Science fiction -- Periodicals; Science fiction, American -- Periodicals
For the two men were garbed as warriors, and their helmets and harness
and sword-sheaths were indisputably of Egyptian design.
There, however, the similarity between the two ended. The one with the
spear was big-muscled and burly; the other much slighter of build.
This latter, Craig guessed, had been fleeing with the girl when icy
death had overwhelmed them.
* * * * *
But he did not then try to go into that, the story that some sudden
cataclysm had cut short. His fervor, as an Egyptologist, was afire. He
was burning with eagerness to get these bodies back to the main base
of the Somers Expedition, some three hundred miles south. Into the
learned circles of Egyptology, of archaeology, they'd throw a
bomb-shell that would make nitroglycerine seem like weak tea.
Craig couldn't taxi his plane closer; he would have to carry them to
it; and to do this he began to carefully massage all the larger pieces
of ice from the girl's limbs and clothing, to make her lighter. At the
Somers base they could all be re-frozen, to maintain their perfect
preservation.
It was while he was diligently rubbing that he fully realized the
girl's beauty. Delicate, cleanly cut features; fine, large eyelids;
tiny, slender hands. Save for her icy pallor, she might almost have
been merely asleep as she lay on the snow.
Wes Craig finished massaging the girl and then went on and did the
same for the two warriors. For an hour he carefully and reverently
released them from the reluctant fingers of their icy death, and he
was a little tired from his exertions and his great excitement when at
last he finished and stood erect, resting. But he did not stand quiet
for long. A sudden gleam lit his eyes: a mad idea had come to him.
"Won't hurt to try!" he muttered excitedly, and the next moment his
lithe figure was running over the slippery ice bank to his airplane,
out of sight behind the nearby hillocks.
* * * * *
Wes Craig worked from a sub-base on his sole expeditions to chart the
various mountains and ranges in the islands off north-east King
Charles Land, within the Arctic Circle. He had only one partner, a
mechanic, who stayed behind on his shorter trips. And therefore all
manner of emergency devices were stowed in the cockpit of his plane: a
tiny folding tent, an amazingly light sled, a large store of
compressed food--and a large vial of Kundrenaline and a hypodermic
needle.
Kundrenaline was still somewhat of an unknown quantity in 1933. Kund,
the German, had developed it but a year before. The fluid was already
standard beside the operating tables of the world's most modern
hospitals, so valuable had its qualities proven to be. It had actually
restored life after hours of death. A complex mixture of concentrated
adrenaline and highly compressed liquid food, it gave a tremendous
stimulation to the heart, at the same time providing the body with
energy food to withstand the shock.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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