June, 1916.
War had raged in Europe for over two years but as their chartered barque, the Margarite Ohlsen, nosed its way north past the fjords of Baffin Island, the war was the furthest thing from anyone's mind. Tarleton and his friend, Arthur Hatley, stood in the bow of the ship; binoculars raised and keeping an eye open for stray bergs. They were sailing up Cumberland Sound, their small ship merely a speck in the vastness dominated by lofty, windswept mountains.
On their starboard side – Hatley still insisted on calling it right just to annoy the sailors – the grey mountains of Baffin Island sailed past. They passed Thor Peak with its towering cliffs and soon after the huge serrated crags of Mount Odin, vaster than the mightiest castle, came into view. Even in summer, their peaks and upper slopes were still white with snow. It was a bleak, austere landscape, rocky and ice bound.
It was a mixed expedition the University had sent out. Historians and archaeologists looking for traces of Scandinavian settlements to prove that Baffin Island was indeed the Norse Helluland – Stone Land as they called it in their sagas. Ethnographers and medical researchers wanted to contact the indigenous Inuit peoples, partly to offer an immunisation programme but also to trace the origins of the legends the people told about themselves.
Geographers wanted to study the glaciers; biologists the Arctic animals such as caribou, Arctic hares and foxes as well as the numerous Ringed and Bearded seals whilst Tarleton himself was more interested in the geology and collecting as many different rock samples as he could.
The expedition was well equipped with no expense spared. A team of cooks and technicians travelled with them, together with handlers to look after the Siberian huskies. The centre piece was a mobile laboratory, prefabricated at Boston containing all the latest scientific equipment.
Tarleton was pleased that he'd been accepted.
The Margarite Ohlsen nosed into an inlet set between two rocky outcrops. A crewman sounded out the depths with a plumb-weight but it was a deep fjord. Their skipper, Captain Calderbank, was happy as this natural harbour was safe; unless the wind blew directly from the south-east which it very rarely did. The anchor rattled and the ship slowed to a standstill. The crew climbed the shrouds and, singing a shanty, furled the sails. Boats were lowered and rowed across to a shingle beach in the lea of the foothills of a mountain.
Over the course of the next few days everyone worked hard moving a mountain of stores and getting everything ashore before covering them with tarpaulins; setting up the mobile laboratory hut, as well as the large mess tent and storage structures and then pegging everything down against the ever present wind. Due to the Arctic summer, the men were able to work eighteen hours a day as the sun merely dipped below the horizon.
As soon as all the ground work was completed, the Margarite Ohlsen backed out of the fjord and carried on with its exploration of the coast. Captain Calderbank ordered signal flags to be lowered and the squares made vivid splashes of colour against the grey mountains and cloudy skies. All the scientists and crew waved the vessel off.
Only one man would ever see it again.
Dr. Philip Welham of History led the expedition. He was a tall, broad man, now in his fifties, but strong and well able to cope with the rigours of a 'field trip', as he called it, far from the safety of civilisation. During the spring and on the voyage up from Boston, he'd grown out his beard and now looked like a seasoned Viking warrior. He needed only a helmet and axe to look exactly like those seafarers who had landed on Helluland almost a thousand years before.
For himself, Dr. Welham's main interest was in the Inuit tribes of the island's coast and their myths, legends and ancestral beliefs. On an earlier trip back in 1909 to the coast of Labrador Dr. Welham had heard fables about lost cities to the north that had long since been covered by the ice cap. He thought that the legends referred to nothing more than abandoned Norse settlements on Markland, as the Vikings called Labrador, or Helluland and that the 'cities' referred to nothing more than stone built farmsteads or temporary shelters.
However, to the nomadic Inuit, even these structures would have seemed strongly built and over the centuries the scale of the buildings had grown in the Inuit imaginations. However, he relished the chance to delve further into the rumours and maybe establish the amount of interaction between the Viking pasturers and traders and the native peoples before these settlements were finally abandoned.
After making sure that the base camp was well founded and secure, the following day Dr. Welham led a smaller expedition further north up the coast. The men had to detour inland to avoid the fjords which bit deeply into the coast. However, their two Inuit guides, brothers named Chugach and Iluliaq, were very experienced and had spent many summers hunting seals and walrus along this rugged shoreline.
Tarleton attached himself to this trip as he wanted to collect samples of the igneous rocks in order to form a detailed geologic map of this little known area. Arthur Hatley, the biologist, also went in order to survey the Arctic sea birds that used the cliffs for their nests.
The first few days out were perfect. Both Tarleton and Hatley were struck by the desolation of the land. Towering cliffs, their pinnacles covered with snow dominated the scene. Rocky scree tumbled down their slopes. Glaciers, their surfaces slashed by deep unfathomable crevasses pushed down the valleys and into the sea where ice bergs drifted south. Their colours were otherworldly – shades of blues, greys, greens and purples vivid amidst the whiteness and the young men compared the larger bergs with fantastical castles or cathedrals.
And over it all howled the ever present north wind making Baffin Island's summer even shorter and colder than normal for its high latitude. The gales gusted down the mountains and the June days were barely above freezing whilst during the nights the thermometer dipped below ten degrees Fahrenheit.
Apart from low-growing mosses and lichens, there were few plants and the bleak rocky landscape looked inimical to mankind. As the group pushed ever onwards under the shadows of the mountains and cliffs, Tarleton began to feel that they had ventured far beyond the realm of modern man and into the sphere of far older beings. However, despite his misgivings, he carried on with collecting his samples and found some black pre-Cambrian basalts that he believed represented some of the oldest rocks in the world.
