THE DRIVE AGAINST DEATH
Two men stood on the bridge of a speeding ship in a place of ice and
fire. A storm rode with them, a tempest that shrieked and moaned and
tore, and around the ship seethed and tossed the waters of the furious
Antarctic Sea. Ice floes cracked and crashed. Giant bergs, staggering
under the lash of the gale, added the dull thunder of their impact to
the wild din.
Yet all the fury and clamor afloat paled in comparison with the
appalling splendor of that which was taking place on shore.
On the port side of the vessel, a scant league across the heaving
frenzy of wave and ice, lay land. Once a stark, bleak mountain range,
rising inland from its beetling shore cliffs, now it was gashed
and quivering in the throes of a terrific volcanic outburst. Rocky
hillsides were laced with streams of molten, iridescent fire. Above
them mighty peaks tottered and crumbled. The titanic detonations of
sundered mountains, with each new outpouring of the tremendous forces
struggling for release, drowned all the strident discord of shrilling
air and booming sea.
For a full score of miles along the inland range the mountain crests
had been riven to loose the internal torrents. Cascades of white-hot
lava poured down their calcined sides, in places streaming over the
foothills themselves, to be quenched in clouds of roaring steam where
the sea met them. Geysers of flame shot skyward from some of the more
lofty peaks, and spread out like the unfolding petals of monstrous,
unholy lilies, thrust into bloom from the underworld.
Above them loomed masses of vapor, rolling and shifting, and were lost
in the murk of the Antarctic night. Below, the raging fires lighted
land and sea for leagues, the colors of blue and green and violet
reflected back from the myriad facets of the whirling icebergs with
dazzling magnificence. Across the churning chaos, where every wave was
a dancing flame, each mass of ice a lustrous opal, six miles to the
west, the great fires shone against the cliffs and peaks of another
shore, that lay cold and quiet and snowbound.
Destruction, many hued and fantastic, menaced the ship in a thousand
glittering shapes, but she tore forward through the turmoil. A long
gray cruiser she was, her sides sheathed in steel, and with the Stars
and Stripes whipping from her bow.
One of the men on the swaying bridge, a blond and youthful colossus,
clothed from head to foot in skins of the white bear, leaned toward his
companion and lifted his voice to a shout, to carry above the screaming
pandemonium.
"Hinson, your friend spoke truly," he cried. "Here, indeed, are the
great fires." With a sweep of his arm shoreward, he indicated the long
arrays of flaming furies.
It was the first time for hours that either of the men had spoken.
Indeed, since the ship had entered this arm of the sea and come upon
the stupendous eruption of nature's vitals, there had been little
conversation aboard, with the exception of sharp orders and a few
subdued comments among the crew. Volcanoes they had expected to find,
but no such tremendous display as here confronted and overawed them.
"Now, this is Ross Sea. Back there to the northwest lie Mount Sabine
and Mount Melbourne. Here, where the great hills burn, is King Edward
VII Land," pursued the young man. "Yonder," he pointed ahead to the
south, "lies the pathway to Sardanes. Shall we be in time, old Zenas
Wright, or will the end have struck already?"
Zenas Wright, member of the American Geographic Society, one of the
first geologists of his day and world famous as an authority on
volcanic phenomena, tore his gaze unwillingly from the most splendid
exhibit of his favorite science his eyes had ever seen. He shook his
shaggy, white old head slowly.
"I can not tell, my son," he said. "Often the great changes of nature
are of slow growth, and may be months or years in the making. Again,
they are done in a day. An outburst of such violence as this one I've
never seen before. It would seem to me that the end must be at hand
down there, if not already passed. We must make haste."
He turned his short, wide-shouldered figure. Clutching the bridge rail
with mittened hands, he settled his ears again into the protection of
his great ulster, and feasted his eyes on a sight of which he would
never tire.
* * * * *
From the wheelhouse another man came onto the bridge. He was tall,
lean and weather-beaten with close-set eyes above high cheekbones,
and the alert and upright carriage of a soldier. For a moment the
three conferred, the newcomer tugging impatiently at his sparse, black
mustache, while he took in the scene around him with sharp glances.
"Speed, and speed, and more speed, Scoland," said the old scientist.
"Aye, speed," echoed the young giant, "all the speed in your good ship,
Captain, while yet there is open water. Yonder, ahead, the ice gathers
for the drive, and there we must needs go slowly. So speed while speed
we may."
Scoland nodded shortly and strode back to the wheelhouse. Down the
speaking-tube to the engine-room went his call:
"Crowd her, Mac, crowd her!"
"Aye, Meester Scoland, aye! But, mon, is she no doin' beautifully the
noo?" The grizzled MacKechnie turned from the tube in the bowels of
the cruiser, to bellow his orders among cursing, panting stokers and
sweating coal-passers.
For this was a race with death; not the death of one man, or of a
ship's crew, but the extinction of a nation.
Down this swirling pathway one of the men on the ship had passed once
before. No stout ship swam under his feet on that journey. He rode on a
careening iceberg. He was the fur-clad young viking on the bridge. His
name was Polaris Janess.
Born in the wilderness of the Antarctic by one of the strangest freaks
of circumstances, Polaris had reached manhood seeing no human being
besides the father who had reared him. When that father died the young
man started to break his way to civilization.
