All the 11 people in the crew work together to unfasten the dogs from the sleds, feed them and let them take a good rest.
After helping Kraus bundle his sleeping bag, Wegener lies down next to him and starts telling him stories about the British explorer Scott.
All of a sudden Sarter starts barking frightfully.
That is a sign of danger！ In the Arctic regions, there’s no other creatures except for strange human beings and polar bears that could frighten the dogs.
Both Wegener and Kraus bounce to their feet at the same time. The young man pulls out a gun and rushes out of the tent.
A white polar bear is approaching Sarter, who is calling desperately his human masters for help. Just as the bear launches his deadly strike on the dog, Kraus fires the gun. The bear gives up the dog and pounces on Kraus with dreadful roars. Seeing the wide mouth and sharp teeth of the bear, Kraus gets dumbfounded and remains still on the spot as if he were literally frozen on the ice field.
“Get down！”shouts Wegener. And as soon as Kraus gets down, Wegener shoots at the polar bear with his submachine gun.
The bear is startled. It stands on the field with its mouth holding up towards the sky. After a few more big roarings, it recoils and turns away.
The next morning after the attack of the polar bear, 8 members of the team tells Wegener that they no longer want to continue the expedition. They lost their courage at the threatening of the “demon of the Arctic”. They would rather go back as caitiff than head toward the north.
Wegener tries hard to persuade them to stay but all in vain. Two sleds change their directions and go back along the traces they left when they come.
“Let’s go！” says the brave Wegener. Though there are now only 2 members stay with him, he presses on the trip. The Arctic Pole is calling for him; his consciousness as a scientist is also calling for him. He cannot give up！
Wegener drives the dogs along two glaciers and heads towards the North Pole. He is running fast behind the dogs. Last night the polar bear scratched Kraus’s reindeer coat. In the polar field, losing the reindeer coat is like losing one’s life. A tiny hole in the jacket could freeze one to death. Wegener did not hesitate to offer his own jacket to Kraus. As for Wegener himself, he puts on Kraus’s torn coat. The holes in this coat have been mended, nevertheless the warm system of that coat has been destroyed. Wegener has to exercise a lot to keep himself warm in the polar field, where the temperature has dropped to 59 degrees below zero now.
Kraus, now dressed in Professor Wegener’s reindeer coat, is sitting on the sled with the other member of the team. He looks very gloomy and distressed. He is regretting for leaving his beautiful home in Berlin and coming to this horrible place as an explorer. The frustrations and hardships are beyond his imagination. He had wished to gain honor through his own efforts, and yet did not expect that the price was more than he could afford. He feels like he is in a tiger’s mouth, or at the door to hell.
He curses himself for his foolishness and stops the sledge without thinking. So Kraus, once the most enthusiastic explorer and follower of Wegener too abandons Wegener and his expedition.
Wegener is left alone in the vast ice field. He moves slowly yet steadily towards north under the gloomy sky.
V
Again the polar ice field reveals its ferocious side！
The gale blusters as if it had called out numerous reveling ghosts from hell that are fleering and bustling. Snowdrifts are swirling in the air and wrestling to the ground. Cracks in the glaciers sound like shrill of alarms！Icicles are whirling violently with the wind, like sharp knives are being thrown about by some crazy guys. The clouds become lower and lower and the sky, darker and darker. In this crevice between the sky and land, the snowstorm is like a monster which sticks out its cruel tongue and licks up all living creatures.
The icebergs are roaring and the land is echoing. What a horrible place！
The leading dog Sarter is running in the blustering wind and snow.
