So Jensen was responsible for my knowing more about Greenland than most
people did. I knew there were about five hundred white people on the
island, as well as fifteen thousand natives. With radio warning of what
was about to happen, there was no reason why most of them should not
have retreated to the central plateau and have escaped destruction.
As we flew, hour after hour, without sight of land, I began to get
worried. The gasoline supply was getting low and there was nothing in
sight but the tumbling ocean. It finally dawned on me that I must have
set a course far south of the one I intended, unless Greenland had
disappeared beneath the waves.
I wrote a note and passed it to Jim, telling him that I had probably
made a mistake in direction and that I intended to turn at right angles
to our present course and fly directly north. He nodded his head in
approval after he had read the note, and I swept around in a wide curve
for a final desperate effort to reach land.
I am not sure what the result would have been if we had not got help.
I was staring steadily ahead when I felt a touch on my shoulder. I
glanced back and saw Jim pointing to an object in the sky a few miles
away, but approaching rapidly. For a moment I thought it was a bird,
and then I saw it was a gigantic Fokker monoplane. It circled above us
and I saw a man leaning out of the cabin window, making motions to us.
Jim handed me a piece of paper on which he had written, "I think he
wants us to follow them."
I silently nodded my head and started in their direction. As soon as
the observer noticed this he drew his head back into the cabin and the
last stage of our journey began.
Following the big Fokker was a simple matter, as long as our gas held
out. When an hour passed and then a second hour without sight of land,
I began to get nervous. If we dropped into the sea there was not much
chance of our being rescued.
When a blue haze appeared on the horizon and rapidly grew into a land
of great frowning mountains, I breathed a sigh of relief. Greenland
rose out of the ocean, with precipitous cliffs hundreds of feet high
against which we could see immense breakers dashing themselves into
spray.
* * * * *
We Start A Settlement
We continued to follow the Fokker, rising over range after range of
mountains. Some of the peaks must have been about eleven thousand feet
above the former sea level and stood out now bare and bleak with no
covering mantle of trees and vegetation. From the earliest history of
the world, they had been covered by the ice-cap, which had now melted.
There were great rivers and waterfalls in the valleys, and in sheltered
spots we could see masses of green which might be vegetation, though we
were too high in the air to distinguish details.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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