As the weather remained good, Sam and Hemmingway made an expedition that afternoon to try and find the house, but the snow had obliterated such features of the landscape as they remembered so they had to return without having had any success. Derek, meanwhile, exercised Finkie, this being his third outing, and he continued to behave like a model prisoner.
At sundown they watched the sky anxiously but luck was with them. A large section of it remained unclouded, so Gervaise was able to take another observation of the sun at its setting, and an hour later he took the altitudes of some of the principal stars which they were able to identify from their celestial charts. After a couple of hours' work with Oliver's books of logarithms Gervaise gave them their exact position on the earth's surface. It proved to be 71 degrees 25 minutes north and 9 degrees 10 minutes west.
'That settles it,' said Hemmingway, pointing to a spot on the map. 'We're on Jan Mayen Island, up on the edge of the Ice Barrier—about 280 miles east of the coast of Greenland.'
'The hell we are!' exclaimed Lavina, who was with them, having now recovered from her chill.
'Not a very jolly prospect,' agreed Sam. 'I don't suppose the place was ever inhabited except by a few fisher-folk; and we won't find much to start life with again in any of their cottages. It would have been a much better outlook if the Ark had beached itself somewhere within reasonable distance of the great cities.'
Gervaise had been looking over Hemmingway's shoulder at the map. 'I suppose you're right about our being on Jan Mayen, as it's the only land anywhere within several hundred miles of the position I worked out. But, actually, the most northern point of the island barely touches the 71st parallel and we're 25 minutes north of that.'
'1 know,' Hemmingway nodded. 'But you must remember that the chronometers may be a little out.'
'Anyway, there's plenty of timber,' remarked Derek. 'If we put our backs into it we could build a seaworthy boat, get down to Iceland, re-fit, and make our way by easy stages through the Hebrides to Scotland and so to London.'
'Easy stages!' echoed Lavina. 'Hundreds of miles in an open boat! No thank you, Handsome, not for this child—at least, not till next summer anyway.'
'There's no point in trying to get to London,' Margery put in. Everyone will have been drowned and the place will be a shambles. The land here looked good for cultivation and I can see no reason why happy homes could not be made here for those of us who're prepared to work.'
'I don't think we have much choice,' Gervaise announced dryly. 'Now the flood has subsided, all the dead bodies of animals and humans will be decaying farther south, and the air will be full of pestilence within a week. Even if we could make a seaworthy boat, as Derek suggests, I wouldn't dream of leading you there until the cold of another winter has killed off the bacilli. Here, we'll at least be safe from plague, as the ice and snow will prevent the corpses rotting. I'm, er—not a religious man, as you know, but it almost seems as if a merciful Providence had ordained that we should land in a place where we could live without fear of being stricken down by some terrible fever.'
'I suppose half a loaf's better than no bread, dearest,' sighed Lavina, 'but I think it's a pretty mean kind of Providence, all the same. Just think what we'll have to go through stuck here during an Arctic winter.'
The thoughts of darkness, cold and discomfort which her words called up were so grim that none of them cared to discuss the prospect further and soon afterwards they went to bed.
The next morning it was a cold but sunny day again; so they decided to make another expedition towards the higher ground. Derek had now formed the conclusion that Finkie was no longer dangerous and, being fond of all dumb beasts, had come to regard him as a sort of tame animal. In consequence he insisted, rather against the wishes of the others, that instead of the imbecile being left a prisoner all day, he should be taken with them. When the whole party set out from the Ark soon after breakfast, therefore, Finkie shuffled along at Derek's side like a morose Caliban.
The going was not easy because the snow was thick, they had no snow-shoes and they occasionally came into heavy drifts which delayed their progress; so they covered barely a mile an hour. Hedges and woods barring their paths at intervals also necessitated considerable detours and it was eleven o'clock before they came upon any other sign that the land had been inhabited by human before the flood.
This was an unnatural hump rising in a corner of one of the fields, and when Derek had knocked some of the snow off it with one of the spades they had brought, they discovered it to be a motor-tractor. The fact that it had been made in England, as they saw by the manufacturer's plate, gave them a strange sense of comfort, and, as Gervaise remarked, since they still had a good supply of petrol left in the Ark, the tractor might come in very useful to them later on.
It had taken them ten minutes or more to clear the snow away and it was only when they had finished that Derek suddenly said: 'Where's Finkie?'
Swinging round they saw that Fink-Drummond had disappeared.
Behind them in the snow his tracks showed that he had padded to the nearest bank, and the black small-wood and leaves of a hedge could be seen through the snow, marking the place where he had scrambled over it.
Derek and Hemmingway ran to the hedge and looked over, but Finkie was nowhere to be seen and his track led towards a small wood in which, if he had decided to hide from them, it was going to be very difficult to find him.
'I shouldn't worry,' Gervaise called to them. 'He'll make his way back to the Ark as soon as he's cold and hungry.' So, for the moment, they abandoned any thought of trying to recapture him and continued their exploration of the country.
Scrambling up a smooth bank of snow an hour later Gervaise suddenly tripped and fell; burying his arms, which he had thrown out to save himself, in the snow up to his elbows. Picking himself up he began to kick round with his feet and soon discovered that the satin-smooth snow surface concealed something unusual.
'This isn't earth below here,' he said, 'it's something jagged and uneven.' Stooping down he pulled out a yellow brick; upon which they set to work clearing the snow in various places and soon found that the mound concealed the ruins of a modern cottage.
'It was probably only a jerry-built place,' Sam remarked, 'and that's why the flood bowled it over.' His idea was confirmed a moment later when Margery gave a cry of dismay. In moving some bricks she had uncovered the sole of a boot and, on pulling at it, had suddenly realised that it had a dead foot inside it which was still attached to a leg and body buried deeper in the debris.
They covered the foot up again, left the mound and went on, still looking for the grey stone house; but they could not find it and at one o'clock sat down to the picnic lunch they had brought with them.
It was hard work ploughing through the heavy snow so they were a little tired after their ramble and, as sundown came far earlier in this high latitude than in mid-August in England, Gervaise suggested that when they had finished their picnic they should abandon their exploration for that day and return to the Ark.
On the way back they reverted to their discussion of the previous night about the hardships of being compelled to winter in the Arctic; but both Gervaise and Hemmingway were comparatively cheerful about it.
Gervaise pointed out that if they could not find better accommodation they still had the Ark in which to live. That would mean that they would have to continue living in rather cramped quarters but, in the Ark, they would have every reasonable comfort and would suffer no more from being thrown about in rough weather. As they had used hardly any of their petrol for propelling the sphere they still had the bulk of their supply which, used economically, should be sufficient to run the electric-light and heating plants through the winter. They would have to cut down their rations of food but there Were ways in which these could be supplemented. The dead cattle they had come across had already decayed to such a degree through their forty-three days' submergence in the flood waters that, although now frozen meat, they were no longer fit for human consumption. But there would be nuts on the trees, edible roots in the ground and seeds which could be crushed for life-giving substances.