Atlantis Found Read Online Free PDF

become jammed in the ice. After running a mile and a half, everyone was ready to collapse from exhaustion. The shouts of their shipmates on the Paloverde, begging them to hurry, urged them to greater efforts. Then, abruptly, it seemed that their struggle to gain the ship had ended in vain. The last crack in the ice before they could reach the safety of the Paloverde nearly defeated them. It had widened to twenty feet, too far for them to leap over, and was spreading at a rate of a foot every thirty seconds.
    Seeing their predicament, the Paloverde ’s second mate, Asa Knight, ordered the men on board to lower a whaleboat over the side, and they manhandled it across the ice to the fissure, which had now increased to nearly thirty feet. Heaving and pulling the heavy boat, the crew struggled to save the captain and his wife and their shipmates before it was too late. After a herculean effort, they reached the opposite edge of the fissure. By then, Mender, Roxanna, and the others were standing knee-deep in water that was coming up through the ice.
    The boat was quickly pushed into the freezing water, and the men rowed it across the rapidly expanding river in the ice, to the vast relief of those minutes away from death on the other side. Roxanna was lifted over the side first, followed by the rest of the crew and Mender.
    “We owe you a great debt, Mr. Knight,” said Mender, shaking his second mate’s hand. “Your daring initiative saved our lives. I especially thank you on behalf of my wife.”
    “And child,” Roxanna added, as two crewmen wrapped her in blankets.
    He looked at her. “Our child is safe on the ship.”
    “I wasn’t talking about Samuel,” she said, through chattering teeth.
    Mender stared at her. “Are you telling me you’re with child again, woman?”
    “I think about two months.”
    Mender was appalled. “You went out on the ice in a storm knowing you were pregnant?”
    “There was no storm when I set out,” she said with a weak grin.
    “Good Lord,” he sighed, “what am I to do with you?”
    “If you don’t want her, Captain,” said Bigelow jovially, “I’ll be happy to have her.”
    Despite the fact that he was chilled to the bone, Mender laughed as he hugged his wife, nearly crushing the breath out of her. “Do not tempt me, Mr. Bigelow, do not tempt me.”
     
HALF an hour later, Roxanna was back on board the Paloverde, changed into dry clothing and warming her body around the big brick-and-cast-iron stove used to melt whale blubber. Her husband and crew did not spare any time for creature comforts. The sails were hurriedly removed from the hold where they had been stowed, and were carried into the rigging. Soon they were unfurled, the anchors were pulled off the bottom, and, with Mender at the helm, the Paloverde began to thread her way through the melting water between huge icebergs toward the open sea again.
    After enduring six months of cold and near starvation, the captain and crew were free of the ice and headed home, but not before they had filled her casks with seventeen hundred barrels of sperm oil.
    The strange obsidian skull that Roxanna had taken from the frozen Madras went on the family mantel of their home in San Francisco. Mender dutifully corresponded with the current owners of the Skylar Croft Trade Company of Liverpool, who were operating under a new name, and sent off the logbook, giving the position where they had found the derelict ship on the shore of the Bellingshausen Sea.
    The sinister and dead relic of the past remained in frigid isolation. An expedition consisting of two ships was mounted from Liverpool in 1862 to recover the Madras ’s cargo, but neither ship was ever seen again and were presumed lost in the great ice floe around Antarctica.
    Another 144 years would pass before men were to rediscover and set foot on the decks of the Madras again.

PART ONE
    AS CLOSE TO HELL AS YOU CAN GET

1
    MARCH 22, 2001
PANDORA, COLORADO
     
THE WANING STARS IN the