Apart from one camp-fire surrounded by seal bones at the head of a fjord they found no trace of any human habitation, present or past and the vast emptiness pressed down on Tarleton's spirits. However, Dr. Welham was not downhearted. As he told the group during one rest break, "Baffin Island is the world's fifth largest island and finding small settlements from a thousand years ago is like hunting for the proverbial needle in a haystack. And a rusty needle at that."
The two guides admitted they had never come across any ruins in the area but as that search was only a part of the reason for the trip, Dr. Welham did not think it was a waste of time.
However, on the fourth day out, the weather closed in. Initial flurries of snow became a full blown blizzard and the party trudged on, heads down, their breath freezing onto their fur-lined hoods. Only the huskies looked like they were enjoying the conditions until one of the sleds hit a rock just under the surface and overturned. The men stopped, righted the sled, fixed and greased its runner and sorted out the dog's tangled traces but it all took time. They broke for lunch in the lea of a glacial moraine before carrying on.
Skirting the edge of the Penny ice cap, the team's progress was next blocked by a glacier. The river of ice was deeply fissured and a bottomless crevasse split it. Carefully, with ropes around their waists and Iluliaq leading, the guides edged out onto the ice. They cast to left and right and tested the surface with their poles. Shaking their heads, the Inuits told Dr. Welham that there was no way over the glacier.
"So what shall we do?" Dr. Welham asked them.
They pointed to the west, inland. "We shall have to go around the ice," Chugach told him.
Tarleton and Hatley looked where the guides were pointing. Over the millennia, the glacier had gouged a valley through the mountains. However, there was a steep uphill slope that would require hard work to traverse. The Arctic wind blasted down through the mountains.
"How long is the glacier? How far have we got to go?" Dr. Welham queried.
The two Inuit looked at each other and spoke in their own language.
Eventually Chugach looked up at Dr. Welham. "When hunting, we stick to the coast – no reason to go inland. I think we go uphill we come to a patch where we cross the glacier."
Dr. Welham thought for a moment. "It's not like we have to hurry back. We're packing plenty of supplies. Let's go on."
Leading the way, Chugach and Iluliaq turned inland and followed the edge of the glacier uphill. The going was steep and the men had to put their shoulders to the sleds to help the dogs but as they climbed the men were rewarded with the most spectacular views any of them had ever seen. In the distance the Davis Strait separating Baffin Island from Greenland stretched pure and clean to the horizon. The waters were a deep cerulean blue speckled with icebergs and ice floes. A whale breached the surface before splashing down. Above them, the mountains soared sheer and tall, grey frosted with white, home to innumerable sea birds wheeling and diving and taking advantage of the short Arctic summer.
Closer to hand, their sleds skimmed over or crunched through the crystalline firn – the ancient snow that had thawed and refrozen many times. In places the firn was harder or softer depending on the weather conditions.
Despite the cold, the men were sweating as they manhandled the sleds up the hill. By their side, the glacier creaked and groaned breaking the silence like a soul in torment as it slowly slid on its journey to the sea. From time to time Chugach and Iluliaq made forays onto the ice but each time they said that the surface was still too fractured and dangerous to cross.
Onwards and upwards. Tarleton was struck by the idea that they might be the first white men to ever come this far as the old Vikings usually kept to the coast. He mentioned that idea to Hatley.
"As far as you know," said Hatley. "What about the old Inuit legends of long-lost peoples?"
Tarleton laughed. "Oh, those. Every culture has its ideas about vanished civilisations. Look at the Atlantis legends."
Hatley grunted as he helped shove the sled over a particularly steep incline.
"Have you ever read the Pnak...?" Hatley said, before hurriedly breaking off as he saw Tarleton's raised eyebrows. "Oh, just some old book Dr. Welham recommended I read. Part of it was a history about how the tall, grey-eyed men of the cities of Lomar fought and were defeated by the Inutos as the ice age started. Legend has it a watchman in a tower fell under an enchanted sleep.
"Of course, this happened many thousands of years ago and the names and geography have changed since then but, from his reading, Dr. Welham thinks that what is now Baffin Island could once have been part of Lomar. Before the ice sheets covered it all of course," Hatley added.
Tarleton laughed. "It all sounds a bit far-fetched to me. Grey-eyed men of Lomar. I mean, everyone knows there were no civilisations before the ice age. Society hadn't evolved beyond the Mesolithic hunter-gatherer stage by then."
Hatley glanced at his friend as they laboured. "There are some very ancient manuscripts and places in the world that give an alternative view," he said.
Before Tarleton could argue further, the ground levelled out. The huskies took up the strain, the sled surging forwards with a jolt. The mountain flattened out to reveal a vast rocky plateau covered with boulders and debris. The ever present wind had scoured the terrain clear of snow.
"Looks almost like Leng, don't you think, Arthur?" Dr. Welham said in an undertone to Hatley.
Tarleton wasn't sure what Dr. Welham meant by that although he was aware that the professor had visited Mongolia back in 1898, returning in 1913 with Hatley and others and come back with some strange and inexplicable artefacts which he had only shown to a select handful of enquirers. According to University rumour, these were now stored in closely guarded vaults beneath the Library.
"Sarkia fits the bill better, don't you think?" Hatley replied after a moment.