The skipper and crew were literally "making hay while the sun shone," for there were more than twenty huge leviathans within a circuit of ten miles from the bark, and they proposed to have every one of them before the flocks of seabirds, or the bears, should find and destroy the stranded creatures. "We'll fill every barrel and be ready to sail home with our hatches battened down when the sea comes back," declared Captain Sproul. "And you are quite sure the ocean will return and float your bark?" queried the scientist, patiently, for he saw that it was quite as useless to explain what had happened to this hard-headed old sea-dogas it was to talk to Phineas Roebach. "You can bet your last dollar it will come back, Mr. Henderson," declared Captain Sproul. "Why do you think so?" asked the professor. "Why, the ocean always _has_ been here; ain't it?" "I expect so--within the memory of man." "Then it will come back!" cried the skipper of the _Orion_, as though that were an unanswerable argument. "But what do you call that up yonder?" asked Professor Henderson, pointing to the calm-faced earth rolling tranquilly through the heavens, while her satellite, the moon, likewise appeared. "We certainly are blessed with moons," said Sproul, nodding. "And mighty glad of it I be. As the day is so short now, and the sun is so hot, two moons to work by is a blessing indeed to us whalers." "And you don't consider that new planet anything wonderful?" Jack Darrow asked Captain Sproul. "Not at all. We often see what they call sun dogs; don't we?" "I have seen such things," admitted the youth, while he and Mark smiled at the old skipper's simplicity. "That double moon is like that, I reckon," said Sproul, and that ended the discussion. CHAPTER XXIX WHEN THE SEA ROLLED BACK The boys were interested in this novel kind of whaling; but they were more deeply interested in the possible outcome of the situation in which they, and their friends, and the fur-traders, and the bark's crew, were all placed. The tearing away of this piece of our planet, on which the boys and their companions now sailed, must end finally in some terrible catastrophe. It would be catastrophe enough if the torn-away world never returned to the earth, but sailed forever and ever, round and round its parent planet. Our heroes and their companions would then be marooned without hope of rescue on a fragmentary planet in space, the said planet doomed to become a mere lump of dead and frozen matter adrift in the universe. Professor Henderson set up the powerful telescope that he had brought, with his other instruments, all the way from the wrecked flying machine left in the crevasse of the great glacier, and busied himself in filling his notebooks with data relating to the movements of this new planet, and of the strange and remarkable incidents occurring each hour of their imprisonment on the island in the air.