go through that tunnel?”

I gave a great spasmodic shudder.

“Don’t! I have already thought of it,” I managed to say. “It makes me ill!”

“But I mean it, Nick,” persisted Gale. “There can’t be more than a hundred and fifty miles of it, and it’s not so much colder inside than it is here. We’ve got our electric lamp ahead, and we could make it in seven or eight hours, the way we are going. If we can hit the tide right we might do it as easy as nothing. If we did, we’d be home for dinner. If we didn’t—well, Nick, to talk right out in meeting, I don’t believe we’d have a bit more chance of getting home the other way, and a good deal longer misery before—before we quit trying. Ain’t that so, now? What do you think, Bill?”

296Neither of us could reply immediately. The thought had lurked in the minds of all, but when put into words it was a bit staggering. Yet the prospect of being, within a few hours, on the Billowcrest with Edith—for dinner, as her father put it—started the warm blood once more in my veins. Perhaps the latter appealed to Mr. Sturritt also.

“I—I—that is—I’m with—er—the Admiral,” he managed to say at last, “as usual.”

“And so am I,” I agreed. “We can only die once wherever we are, and it is better to take the chances where we will go all together, in a minute, and be carried somewhere near our friends, than to perish lingeringly one after another, away off up yonder in the snow.”

“That’s my ticket!” assented Gale. “And anyway, our boat, some of it, will get through, with all these air-tight compartments, and we can put some messages in each one, so if any pieces are picked up the folks will know what became of us.”

We began doing this at once, for we felt that the entrance to the dark tunnel could not be far distant.............