CHAPTER XIX

At the North Pole Don worked with feverish intensity, spurred on, not only by curiosity, but by a tingling feeling that he was on the brink of some important discovery. He had heard of bottles that had been thrown overboard, sometimes by shipwrecked sailors in the hope that they might somewhere reach others, carrying their messages of their plight, sometimes for scientific purposes to test the drift and direction of currents. Possibly this was one of those; perhaps it contained a story of some tragedy of the sea. I…