An Old Captivity (22 page)

Ross said: “I think we’ll get away to-day, all right. It’s good enough to make a start, anyway.”

They went down to the water’s edge and sluiced their faces in the ice-cold sea. Refreshed, they went back into the house. Luki pressed a plate of cold boiled seal meal on them by way of breakfast; they ate what they could of it. Then they carried their sleeping-bags down to the seaplane.

They had little else that they could give the tribe. They would have liked to have left clothes behind, since that was evidently what was needed most, but they did not dare to part with any of their wardrobe. They gave Luki two more tins of pemmican and some more oatmeal and cocoa. Then,
with the help of the tribe, they launched the seaplane down the driftwood rollers laid upon the beach, and turned her round in the shallows till the nose pointed out to sea.

They shook hands all round and got into the cabin. Lockwood and Ross started up the engine; the pilot slipped into his seat. He waved to the Eskimos to let go, opened the throttle a little, and the machine moved from the shore.

They found a lane for the take-off without much difficulty; by seven o’clock they were in the air. Ross reeled out his aerial and got in touch at once with Julianehaab. The report was that there was clear weather there, likely to continue for some hours. They circled and swept low before the Eskimos, then rose to three thousand feet and followed the black jagged coastline to the south.

The flight gave them little difficulty. They followed the coast southwards for an hour and a half. Then, homing upon the occasional transmission of the wireless station, they struck inland a little over the lower end of the ice-cap. Very soon they could see the sea upon the far side of the land; by half-past nine they had identified Julianehaab and were circling above it.

It was a much bigger place than Angmagsalik, covering about fifty acres with scattered red-and-white wooden houses. There were roads between the houses, and a little white bridge across a stream. They saw their red buoy lying on the water of the harbour as they flew around; finally they landed near the harbour mouth. They taxied in towards the buoy; Alix got down on to the float, and they hooked on without difficulty. Ross cut the switches and the engine came to rest; Alix got back into the cabin and dried her feet.

Ross turned to Lockwood. “Well, we’ve got here, anyway,” he said. “That’s the first part of the job done.”

The don nodded. “You’ve done very well, Mr. Ross,” he said quietly. “It’s only July the eighteenth, now.”

The pilot rested his hands upon the wheel, relaxed. “I know,” he said. “We’ve got time to spare. But that’s because we’ve had such good luck with the weather—we
haven’t had to use the allowance that I had in hand. We might have been held up for days at Angmagsalik.” He paused. “I hope I haven’t rushed you along too quickly, sir.”

Lockwood shook his head. “The more time we have here the better, from my point of view. But I feel that it has been a great strain upon you.”

“Oh, I’m all right. Besides, now we shall be linking up with Jameson and he’ll take a lot of the work off my shoulders.”

A boat approached them from the shore. It was rowed by two Eskimos, but very different Eskimos from the east coast tribe with whom they had slept. These men were taller and had longer, more European faces; moreover, both of them spoke English fairly well.

They drew up alongside the float. After the first greetings Ross said:

“Is there another Englishman here waiting for us? A man called Jameson? He should have come here on the boat two or three days ago.”

The men consulted together in their own language. Then one of them said: “He is not here. He has gone on in the ship to Godthaab.”

“But that’s impossible!”

Lockwood said: “They must be talking about someone else.”

The native said: “No, your man. He cannot walk. His leg is hurt. The boat returns in three days; then you will see.”

Half an hour later, in the governor’s house, they had the whole story. Jameson had broken his thigh. It had happened about a week before, in a rough sea; he had been thrown heavily against a hatch and had fallen awkwardly. The leg had been stretched and set in his bunk, and there he was. The governor had refused point-blank to allow him to be landed.

“It is not suitable here to nurse an injured man,” he said. “If I give permission that he land, he stays in my hospital
two months, and then remains here all the winter. That I will not allow. The hospital is for Greenlanders. He is well cared for and comfortable on board ship, and they will take him back to Copenhagen.”

Nothing that they could say would shake him from that decision; indeed, they did not try very hard. There was good sense in what he said. Jameson with a broken thigh would be no use to them as a photographer or as an engineer; they could not take him into camp at Brattalid in that condition.

