"Now, the equatorial warm and salt current enters Baffin's Bay as a
submarine current, while the cold and comparatively fresh waters of the
Polar regions descend as a surface-current, bearing the great ice-fields
of the Arctic seas to the southward. One thing that goes far to prove
this, is the fact that the enormous icebergs thrown off from the
northern glaciers have been frequently seen by navigators travelling
northward, right _against_ the current flowing south. These huge
ice-mountains, floating as they do with seven or eight parts of their
bulk beneath the surface, are carried thus forcibly up stream by the
under-current until their bases are worn off by the warm waters below,
thus allowing the upper current to gain the mastery, and hurry them
south again to their final dissolution in the Atlantic.

"Now, lads," continued the Captain, with the air of a man who propounds
a self-evident proposition; "is it not clear that if the warm waters of
the south flow into the Polar basin as an _under_ current, they must
come up _somewhere_, to take the place of the cold waters that are for
ever flowing away from the Pole to the Equator? Can anything be clearer
than that--except the nose on Benjy's face? Well then, that being so,
the waters round the Pole _must_ be comparatively warm waters, and also,
comparatively, free from ice, so that if we could only manage to cross
this ice-barrier and get into them, we might sail right away to the
North Pole."

"But, father," said Benjy, "since you have taken the liberty to trifle
with my nose, I feel entitled to remark that we can't sail in waters,
either hot or cold, without a ship."

"That's true, boy," rejoined the Captain. "However," he added, with a
half-humorous curl of his black moustache, "you know I'm not given to
stick at trifles. Time will show. Meanwhile I am strongly of opinion
that this is the last ice-barrier we shall meet with on our way to the
Pole."

"Is there not some tradition of a mild climate in the furthest north
among the Eskimos?" asked Alf.

"Of course there is. It has long been known that the Greenland Eskimos
have a tradition of an island in an iceless sea, lying away in the far
north, where there are many musk-oxen, and, from what I have been told
by our friend Chingatok, I am disposed to think that he and his kindred
inhabit this island, or group of islands, in the Polar basin--not far,
perhaps, from the Pole itself. He says there are musk