Wegener, sitting on the sledge in the leaking reindeer coat, seems to have turned a deaf ear to the roaring of the icebergs and the land’s echoing. His ears are filled with the soul-stirring music—Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5！
The symphony starts with the “Fate Motif”, in which Fate is knocking at the door violently. The “knocking” sound is so pressing that the motif immediately commands the listener’s full attention and brings an extreme intensity. As the symphony moves on, it gets more and more vigorous and brave. The icebergs are now playing the fourth movement of the Symphony in Wegener’s ears. He could hear the impelling tones of trombones, trumpets and horns, which are weaved together with the vociferations of people and bring along rapturous themes one after another: the march of the troupe, the call of the hero and finally the exhilarating dance of triumphs. The Symphony ends with a resplendent finale！
On the afternoon of Oct. 18, 1937, Wegener finally lands his feet on Cape Morris Jesup. The two Danish scientists, who are under the threatening of death due to the shortage of provisions tumble out of their shelter and welcome Wegener with a big hug.
Despite the two Danish scientists’invitation to stay, Wegener decides to return to the base camp. He leaves the food and fuel to them, with which they are equipped to get through the winter. In return, the two scientists present the most valuable scientific data to Wegener.
Darkness prevails the polar nights, with only a few stars blinking in the sky. Sarter, driven by his master, is leading the dogs in running and pulling the sledge in the direction of south.
The vast ice field is spreading ahead. Wegener is indulged in past memories. For over 30 years he has treaded on various places of the world. He has never ceased his quest for the mysteries of nature. He has gone through hardships that are unbearable for ordinary people, and yet at the same time enjoyed the happiness that ordinary people can hardly have. The most delightful thing in his life lies in the observation of nature, through which he studies all the things on earth and probes into the relationships between the universality and the particularity. He has devoted his life to continental drift theory and is yet not satisfied. He is determined to continue his quest and efforts until the theory is accepted by the whole society！
He then thinks of his wife Else, the daughter of the world famous meteorologist Wladimir K?ppen. She is so beautiful and kind, with outstanding intelligence and knowledge. For her, Wegener’s cause exceeds everything！ Deep in his heart Wegener feels that their souls are tightly linked together. Now that he misses her, he takes out a stone carving of musk-ox from inside of his jacket. This is a well-known artwork of the Eskimos. He plans to bring it back to Germany and give it to his beloved wife. He also plans to take her out for vacations after he finishes revising the fourth edition of The Origin of Continents and Oceans—they should go to the beautiful Vienna and the blue Danube at the foot of the Alps.
Wegener falls asleep and had a dream. In his dream the cumulus in the sky grows heavier and heavier until it is like an iceberg and begins to press on him. Snake-shaped thunders coming from the borders of the cumulus constantly strike the land. The land becomes thirsty and hungry. Suddenly the land beneath Wegener’s feet starts to tremble. Then there comes the roaring sound. No, it’s not the cracking sound of glaciers, but the pressing and crumpling sound of huge landmass. It is the soul-stirring sound that the continents make when they drift away...
Wegener wakes up in sharp pains caused by unusual fast heartbeats. He feels dizzy and wrenching heartache. His whole body is caught in great agony.
He calls the dogs for a halt. Sarter turns back to his master with a surprised look.
Wegener feels his body is shivering like the land that is experiencing the burst of a volcano. His heart is cramping as if someone were pulling it.
Time passes by second after second. The hero finally loses the last bit of strength in his struggling against death.
From the bleak ice field there comes the plangent sound of the land, along with it are the cracking sounds of the glaciers. Together they are tuned into Beethoven’s Hero Symphony.
Listen, all the wind and string instruments are giving out thundering music. This is the hymn to the hero; this is the movement of triumph！
Wegener lies on the ice field with his eyes looking into the sky. There’s no tear in his eyes and no sadness. There’s only a pity in his heart. His body temperature is dropping as the candle of his life is being blown out.
There in the sky appear the remarkab bright polar lights.
These are the most magnificent polar lights that ever appear in the North Pole region. They are extending to all directions from the sky and show varied colors. Now red, and then purple; for a moment they are like the glory of sunrise, in a while they turn into the blaze at sunset...they keep changing and showing their unparalleled splendor.