Ross turned aside and spoke to Lockwood. “We’ll just have to get on without him, sir.”

“Is that possible?”

“Lord, yes.”

The don glanced at him keenly. “I’m afraid I know very little about photography, and nothing at all about air survey work.”

The pilot said: “Well, we’ve got to learn. The only other thing to do would be for me to fly back to England and get another photographer.”

Lockwood hesitated, the memory of their own flight fresh in his mind. “That sounds like a tremendous undertaking.”

Ross nodded. “I don’t know that I fancy it myself. We might get held up by the weather, or we might get into trouble with the ice.” He eyed the don seriously. “I’m not so keen on going back to Angmagsalik, sir. We got away with it all right this time, but I don’t say that we’d be so lucky again. And if we were to have an accident with the machine up there, this expedition will be over—for this year, at any rate. We’d never get repairs done in time to go on this summer.”

Alix said: “Apart from the actual work of doing it, is there anything in the photography that we can’t learn?”

Ross shook his head. “No. I’ve done plenty of survey flying in my time. I’ve never done the photography, but I know what the camera looks like, and I know more or less how it works.”

Lockwood said: “You mean we can tackle the job by ourselves?”

The pilot said cautiously. “I’d like to answer that this evening, sir.”

It seemed that Jameson had had some such idea in his mind. He had caused the whole of the expedition gear to be unloaded from the ship; it had been put into an empty two-roomed house. The governor suggested that they should rent this little wooden shack and make it their headquarters in Julianehaab; he could provide an Eskimo woman to cook for them, and look after it while they were away. Lockwood agreed to this arrangement on the spot.

They left the governor, and went to look at their new dwelling. It was a simple wooden building built with double walls and windows; it was painted white with a roof of red wooden tiles. Inside it was divided into two unequal portions by a matchboarding partition that ran most of the way across the hut; there was no door to cut off one room from the other. There was a cooking stove in the larger room, and a great pile of the photographic gear and camping kit that Ross had shipped from Copenhagen.

Lockwood looked around. “I should think this will do.”

Ross turned to the girl. “I’m afraid it’s a bit matey,” he said. “You’d better have this inside room, and I’ll rig up something for a curtain.”

She smiled. “I’ll be all right.”

They decided to stay there till the ship returned in three days’ time, and spent the remainder of the morning settling in. Ross went out to the seaplane again, moored her more securely, and came back with their luggage and their sleeping-bags. Lockwood spent the morning unpacking and sorting out their camping gear and food supplies. The Eskimo woman turned up and announced herself as Gertrud; she spoke a little Danish and one or two words of English. Alix made her light the stove, and set to work to organise a meal.

They lunched on bully stew and biscuit. Then Ross opened the packing-case that contained the camera, and spent some time studying it and the mass of photographic gear. He was fortunate enough to find a little book of
maintenance instructions with the camera; he settled down to read this carefully. By tea-time he was ready to report to Lockwood.

“The way I see it is like this, sir,” he said. “There’s no doubt that we can take photographs of a sort. But they may not be very good ones. I’m not much worried about getting the strips lined up right. I’ve done that often enough before—I don’t think there’ll be many gaps when we come to make up the mosaic. I can teach Miss Lockwood how to change the film chargers on the camera. We can do the actual photography all right, I think.”

“I see. But the quality may be rather poor?”

The pilot nodded. “There’s that risk. I don’t say that they’ll necessarily be bad, because we shall all do our level best to make them good. But, frankly, sir, I know very little about the exposures and the apertures to give. Then there’s the developing—we must do a percentage of check developments to see that we aren’t wasting all our time and film. I don’t know a thing about that. Jameson can tell us a good bit when he comes through on his way home. It’s just a question if he can tell us enough.”

Alix said doubtfully: “I used to develop my own Kodak films, in the holidays.”

Ross said: “So did I. But this is a bit different to that.”

The girl stared at the mass of equipment. “I don’t see why we shouldn’t have a go at it,” she said. “After all, it can’t be so very different. Mr. Jameson ought to be able to tell us about the developing. And as for the exposures, we’ll just have to learn how much to give. There seems to be plenty of film.”