In his wild adventurings northward he had found Rose Emer, an
American heiress, lost in the snows. Where they made their camp an
ice floe broke up, and they were whirled down the coast to the south
again on an enormous berg. Inland, they had found the kingdom of
Sardanes--Sardanes, the mystical volcanic valley, set like an emerald
in the white fastnesses of the Antarctic, blooming with tropical
verdure, and peopled with a fragment of the ancient Greek nation, the
Hellenes, whose victories Bard Homer sang. And they were the first
people from the outer world of men to set foot there in nigh upon three
thousand years.
There a king would have wedded the American Rose, but Polaris fought
his way out of that valley with his dogs and guns, saving the girl, and
taking with them Kalin, the young high priest of Sardanes. The priest
had died in the snow-lands, but the man and the girl had come at last
to the ship _Felix_, Scoland's ship, from which the girl had strayed.
Long before they reached America, Rose Emer had lost a not-too-warm
admiration for the captain in a great love for the man who had saved
her. Scoland, the daring explorer, who had reached the South Pole in an
airship, saw the girl won from him by the man from the wilderness.
Fearing lest the girl was glamoured by the strange events through which
they had passed, and might come to scorn the half barbarian that he
was, Polaris delayed to wed her for a year, which he devoted to intense
study of men and their ways. Of books he knew much, and commanded many
languages; of men he knew little.
Before the year was ended came Zenas Wright, with a report from the
Smaley and Hinson expedition into Ross Sea, telling of a mighty
volcanic outbreak there. The scientist declared it to be an outpouring
of the fires which warmed Sardanes. With the going of those fires, he
asserted, the mystic valley was doomed to return to the wastes, and its
wonderful people to die.
"It is fitting that the man who discovered Sardanes should be the man
to save her," said Zenas Wright to Polaris, "and without you, who know
the way and the people, the trip would be well-nigh hopeless."
Polaris had responded to the call of what he deemed to be an almost
sacred duty. Still unwed, he said farewell to his Rose maid for another
long year, to start south and face the hardships and perils of the
Antarctic once more, and to fetch to America the two thousand or so
inhabitants of Sardanes, or as many of them as should be found alive.
With tireless haste a relief expedition was organized. Dogs were
brought down from the upper reaches of the Yukon. Men whose lives and
callings had inured them to the perils of the colds and the tempests of
the snow-lands were enlisted for the great errand.
Foremost among those who came to enlist for the venture was Captain
James Scoland. He came with a heart full of hot hate for the man who
had balked him, and whom he considered little more than a half-mad
barbarian. But he hid his hate well, and bided his time. With Polaris
Janess, the enmity that had been between himself and the captain was
a closed book. He had forgotten and forgiven. Scoland was a man of
unquestioned bravery, a born leader of others. Above all, he had the
knowledge of the Antarctic that made him an invaluable ally.
Polaris accepted his proffered services gladly.
Through the influence of Zenas Wright and of Scoland, the United States
second-class cruiser _Minnetonka_ was turned over for the use of the
expedition, and manned. All the great fortune his father had left him
Polaris had guaranteed in payment for the expenses of the expedition.
Danger and death lay before him. He would be a poor man if he returned.
He did not falter.
He stood on the deck of the rushing ship, his topaz eyes turned toward
the blazing, thundering mountains on the shores of Ross Sea. Their
weird lights shone on his handsome, high-featured face, but at times
he saw them not. Persistently there arose before him a picture of a
quaint old New England garden, bright with its sunshine, its phlox and
marigolds and honeysuckle. He looked again into the gray eyes of the
garden-woman; long eyes, wet with tears. He felt her soft lips cling to
his. In the moaning of the wind he heard again her sad voice pleading,
"Oh, Polaris--how can I let you go?" and a great gray dog that answered
to the name of Marcus stood by them, whining and ill at ease.
From his reverie the voice of Zenas Wright recalled him.
"The bergs are getting thicker," the old man said. "Stout as this ship
is, we will have to slow down soon, or risk worse than we've risked
already. You say the sea narrows down there ahead?"
"Aye, old man, it narrows, and then sweeps wide again, so wide that
from one coast you may not see the other for many a long day," Polaris
answered. When he spoke it was with the quaintness of expression that
had come to him from the pages of the "Ivanhoe" of Scott, a treasure he
had found among the few of his father's books that were not of science,
and over which he had pored and pondered lovingly through many years. A
few short months of civilization had not worn that custom from him.
Zenas Wright gazed aft. "Well, whatever happens to me now," he said,
"I've seen a sight to-day few men have ever seen."
He waved his old hand toward the spouting hills, which they were now
leaving behind him. "I'd like to study that eruption and write a book
on it," he added regretfully. Despite his age, and the long hours he
had spent on the bridge he left it with a vigorous springy step as he
went below.
At racing speed, wherever the way lay clear, the stanch _Minnetonka_
tore forward, her nose of steel pointed straight into the dark,
mysterious South, hurling her eight thousand tons through every
available gap in the ice flotilla with all the strength of her
twenty-one thousand horsepower.
Down the seas behind the vessel, faster and ever faster, crept the dawn
of a six-months' day.