I forgot to mention that while we were limping across the sea one of
us—I believe it was the radioman—noticed on the shore what looked like
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a house or a wooden towerlike structure. It disappeared round a bend
when we came inshore. It may have been a landmark, one of those
structures raised on a shore which is seldom visited by ships. If so, it
could be of little use to us. But if it was not?
On the other hand, we could stay where we were, and after our meal,
lie down again among the rocks, choosing a cosy, sheltered spot,
relaxing and gazing at the bluish ice-floes drifting past with the water
running off them, glistening and tinkling. But our radio, worse luck, was
smashed, and no matter what the dogged radioman did to it, it stayed
mute as a stone.
In short, there was nothing for it but to push on. Where to?
Obviously, towards the landmark, which might prove to be an electric
lighthouse or a fog-warning station or something else of that kind.
'But first of all,' I said to the navigator, 'where are we?'
It took him no less than a quarter of an hour to answer that question;
he gave coordinates which though differing from those I had named
when Ledkov had asked me where I thought the remains of Captain
Tatarinov's expedition could be found, were so close to that point—the
point on which I had put my finger on Ledkov's map— that I couldn't
help looking round me, as if expecting to see the Captain himself
standing within two paces of me, behind that rock there...
__________
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PART TEN
THE LAST PAGE
CHAPTER ONE
THE RIDDLE IS SOLVED
Another book would have to be written to fully describe how Captain
Tatarinov's expedition was found. Strictly speaking I had very many
clues, much more than, for instance, the famous Dumont d'Urville had,
when, as a boy, he showed with amazing accuracy where he would find
La Perouse's expedition. I had it easier than he, because the life of
Captain Tatarinov was closely interwoven with my own, and the
conclusions which these clues led to concerned me as well as him.
This is the route he must have taken if it be accepted that he returned
to Severnaya Zemlya, which he had named Maria Land: from 79°35'
latitude, between meridians 86 and 87, to Russian Islands and the
Nordenskjold Archipelago. And then, probably after wandering around
a good deal, from Cape Sterlegov to the mouth of the Pyasina, where the
old Nenets had come across the boat on the dog-sledge. Then to the
Yenisei, because the Yenisei was his only hope of finding people and
assistance. He had kept to the seaward of the offshore islands, going in
as straight a line as possible.
We found the expedition, or rather what remained of it, in an area
over which our planes had flown dozens of times, carrying mail and
passengers to Dickson, and machinery and merchandise to Nordvik, and
conveying parties of geologists prospecting for coal, oil and ores. If
Captain Tatarinov were to come to the mouth of the Yenisei today he
would meet dozens of great seagoing ships. On the islands which he
passed he would have seen today electric lighthouses and radar
installations, he would have heard nautophones guiding ships during a
fog. Some three or four hundred kilometres farther upstream he would
have come on the Arctic Circle Railway linking Dudinka with Norilsk.
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He would have seen new towns which had sprung up around oil fields,
mines and sawmills.
I mentioned earlier that I had been writing to Katya from the moment
I arrived in the North. A heap of unposted letters were left at N. Base
which I had been hoping we would read together after the war. These
letters were like a diary kept, not for myself, but for Katya. I will quote
from them only those passages which describe how we found the
camping site.
'1. I was astonished to learn how close life had come up to this place,
which had always seemed to me so infinitely far away. It lies within a
stone's throw of the Great Sea Route and you were quite right when you
said that they had not found your father because they had never looked
for him. Between the lighthouse and the radio station there is a
telephone line, a permanent one on poles. Mines are being worked ten
kilometres to the south, and if we hadn't discovered the camp site the
miners would have stumbled upon it sooner or later.
'It was our navigator who first picked up the piece of canvas from the
ground. Nothing surprising about it! You can pick up all kinds of stuff
on a seashore. But this was a canvas strap you harnessed yourself in to
haul a sledge. But when the gunner found the aluminium lid of a
saucepan, and a dented tin containing balls of string, we divided the
hollow between the hills and the ridge into a number of squares and
started going over them—each man his own square.
'I remember reading somewhere that a single inscription carved on a
stone had helped scholars to reveal the life of a whole country which had
perished long before our own era. Now this place, too, gradually came to
life before our eyes. I was the first to spot the canvas boat, or rather to
guess that this flattened pancake thicking out of the eroded earth was a
boat; moreover, a boat resting on a sledge. In it lay two guns, a skin of
some kind, a sextant and a pair of field-glasses, all rusty, covered with
mould and moss. By the ridge which protected the camp from the sea,
we found various articles of clothing, among them a mouldering
sleeping-bag made of reindeer-skin. Evidently a tent had been pitched
