Sometimes Harley and I would go about twenty miles of a flight up the snow farther north, partly for pleasure and partly to see whether or not we could extend operations. We would have taken longer flights had our boat been fitted to carry more stores of force. As it was, we on one occasion went too far, and had to walk home over the snow, sometimes through it. Our boat had to he carried five miles next day. We had a sleigh also, but the snow surface was broken up too much, and we could not make much use of it.
Government boats, specially equipped, have been at the north and south poles. The snowcaps, however, are very great. They extend for twenty degrees of latitude even in summer, and in winter they come twenty degrees further. Indeed, the subsoil is almost always frozen above the fiftieth parallel of latitude. Winter begins to be felt as positive cold at thirty degrees from the equator, ice and snow forming in great quantities.
I had almost finished my task and was thinking of returning to Sidonia, pushing on with my studies, and of the pleasure of going to all the grand sights of the metropolis with father, mother and sister, when one night something happened to modify my plans.
It was about twenty-three o'clock, and I was just about to retire, when Fred Harley came running in with the news that an air boat with three people in it was supposed to be lost on the snow-fields.
We had two air boats and a sleigh at our disposal, and I requested Harley to charge all the accumulators while I got particulars, I found that a boat containing three travellers had called about seventy-five minutes, three-quarters of an hour ago. It was going to the village of Ayreton, eighty miles to the west, and would have to call at the next station to renew its electrical supply in about thirty minutes. In such cases it was usual to report arrival. The report had not come, and the man in charge had seen nothing of the boat. It was already half-an-hour behind time, and its route lay over a desolate snow-field with an atmospheric temperature below zero. The boat would not have warning appliances; it was described as a common family one.
The large boat was ready when I got back, and I left Fred to make ready for the starved strangers if I could find them. I turned the light into a couple of search lamps that Fred had attached, and flying as low as I dared went after the missing ones. I had travelled quite twenty miles when I saw something dark on the snow surface, and went down to see if it was anything dropped from the missing boat. Truly it was something: dropped; the dark object was the covering of a woman's head. She was all but buried in loose, powdery, dry snow, and could not have extricated herself, If I had not had the good fortune to find her she would soon have perished. When I attempted to lift her out of the drift into my boat she made some effort to
