K contained destroyed, and their recent labours, and, one by one, they dropped off to sleep.
When morning dawned the fire was still burning brightly. Derek and Hemmingway had fulfilled their task and, waking each other at intervals, had kept it going. Having warmed themselves at it they decided to set off at once, as they had nothing to pack and only the two spades to carry with them. Every moment was precious as, if they failed to discover some place that they could make a permanent headquarters while they devoted their energies to searching for food, it was certain that cold and hunger would put an end to them within the next few days. Since they had not succeeded in locating the grey stone house on two previous expeditions it seemed foolish to expend further time in looking for it; yet they had no idea which direction would give them the best prospect of coming upon some distant habitation.
'I think our best plan,' Gervaise announced, 'is to make for the highest ground we can see. Jan Mayen Island is about forty miles long but only five to ten miles broad. If we can reach a spot where we can get a good view in several directions we should be able to see the sea. Once we've done that, we must head for it and follow the coast-line until we find a village, as it's certain that in an island like this nearly all the inhabitants would live down by the shore.'
For an hour they trudged slowly but determinedly on, plodding through the crisp snow up the gentle slopes towards the higher ground to the north. Crossing a high bank they came down into a broad, snowy bottom. They followed it for some distance until they arrived at a place where it was intersected by another shallower valley, the sides of which were less than 20 feet in height and were, in fact, only banks crowned by buried hedges.
It was Hemmingway who suddenly pointed to one of the corners of the intersection and began to run towards it. Almost at the same second the others also noticed that the top of a signpost was protruding some feet above the snow. They followed his lead and, coming to a halt, stood there spellbound with amazement.
The signpost had two arms, one of which read: 'woodside place 1 Mile', and the other 'london 19 Miles'.
Lavina began to laugh. To find such a thing in the Arctic Circle was positively fantastic and, quite obviously, beyond the bounds of possibility. Throwing her arms round her father's neck, she cried:
'You darling old silly, with your funny calculations! You were right off the map, my sweet—right off the map. We're still in England.'
It was impossible to believe that she was not right. The signpost stared them in the face and forbade all argument; yet Gervaise remained utterly bewildered.
He had taken two observations on each occasion that he had shot the sun and had taken the altitude of half a dozen stars as well. It was inconceivable that those could all be wrong and every one of them had worked out to show that their position was within a few minutes of 71 degrees 25 minutes north.
Hemmingway, who had checked his sums, supported him in his assertion that his calculations had been correct, but the fact that the country with its meadows, little woods and small fields was so like England bore out the message of the signpost.
As they set out to explore a little farther, taking the wider of the two valleys which they now had reason to believe was a road, Lavina said:
'I wonder what part of England we're in? I've never heard of Woodside Place. Have any of you?' 'No,' murmured the others, and Sam added: 'Wherever it is it's only nineteen miles from London.' 'Perhaps,' said Gervaise, 'but I wouldn't be too certain of that. There's just a chance that some mad Englishman may have settled on Jan Mayen Island and put the signpost up for a joke. The sun and the stars can't lie, you know, and it's very easy to take accurate observations with a sextant; in fact, if you've once learnt how, as I did many years ago, it's impossible to make a mistake.'
For a time they trudged on in silence, depressed again by the thought that his theory of the mad Englishman might conceivably be right, but twenty minutes later they came to another crossroads which also had a signpost. It had three arms which read respectively: 'woodhill Mile', 'London 18 Miles', 'hat-field 3 Miles'.
That settled the question. Not only were they in England, but they were on the northern outskirts of London in the county of Hertfordshire.
At last they were able to give rein to their feelings. The hunger they had been beginning to feel from having had neither supper nor breakfast, the cold, and the loss of all their possessions were all forgotten as they joyfully took the road south, to London. But Gervaise was still extremely puzzled about his calculations being so many hundreds of miles out, and as they marched along he began to postulate a theory which might account for it.
'You may remember,' he said, 'how Oliver mentioned on one occasion that some scientists believe the South Sea Islands to be the remnants of another great comet which hit the earth many millenniums ago. There is a theory about the axis of the earth which ties up with that. Most of the planets revolve with the plane of their equators horizontal to the sun so that there are no seasons and the climate on different parts of their surface remains the same the whole year round. The theory is that our earth was like that originally, but when this first great comet hit it in the South Pacific the blow was so terrific that it threw it right off its axis, shifting the North Pole from a spot about degrees north of Scotland to its present position—or rather, to that which we know it to have occupied before the new comet hit us; and that instead of swinging back again the earth, from then on, revolved round a new axis at a tilt of 23| degrees to the sun.'
'The business of the mammoths supports that,' said Hemmingway. 'Their remains are found in Siberia and in the Andes at high altitudes where the climate of the world as we knew it would have made it quite impossible for such animals to live.'
'How about the ice ages, though?' Lavina inquired. 'The ice caps shifted up and down, didn't they? So for long periods when there wasn't much ice Siberia might have been quite warm enough for them to live in.'
'That doesn't explain the mammoths in the Andes. There is a high plateau in Peru which is not more than 10 degrees south of the equator, and the southern ice cap certainly never got as far north as that. On the plateau there are the bones of hundreds and hundreds of mammoths. The only explanation for their all being found together is that the place must have once been a mammoths' feeding-ground, and the fact that they could not possibly have lived at such a height, owing to its low temperature, proves that they were all wiped out by some sudden and drastic change of climate before they had time to migrate to pastures nearer the sea level. No one has been able to explain what could have caused such a change; but Ger-vaise's theory of the shifting of the axis of the earth would certainly do so.'
'Exactly!' agreed Gervaise quickly. 'And I suggest that since our comet hit the earth in the Northern Pacific, it threw the earth back again practically on to its original axis. We know too, that the impact occurred in longitude 165 degrees west so, if I'm right, the new North Pole must be some 20 degrees farther south on the 15th parallel of longitude east, which would place it approximately on the coast of north-western Norway. In consequence, Britain would be well up within the Arctic Circle.'
The others agreed that his reasoning offered the only possible explanation which tallied with the two established facts that they were only about twenty miles north of London and yet their latitude was 71 degrees north. But, after a moment, Lavina said gloomily: