"A copper urn," he said, passing it to Roxanna, who held it up in the brighter light of the steerage compartment. "Beautifully sculpted. Greek or Roman, if I'm any judge of antiquity."
Bigelow removed and passed several more artifacts through the open door. Most of them were small copper sculptures of strange-looking animals with black opal eyes. "They're beautiful," whispered Roxanna, admiring the designs that had been sculpted and etched into the copper. "They're nothing like anything I've seen in books."
"They do look unusual," agreed Mender.
"Are they of any value?" asked Bigelow.
"To a collector of antiquities or a museum maybe," answered Mender. "But I seriously doubt any of us could get rich off them…" He paused as he held up a life-size human skull that gleamed black in the veiled light. "Good Lord, will you look at this?"
"It's frightening," muttered Bigelow.
"Looks like it was carved by Satan himself," murmured a crewman in awe.
Totally unintimidated, Roxanna held it up and stared into the empty eye sockets. "It has the appearance of ebony glass. And see the dragon coming out between its teeth."
"My guess, it's obsidian," observed Mender, "but I couldn't begin to presume how it was carved-" Mender was interrupted by a loud crackling sound, as the ice around the stern of the ship heaved and grumbled.
One of the crew dropped down the stairway from the upper deck, shouting, his voice high-pitched and harsh. "Captain, we must leave quickly! A great crack is spreading across the ice and pools of water are forming! I fear if we don't hurry, we'll be trapped here!"
Mender wasted no time in questions. "Get back to the ship!" he ordered. "Quickly!"
Roxanna wrapped the skull in her scarf and tucked it under one arm.
"No time for souvenirs," Mender snapped at her. But she ignored him and refused to let go of the skull.
Pushing Roxanna ahead of them, the men hurried up the stairway to the main deck and dropped down onto the ice. They were horrified to see that what had been a solid field of ice was now buckling and breaking up into ponds. Cracks turned into meandering streams and rivers as the seawater poured up through the ice onto the floe. None of them had any idea the floe could melt so fast.
Skirting the upheaved masses, some of them forty feet high, and leaping across the cracks before they widened and made crossing impossible, the crew and Roxanna ran as if all the banshees of hell were after them. The macabre, indescribable sounds of the ice grinding against itself struck terror in their minds. The going was exhausting. At every step their feet sank six inches into the blanket of snow that had accumulated on the level stretches of the floe.
The wind began to pick up again, and incredibly it felt warm, the warmest air they had felt since the ship had become jammed in the ice. After running a mile and a half, everyone was ready to collapse from exhaustion. The shouts of their shipmates on the Paloverde, begging them to hurry, urged them to greater efforts. Then, abruptly, it seemed that their struggle to gain the ship had ended in vain. The last crack in the ice before they could reach the safety of the Paloverde nearly defeated them. It had widened to twenty feet, too far for them to leap over, and was spreading at a rate of a foot every thirty seconds.
Seeing their predicament, the Paloverde's second mate, Asa Knight, ordered the men on board to lower a whaleboat over the side, and they manhandled it across the ice to the fissure, which had now increased to nearly thirty feet. Heaving and pulling the heavy boat, the crew struggled to save the captain and his wife and their shipmates before it was too late. After a herculean effort, they reached the opposite edge of the fissure. By then, Mender, Roxanna, and the others were standing kneedeep in water that was coming up through the ice.
The boat was quickly pushed into the freezing water, and the men rowed it across the rapidly expanding river in the ice, to the vast relief of those minutes away from death on the other side. Roxanna was lifted over the side first, followed by the rest of the crew and Mender.
"We owe you a great debt, Mr. Knight," said Mender, shaking his second mate's hand. "Your daring initiative saved our lives. I especially thank you on behalf of my wife."
"And child," Roxanna added, as two crewmen wrapped her in blankets.
He looked at her. "Our child is safe on the ship."
"I wasn't talking about Samuel," she said, through chattering teeth.
Mender stared at her. "Are you telling me you're with child again, woman?"
"I think about two months."
Mender was appalled. "You went out on the ice in a storm knowing you were pregnant?"
"There was no storm when I set out," she said with a weak grin.
"Good Lord," he sighed, "what am I to do with you?"
"If you don't want her, Captain," said Bigelow jovially, "I'll be happy to have her."
Despite the fact that he was chilled to the bone, Mender laughed as he hugged his wife, nearly crushing the breath out of her. "Do not tempt me, Mr. Bigelow, do not tempt me."
Half an hour later, Roxanna was back on board the Paloverde, changed into dry clothing and warming her body around the big brick-and-cast-iron stove used to melt whale blubber. Her husband and crew did not spare any time for creature comforts. The sails were hurriedly removed from the hold where they had been stowed, and were carried into the rigging. Soon they were unfurled, the anchors were pulled off the bottom, and, with Mender at the helm, the Paloverde began to thread her way through the melting water between huge icebergs toward the open sea again.
After enduring six months of cold and near starvation, the captain and crew were free of the ice and headed home, but not before they had filled her casks with seventeen hundred barrels of sperm oil.
The strange obsidian skull that Roxanna had taken from the frozen Madras went on the family mantel of their home in San Francisco. Mender dutifully corresponded with the current owners of the Skylar Croft Trade Company of Liverpool, who were operating under a new name, and sent off the logbook, giving the position where they had found the derelict ship on the shore of the Bellingshausen Sea.
The sinister and dead relic of the past remained in frigid isolation. An expedition consisting of two ships was mounted from Liverpool in 1862 to recover the Madras's cargo, but neither ship was ever seen again and were presumed lost in the great ice floe around Antarctica.
Another 144 years would pass before men were to rediscover and set foot on the decks of the Madras again.
PART ONE
AS CLOSE TO HELL AS YOU CAN GET
1
The waning stars in the early-morning sky blazed like a theater marquee when seen from 9,000 feet above sea level. But it was the moon that had a ghostly look about it as Luis Marquez stepped from his little wooden frame house. It wore a curious orange halo that he had never seen before. He peered at the odd phenomenon for a few moments before walking across the yard to his 1973 Chevy Cheyenne 4X4 pickup truck.
He had dressed in his work clothes and slipped quietly out of the house so as not to wake his wife and two daughters. His wife, Lisa, would have gladly gotten up and fixed breakfast and a sandwich for his lunch pail, but he insisted that 4:00 A.M. was too early for anyone but a mental case to be roaming around in the dark.
Marquez and his family lived simply. With his own hands, he had remodeled the house that had been built in 1882. His children went to school in nearby Telluride, and what he and Lisa couldn't buy in the booming resort ski town, they brought home during monthly shopping trips to the larger ranch community of Montrose, sixty-seven miles to the north.