In the pupils of Wegener’s eyes, there are reflections of the splendid northern lights. It is as if Wegener were murmuring his last words to the sky and the icebergs, “Nevertheless the continents are moving！ Yes they are drifting！”
The Epilogue
Thirty years have passed. The Atlantic Ocean is still wavy, and the Greenland Island is still frigid. The blue earth is still rotating at the speed of forty thousand kilometers a day. However a radical change is taking place in people’s understanding of the continents. The continental drift theory resurrects and once again draws people’s attention after being left dismissed for 3 decades as a result of Wegener’s death and the rejection by the mainstream geological circles. Wegener is back to people’s heart.
Since the 1950s, following the discovery of the central valley of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, geologists find out that the Mid-Atlantic Ridge is part of the Great Global Rift, a continuous system of mid-ocean ridges on the floors of all the Earth’s oceans. Later Harry Hammond Hess, a notable geologist who served as the Geology Department Chair of Princeton University comes up with the famous sea floor spreading theories. Hess believes that the central valley of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge which runs several kilometers is the earth’s most vulnerable part. There the magma underneath the earth’s mantle is squeezed out and tears the sea floor, just like when a cork is pressed in a wooden plank. Then the magma cools down and forms new sea floor. This process repeats in cycles, and the magma continues to rise up the fractures, thus the sea floor spreads on both sides of the central valley in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. And because the continents and the sea floors are joined together, the spreading of the sea floors forces the continents to move accordingly.
In the summer of 1961, an undersea research project is being carried out jointly by scientists from France and the U.S. in the central sea area of the Azores Archipelago. An iron ball (the bathyscaphe) with a diameter of 2 meters is put in the ocean from the cruiser Bessel. The bathyscaphe can endure 3,000 atmospheric pressure and dive as deep as 2,700 meters under the sea. Through this submersible equipment, the French scientist Le Picho is amazed by the deep ocean creatures that have never been seen on the continent, such as the huge crab that weights 30 tons, strange creatures with eyes growing on the end of long antennae, colorful sea lilies...But the most important thing is that scientists find a totally strange marine world. Under the searchlight of the bathyscaphe, there seems to be some egg yolk-like stuff spilled all over the ocean floor. Calculations of the sample rocks on the ocean floor indicate that they are as young as less than 100 million years old, while the continents are in 4.6-billion-year age. No doubt that these findings are the most convincing evidences of the sea floor spreading theories.
On the basis of the sea floor spreading theories, in 1965, the Canadian geophysicist John Tuzo Wilson brings forth the theory of plate tectonics, which is a revolutionary achievement in the geological science. Wilson studies the data collected in research projects of the mid-Atlantic ridge, and proves that the out layers of the Earth are broken up into 6 major “plates” and numerous small pieces. The magma gushes from the boundaries between the plates and forces the plates to move. When two plates collide head-on, one plate goes up to the top and the other is forced to go down, causing a descending convection current that sucks down the ocean floor where the deep sea trenches form. Collisions between plates also lead to big earthquakes and burst of volcanoes. This is all because the plates (both the continents and sea floors) ride on top of the mobile lavabed, and it is the very cause of the continental drift that Wegener has been seeking so hard.
It is now clear that the sea floor spreading, the plate tectonic and the continental drift are three aspects of the same issue. The continental drift is the inevitable result of plate tectonics and sea floor spreading. The “geopoetry” finally turns into reality！
Once again the continental drift theories draw the close attention of the geological circle.
Numerous symposiums and lectures are held on which continental drift becomes the hottest topic. Over 6,000 papers published in various countries address this topic. The continental drift theory is revived in the West and is still active today. In recent years, chapters on plate tectonics have been added to the geological textbooks in many countries. In some universities even special course programs focusing on continental drift have been developed.
In the history of earth science, there has never been any theory that has been so widely discussed and referred to as the continental drift theory is. It is addressed in various languages and on a wide range of academic and science publications. Along with this Wegener’s name is spread all over the world. He is acclaimed as a great scientist, prophet and explorer.
Wegener’s contribution and achievements shall never be forgotten by the people, ever！