The pilot looked at the heaped piles of aluminium canisters. “There surely is. I should think he’s brought three times what was needed.”

“Well, that’s a good thing in itself,” said Lockwood.

The pilot sat for a few minutes, deep in thought. “Jameson will be back in three days’ time,” he said. “If we’re going to have a crack at this I’d like to make a flight to-morrow. I’d like to take a trial set of photographs with
different exposures and apertures, and get them developed before the ship arrives.”

The don said: “Why not wait till he comes?”

“The ship only stays for a few hours. I think we’d better have a trial first to find out the difficulties. Then he can tell us where we’ve gone wrong. We don’t want to find our difficulties when he’s gone for good.”

Lockwood nodded. “That’s good sense. Would you like to get the camera on board and do a flight to-morrow?”

“I think so. We can make a flight out over Brattalid, and perhaps pick out a decent site to camp.” He looked at his watch. “Six o’clock. If we’re going to do that, I’d better get the machine fuelled up this evening.”

Alix said: “Can’t that wait till the morning?”

The pilot got to his feet. “I think I’d better get on with it to-night. To-morrow morning we’ll have all that we can do to get the camera rigged up and make the flight before the fog comes down. We don’t seem to be able to count on flying after noon, these days.”

“I’ll come along and help.”

He smiled at her. “Don’t do that. You stay and get the place cleared up and make up beds of some kind for us. I’ll get a couple of the Eskimos to help. I may be a couple of hours.”

“All right. I’ll have something hot for you when you get back.”

He went out to find the boatman, and to locate the petrol store. In the hut the girl turned to her father. “He won’t rest,” she said.

Lockwood frowned. “I don’t think he’s looking very well. It’s bad luck about this fellow Jameson.”

The girl stood at the window, staring at the figure of the pilot going down the hill. “The work all falls upon his shoulders,” she said quietly. “There’s so very little we can do to help.”

Her father said: “We’re definitely ahead of time. Do you think I ought to make him take a rest? Do nothing for the next three days?”

She rubbed her finger on the window-sill. “It’s so difficult, because he’s always right. It’s obviously sensible to have this try-out of the photographic stuff, Daddy, before the ship arrives.”

The don nodded. “There’s the weather, too. I think he’d take it badly if we tried to make him rest while the good weather runs to waste.”

“I’m quite sure he would.”

In the end they decided to do nothing.

Ross went and found the Danish trading manager, and opened up the petrol store. It was three hundred yards from the jetty; he got a couple of Eskimos to help and carried a hundred and twenty gallons of petrol in two-gallon cans down to the boat. They rowed out to the seaplane and began to put it into the big tank.

It was nine o’clock when he got back to the hut, tired, sick and dizzy with the petrol fumes. Alix had hot soup waiting for him; while he was eating that in the dim light of a paraffin lamp she cooked him bacon and eggs, with fried potatoes and coffee. Presently he leaned back and lit a cigarette, rested and refreshed.

“Well,” he said, “I got her filled up. To-morrow we’ll get up early and take the camera on board, and fix that up. Who’s going to work it?”

He explained. “It goes in the cabin, at the aft end. There’s a round patch in the floor that comes away, and it goes vertically over that, with the lens looking out downwards. It’s semi-automatic, but it needs attention all the time. Would you do that, sir—or Miss Alix?”

The girl said: “I’d better do that, Mr. Ross. Daddy wants all the time that he can get upon the ground at Brattalid.”

Ross nodded. “That suits me all right.” He turned to the girl. “Look, we’ll just wash up these dishes. Then I’ll run over the camera with you, and show you what you’ll have to do.”

Half an hour later he settled down with Alix and the camera, and began to explain the rather complicated mechanism to her. He found that she had little mechanical
aptitude. She was immensely willing to be taught, but she found it very difficult to grasp the principles involved.

After half an hour she said despairingly: “I see why it has to make a record of the time and the height and the serial number on the edge of each negative. But I can’t see what the spirit levels are for, Mr. Ross.”