66 Poor Northbrook! His ill-luck surely held right through. Listen to this.

66

Many a criminal has put his neck in the noose by being too grasping," answered the detective. "Northbrook was a wise man. Insurance companies ask very awkward questions sometimes."

د,

"I suppose you are right, said Mr Peabody. "I say, Thesiger, I wish we had Costello here. He would appreciate all this. After all, it was his deductions from the finger that set us thinking seriously."

"Good Lord! I had almost forgotten about the finger," cried Thesiger, starting up. "My youngsters gave me their report just before I left, and I haven't had time to look at it yet. Here it is." He put his hand in his pocket, and producing an official-looking envelope, tore it open and glanced at the contents. As he read he began to smile, then to chuckle, and finally he burst into an uncontrollable fit of laughter.

"What's the joke?" asked Mr Peabody, feeling rather out of it.

to

666

'SIR,-We have the honour report that, after a prolonged investigation lasting over three months and involv

ing a large amount of correspondence with foreign shipping companies, we have ascertained that an accident occurred on 15th September 1906 on board the s.s. Kobe Maru of the Nippon Yusen Kaisha Line, when she was leaving Cork Harbour, where she had put in the previous day to repair a slight defect in her engineroom. Her log states that she was proceeding to sea on the last of the ebb tide, the weather being hazy at the time, when at 6.30 A.M. one of the stewards, who was cutting up bread with a slider for the officers' break

fast, had an accident which involved the loss of three fingers of his left hand. The severed fingers were thrown overboard by the first officer after he had attended to the wound.

We have the honour to be,

Sir,

Your obedient servants, JOHN SMITH, RICHARD YATES.'"

"The devil," cried Mr Peabody, laughing in spite of himself. "Everything seems to be against me. But I swear I will use the finger in my story

How does it feel to be living on the top of the world-literally clinging to the slopes of the globe as it sweeps upwards towards the Pole, in the world's most isolated community, one of half-a-dozen human beings in a million square miles?

There are many claims to the doubtful honour of being an inhabitant of the most isolated settlement in the world-that spot on the surface of the globe most remote from the rest of humanity. But to one who has lived there, as I have, it seems that on all this earth there can be no more lonely spot than Craig Harbour, that barren cove on the southern shore of Ellesmere Land, the farthestflung post of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

We were, with the exception of two small families of North Greenland Eskimos brought down from Etah, the only inhabitants of the vast 76,000 square miles of Ellesmere Land, that last stretch of land before the Pole. Northwards no human being existed. It was thrilling to stand outside the tiny shack on the barren shore of Jones Sound and gaze northwards-to feel that for those seven hundred miles to the Pole, and a thousand miles and more down the other side of the earth into the Siberian plains, no human being existed. Westwards stretched

a million square miles in which no man dwelt, white man or native. We knew that it would be possible to leave the post and travel on the same degree of latitude completely round the earth before other humans would be encountered, and they a tiny tribe of two hundred Eskimos clinging precariously to the western coast of North Greenland. To the north-west lay a vast area which had never yet been scanned by the eye of white man, a huge expanse of frozen sea and barren island, stretching far out into the unknown. Southwards - to complete the orientation of Craig Harbour-lay three hundred and fifty miles of rugged ice and treacherous open water before one could reach Pond's Inlet on the northern tip of Baffin Land, itself almost as completely isolated as our own wretched habitation. There at Pond's Inlet was a small Eskimo village, a Hudson's Bay post, and a Mounted Police detachment. To the south for 700 miles stretched Baffin Land. In all its 210,000 square miles there were only 1400 Eskimos, half-a-dozen trading-posts, and two of our own.

When the lonely Arctic post was built a few years ago only half-a-dozen men formed its garrison. Then the following summer, when the supply ship Arctic called on her yearly

round of the posts, three of the men went southwards to build another post in Baffin Land, a thousand miles nearer civilisation.

It is impossible, by the mere telling of a story, to bring home the realisation of the utter desolation, the bitter loneliness, and terrible isolation of that post at Craig Harbour.

The Arctic left for the south soon after midnight on the 15th of August. The midnight sun shone weirdly through a heavy bank of mist lying over the pack ice. Not a sound could be heard in the harbour but the incoming tide swishing about the base of the stranded icebergs, and the creak of the Arctic's anchor chain as she prepared to sail.

We three, doomed to spend twelve long lonely months on Ellesmere before seeing another human face again, sat idly in the whaleboat alongside, exchanging parting sallies with the heavily-clothed figures leaning on the Arctic's rail. To us that old bluff-bowed whaler meant all civilisation. She was the only link between us and the outer world, and the warm glow shining up from her open hatchway seemed almost like the glow of our hearths at home. Sharp commands rapped out in the gloom, and the engines began to throb. A few minutes later the black mountains surrounding the harbour rang with the boom of the Arctic's siren, thrice repeated, and with her bows swung southwards the vessel slid off for the open sea.

VOL. CCXX.-NO. MCCCXXIX.

We sat in silence and watched her steam away, and then, each with thoughts he would not for the world have shared with the others, pulled for the shore. Half-way towards the post the Arctic's siren boomed again in the still night air a final farewell, her tall spars slid behind a big iceberg, and in a few minutes she had slipped into the mist of the Sound.

