Page:Weird Tales Volume 12 Issue 05 (1928-11).djvu/17

the place they sought, the place of man's origin, lay hidden somewhere under the polar ice-fields of the north.

So it was that this news of strange ruins in the icy Arctic was as flame to tinder to his fanatic scientist's soul. On the strength of that news, using all his prestige and influence, he had managed to obtain backing for his expedition, which he confidently predicted would lay bare the last secrets of anthropology and throw a flood of new light on the past of the human race. So through the months that followed that first announcement the expedition's supplies and equipment were gradually assembled, and in the first week of July it took its departure from New York in the auxiliary schooner Delight, which had been specially chartered and fitted for the trip.

The party, when it sailed, proved to be a comparatively small one. It included, besides Dr. McQuirk, his only close relative, his sunny-haired younger brother David, who had long acted as his assistant; three archeologists and ethnologists from Eastern University's staff, Drs. Lowell, McGrath and Drivoli; and a field representative of the North American Museum named Chapman, who was to act as the expedition's radio operator. There were also three hard-bitten Canadians experienced in Arctic work who were to have charge of the new motor-sledges which would be used in penetrating the island's interior, while the ship itself was manned by New England officers and crew.

Four days after leaving New York the Delight touched at St. John's harbor, taking on the last of its supplies and then proceeding north along the Labrador coast and up Davis Strait. Daily the ship reported its position and progress by radio, but as it crept farther and farther north the calls of its powerful apparatus came fainter and fainter to the listening stations. By the time the schooner had passed through Belcher Channel and was threading its way northward through the maze of the Parry Archipelago, trouble was already being experienced in receiving its signals.

On September 4th, two months after the expedition's departure, a message from the Delight was received by the Canadian government station at Fort de Roche, announcing that the ship had anchored off the coast of Corson Island and that the scientific party was completing its preparations for the expedition into the interior. The motor-sledges had been tested and had worked perfectly, the message added, and a start into the island would be made soon.

Almost immediately after the reception of that message the thread of communication with the schooner was abruptly snapped, since a few hours later there burst out one of those intense electrical disturbances peculiar to the polar regions, which smothered all attempts at communication beneath an unbroken roar of static. For almost a week the static tempest raged before lessening. It was on the sixth day, when the crashing bursts were just beginning to subside, that a half-dozen Canadian stations picked up that brief, fragmentary message from the Delight which was to focus on the schooner the attention of most of the world.

It would be best, perhaps, to give that message verbatim, in the incoherent, static-broken condition in which it was first taken down. So it is presented hereinafter exactly as received at the time, just before midnight on the 10th, the records of it kept by the receiving stations having been collated and cheeked against each other.