Sixty Days to Live (42 page)

‘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
½ Mile’, ‘
LONDON
18 Miles’, ‘
HATFIELD
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 7½ 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 23½ 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 Gervaise’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:

‘In that case we’ll still have to spend the rest of our lives like Eskimos, so it doesn’t seem that we’re much better off than we were before.’

‘Oh, yes, we are,’ Sam hastened to reassure her. ‘All London is ours for the taking. Houses, food, furs, jewels. Why, you’ll be able to sleep in the Queen’s bed at Buckingham Palace for the rest of your life, if you want to.’

‘That would be rather fun,’ she admitted. ‘I hadn’t thought of it quite that way. The whole idea of London being a city of the dead is so terrible, but I suppose we’ll get used to that, and once we do there’ll be all sorts of queer ways in which we can amuse ourselves.’

‘I think I shall make my headquarters in the British Museum, said Gervaise thoughtfully. ‘Some of the manuscripts may have been damaged by the water, which is tragic, but being packed side by side on their shelves the volumes can’t have suffered very much. It’s a little awe-inspiring, though, for a bibliophile like myself suddenly to find that the greatest library in the world is his for the taking.’

Suddenly Hemmingway began to laugh, and on Sam’s asking what had bitten him, he replied: ‘All our lives long we’ve been striving to make money. You and I, Sam, have been pretty successful. Gervaise and Derek haven’t striven so hard but a few months ago both of them would have found a few thousands apiece very useful. Now, all of us are billionaires—multi-billion
aires. The jewels in the Tower of London, the gold in the Bank of England, the script and securities of the greatest city in the world are all ours if we like to go and collect them. But we shan’t, because they’re utterly useless to us.’

‘Not quite,’ said Lavina. ‘The Koh-i-noor, or whatever the big diamond is in the top of the crown, would have a much more appropriate setting if I wore it in my hair.’

‘That’s all very well,’ grunted Derek, ‘but d’you realise that there’s not a horse left alive; and there’s not a partidge or a pheasant, nor even any eggs to restock the coverts.’

‘You’ll still be able to fish,’ Hemmingway consoled him. ‘Cut a nice hole in the ice of the Thames and put a light down it as the Eskimos do. That attracts the fish, then you can spear them.’

Derek gave him a supercilious smile. ‘Evidently you’re not a fisherman, or you’d know that that sort of thing isn’t fishing.’

Margery brought them all down to earth by suddenly remarking: ‘It’s all very well for you to talk about fun and jewels and living in Buckingham Palace or the British Museum and things like that, but you’re not being very practical. What we have to find are a few small houses which can be easily run so that there’s not too far to carry the food from their kitchens.’

‘That’s right,’ Sam nodded. ‘And, after all, what more do we want as long as we’ve got food and fire and comfortable beds to sleep in? I’m afraid we’ve rather overlooked the fact, too, that we’ve still got the best part of twenty miles to walk to London.’

‘Now we’re on the main road we’ll find plenty of houses to rest in,’ said Gervaise. ‘A great many of the jerry-built places outside London will have been demolished by the flood, like those cottages we came upon the other day, but I should think that most of the better built places will still be standing.’

He had hardly spoken when they came round a bend in the road and saw a good-sized house among some trees a quarter of a mile ahead. It was a two-storeyed building and a snowdrift, almost as high as the house, buried one wall. The roof was heavily covered and the only patches of mellow red brick which showed through the snow were under the front windows; but with a sense of fresh excitement they hurried forward, scrambled over the banked-up snow which hid a hedge, and approached the front door.

All the windows of the house had given under the pressure
of the water and stared at them blank and foreboding like the eye-sockets in a skull. The door had swollen from the wet so they had some difficulty in getting it open and, as Derek and Hemmingway forced it with their united weight, a mass of snow slid down from the porch upon the others. Shaking it off, they went inside.

There was a thin coating of ice on the floor of the hallway which crunched under their feet as they advanced and, just as they entered the first room on the right, Derek slipped and fell. The whole floor of the room was covered with a three-inch-thick layer of glassy ice from the flood water which had failed to drain away and stuck fast in it, at all sorts of odd angles, were its furnishings, which looked as though they had been hurled about by a typhoon. Actually, the flood water had only swept the ornaments from their places and floated the lighter pieces of furniture up to the ceiling until, on its receding, they had been left scattered about the floor. Long icicles hung from the ceiling and the walls had a satin-like sheen from the frost rime that covered them.

It was a sitting-room equipped with pieces typical of middle-class England during the last three generations. Lavina sat down on the sofa, which had remained upright, but she promptly stood up again, as its appearance was extraordinarily deceptive. With its rather worn cretonne cover it did not outwardly appear very different from any other sofa, but the whole thing had been water-logged during the flood and frozen afterwards so that it was now as solid as a piece of iron.

Margery had gone straight through to the back of the house and she called to them from the kitchen. When they joined her they found her in the larder. It contained the half of a cold chicken, some eggs, fruit and other oddments. The discolouration of the fruit showed that it had gone bad, although it was now frozen solid. The eggs were encased in a solid pack of ice as the flood water, which had filled the bowl in which they were, had had no means of draining away; while several broken plates and odd items of food lay half buried in the ice on the floor where they had been swept when the waters had gushed through the larder window.

They were all now ravenously hungry and Derek immediately suggested: ‘How about a meal before we go any farther?’

‘That’s just what I was thinking,’ Margery laughed, laying hold of the dish on which the chicken reposed to wrench it up from its bed of ice.

‘Don’t bother with that chicken,’ said Gervaise quickly. ‘It was submerged in the flood for forty-three days at least and it must have gone bad long before it became frozen. The eggs will be bad too. We must see if we can find any food in tins.’

In a kitchen cupboard they found some tins of sweet-corn and salmon; also some pots of jam, although there were no bread or biscuits with which to eat it. They were so cold that they badly needed a hot meal, so Margery said:

‘There won’t be any gas or electricity but I could heat up the sweet-corn and salmon if some of you will get a fire going in the sitting-room.’

Instead of going outside to see if there was a supply of coal or wood in a nearby shed, Derek, having found a chopper, returned to the front room and began to hack some of the lighter furniture to pieces: remarking as he did so that, as they would have the whole stock of Harrod’s, Maple’s and Hampton’s from which to choose at their leisure, they could well afford to use the stuff in their temporary quarters for firewood. Hemmingway, who had joined him and was busily applying the poker to a hideous Victorian cabinet, replied: