ess this land
which the Viking ship, discovered by us, was making so desperate an
effort to reach when death claimed her crew as its prey. The other
question, as to why the discovery of this land was suffered to remain an
unknown fact, is not by any means so easy to answer. Perhaps the man
before whose dead body the chart lay spread open upon the table may have
been its author and the original discoverer of this land; perhaps the
ship represented on the chart and the ship discovered by us may have
been one and the same; she may have been on her homeward voyage; and,
finding the channels to the southward completely blocked with ice, may
have been attempting to force her way back into the open Polar Sea when
her fate overtook her."

"But, admitting for the moment that such may possibly have been the
case," remarked the baronet, "how do you account for the fact that,
whilst she must necessarily have forced her way twice through the
ancient ice, she should have failed in her third attempt?"

"Her third attempt may have been made late in the season," answered the
professor. "But it is just possible that her final attempt may have
been to force not a _third_ but a _second_ passage through the ice. She
may have been attempting to return _southward_ instead of northward, as
I just now suggested. My impression, with respect to the vast field of
paleocrystic ice, is that at certain seasons--as when, for instance, two
or three very mild winters have occurred in succession in the Arctic
circle, followed possibly by exceptionally hot summers--it undergoes
partial disruption, splitting up, in fact, into several lesser fields
which drift for longer or shorter distances out into the open Polar Sea.
The fact that Scoresby, Penny, and Kane all beheld, at different
periods, an open Polar sea, tends to confirm this impression; and the
circumstance that the bows of the galley discovered by us were pointing
to the northward may be due, not to the fact that she was actually
making her way north when finally frozen in, but to the accident of that
portion of the field by which she was surrounded being subsequently
turned completely round whilst adrift. But what object do I see yonder?
Surely it is not a human habitation?"

It was, however, or at least had been, at some more or less distant
period. It was the roofless ruin of a once most substantially built
log-hut, measuring some twenty-five feet long by sixteen feet broad.
The roof h