So strange and uncanny was the place in which our sledge party thus unexpectedly found themselves that Phil was for exploring it and attempting to determine its true character at once; but practical Serge persuaded him to wait until they had performed their regular evening duties and eaten supper. “After that,” he said, “we can explore all night if we choose.”
So Phil turned his attention to the dogs, which he unharnessed and fed, while Serge prepared supper, and Jalap Coombs gathered a supply of firewood from the bleached timber ends projecting from the bank behind them. He tested each of these before cutting into it to make certain that it was not a bone, quantities of which were mingled with the timber.
The firewood that he thus collected exhibited several puzzling peculiarities. To begin with, it was so very tough and thoroughly lifeless that, as Jalap Coombs remarked, he didn’t know but what bones would cut just as easy. When laid on the fire it was slow to ignite, and finally only smouldered, giving out little light, but yielding a great heat. As Serge said, it made one of the poorest fires to see by and one of the best to cook over that he had ever known.
Although in all their experience they had never enjoyed a more comfortable and thoroughly protected camping-place than this one, the lack of their usual cheerful blaze and their mysterious surroundings created a feeling of depression that caused them to eat supper in unusual silence. At its conclusion Serge picked up a freshly cut bit of the wood, and, holding it in as good a light as he could get, examined it closely.
“I never saw nor heard of any wood like this in all Alaska,” he said at length. “Do you suppose this can be part of a buried forest that grew perhaps thousands of years ago?”
“I believe that’s exactly what it is,” replied Phil. “I expect it was some awfully prehistoric forest that was blown down by a prehistoric cyclone, and got covered with mud somehow, and was just beginning to turn into coal when the ice age set in. Thus it has been preserved in cold storage ever since. It must have grown in one of the ages that one always likes to hear of, but hates to study about――a palæozoic or silurian or post-tertiary, or one of those times. At any rate, I expect it was a tropical forest, for they all were in those days.”