Once a year, usually in August, the Arctic struggled up from Quebec with her load of supplies for the mounted police posts in the Eastern Arctic, panting her way laboriously into each harbour as if the trip would be her last. She would stay a day, may be two, perhaps only a few hours, bringing a breath of civilisation into the lonely little community.

At Craig Harbour she did not linger long. The season was short, and in latitude of 76.50 degrees north it meant a long year's imprisonment should she get caught in the grip of the terrible Arctic winter.

Southwards, at the luckier settlements Pond's Inlet and Pangnirtung, on the shores of Cumberland Gulf, the ship stayed longer. There were other ships, too, down there in what seemed to us the southern waters of Baffin Bay; the yearly Hudson's Bay steamer, other trading vessels, an exploration ship now and then, a whaler, to make life pleasant. But for us at Craig Harbour there was just the one.

Living there shut off from the outer world in the frozen C

fastness of Ellesmere Land, the sound of the Arctic's siren as she ploughed her way slowly through the ice each summer towards Craig Harbour seemed to us more heavenly than the sound of Gabriel's trumpet will ever be. It meant to us more than can ever be realised or imagined in civilisation.

Remember, if that ship failed to arrive there would be no other, only twelve long weary months more of isolation, such isolation as few men ever know. Next to the intense desire for intercourse with our fellowhumans from the great "outside," it was the mail for which we longed the most.

Each summer, when the the harbour clears after ten months of gazing at nothing but ice from the windows of the tiny post, two of the three white men go down the coast to a point where, on a clear day, they can see a hundred miles with the glasses from the clifftop, far down the coast of North Devon Island to the southwards.

Then starts the vigil, the ceaseless nerve-racking strain of waiting.

Each morning these men climb, as I have done, to the top of the cliffs, a thousand feet above the sea, and strain their eyes southwards, hoping to catch a glimpse of smoke above the pack-ice lining the southern horizon or, luckier still, the black spars of the relief ship thrown in contrast against the shimmering white of a distant iceberg.

when the inevitable will happen. The treacherous ice will hold her, maybe crush her, stout as she is, as she fights her way through the ice-choked channels of Baffin Bay. Perhaps the great pack itself will grip her and force her, with its billion tons of irresistible weight, aground on the rocky Greenland shore or the shoals off southern Baffin Land.

Maybe one summer she will not get that far. There are treacherous gales and currents in the Strait of Belle Isle, and then, far up on Ellesmere Land, in the very shadow of the Pole, two broken-hearted men will pack their tent with the first signs of winter and return to the post at Craig Harbour to wait, if it is humanly possible, for the passing of another year.

There are two months of open water off the Ellesmere coast at Craig Harbour. Some years, when the gods are specially good, a fierce gale from the mountains drives the ice from the coast in late June. Other years, when the season is late, the ice never leaves the sheltered fiords.

As a general rule there is little variety in the view from the Mounted Police post built on the shore of the rocky covenothing to be seen from the windows but the wind-swept ice of the bay, ice pouring down from the mountains in the big glaciers behind the post, ice driven in from the west and piled on the open beach, ice everywhere, ice and wind-worn

There is no escape, no way of communicating with the outside world except by terrible sled journeys which would take two years to make. A sled journey of five hundred miles, an awful journey through a country devoid of human beings, across treacherous moving ice-pans, over steep glaciers to avoid stretches of black, icy, open water, and then what? A scattered village of Eskimos along the North Greenland coast, themselves seven hundred miles north of the nearest white post, and the most isolated natives in the world. And southwards? Just the same. A long sled journey, never yet made by white man, far to the westward to avoid the treacherous ice of Lancaster Sound, five hundred to six hundred miles of open windswept ice and barren island, and then only Pond's Inlet, with its trading-post, its Hudson Bay store, its handful of Eskimos, and its equal isolation from the world of civilisation thousands of miles to the south.

Ellesmere Land. Barren, half-covered with ice thousands of feet thick, swept by the terrible gales which bear down upon it unhampered from the Pole, huge glaciers which run their broad ghastly mouths into the sea every few miles along the coast, bare rugged cliffs, and naked stony valleys. That is Ellesmere Land, the home of three white men and a halfdozen Eskimos.

To be sure, here and there caribou moss grows sparsely. A few hardy Arctic flowers

spring up in the sheltered spots along the coast in the fierce warmth of the few short weeks of summer; but the nearest tree, even the nearest bush, is a thousand miles away, down somewhere on the edge of the Barren Lands, north-west of Chesterfield Inlet, on the mainland of Canada.

In late October at Craig Harbour the sun sinks down below the southern horizon and does not return again until the following February.

It seemed to us, watching the blood-red orb drop below the ice-cap of North Devon, sixty miles to the southward, during that first year of occupation, that the sun had gone for ever.

Day after day the light in the sky grew paler. The red afterglow at noon gave way to saffron and then to a faint light

above the southern heavens at mid-day. By December the last sunlight had departed, and absolute darkness reigned on Ellesmere.

During the lighter days of November and December the reflection in the heavens gave some respite. But on dark gloomy days, when the clouds were low or when mists from the black icy water of Baffin Bay swung inwards towards the land and obscured the southern sky, it seemed blacker than Hades on Ellesmere Land, and harder still to live.

Then the dreadful waiting, waiting, waiting each day for the sun to return, depressed by the curtailing of even normal activity, by the sombre stillness which lay over the frozen land,