INTO THE UNKNOWN
Southward, ever southward, the floating glory of the jeweled tide
bore them. Fast as they went, the wind-urged waters raced by them
faster still. Steel-blue surges, mountain high, tore by their refuge
in endless rush. From a sky gale-swept of all clouds, the sun shone
steadily through nightless days.
Fragment after fragment of the drifting floe was rasped away and
ground to splinters among the staggering icebergs. As it dwindled in
dimensions, its revolving movement increased, until it reeled onward
like a giant gyroscope, and they who rode it grew giddy with its whirl.
Around them nature played her heart-shaking music, and spread over
glittering tide and snow-splashed icebergs the wondrous, iridescent
filaments reflected from the facets of her monstrous gems.
Then, as suddenly as it had risen, the wind died away. Cloudheads arose
and overcast the sky, the ragged waves smoothed into long rollers, and
their frightful pace was abated, although they continued to ride south
with a strong tide.
A few hours later it seemed that the wind had been to the end of the
world and had turned to hurry northward again, for it began to beat up
steadily from ahead of them, but not strongly enough to overcome the
tide it had set with it in its headlong dash.
To their left, far away, they could catch occasional glimpses of a
jagged coast-line. Out to the right little was to be seen but the
tossing flotilla of bergs, gradually fretting away into tide ice.
With the return of the wind from the south, Polaris was puzzled to note
once more the recurrence of a phenomenon over which he had pondered
often. The air was growing warmer!
Another manifestation came; more puzzling by far than that of the
warming breeze. One day they awoke and found the air filled with
drifting white particles. As far as the eye could see it seemed that a
shower of fine snow was falling. But the storm was not of snow!
Settling weblike in the crannies of the ice, filming the crests of the
waves, hanging impalpably in the breeze, it was ashes that was falling!
Whence came this strangest of all storms? Polaris and Rose Emer stared
at each other, completely at a loss.
"If we are to go far enough, we are to find out some great new thing,
lady," said the man.
* * * * *
Soon after the battle with the bears they had abandoned the first
iceberg. The floe had broken away on that side until the berg's sheer
side was opposed to the fury of the wind and waves, and Polaris feared
that it would topple under the constant impact with other bergs, and
pitch them into the tide.
They crossed the narrow path to the twin berg, threaded the pass of the
bears, and found on the farther side a cavern in the ice, partly filled
with drift snow, where the animals had made their lair. There they were
now confined, as in a castle. The plane of the floe had all been beaten
away. Even the ridge between the bergs was gone, and the waves rolled
between the twin towers of ice, still held together beneath the surface
of the waters by a bond that no crash had severed.
The wind subsided, but the air remained warm. No longer were they
within the realm of eternal ice, for, outside their prison, the
surfaces of the revolving bergs at times actually dripped. The ice was
thawing!
Then a kink in the current caught them and shot them straight to shore.
From the crest of their watchtower, Polaris and the girl viewed the
approach. Along the shore-line for miles the drift ice lay like a scum
on the water, with here and there the remnant of a mighty iceberg
jutting up. Of those, their own refuge was the largest remaining.
Beyond the drift ice the land seemed covered with heavy snow, and far
inland were hills. To the northward, perhaps a mile, a mountain range
that seemed like a mighty wall curved from the horizon to the lap of
the sea, and terminated at the water's edge in a sheer and gleaming
face, many hundred feet high. Just ahead a promontory extended out
toward them, and beyond it lay a cove. The heavens to the southward
were piled with dull cloud-banks that curled and shifted in the slow
wind.
"It may be that this will be a rough landing, lady," said Polaris. "Our
tower is going to pieces, and here we may not stay. I will make ready
the sledge. We must cross the drift ice to the shore in some manner."
He packed their stores on the sledge, with the robes and all that made
their little camp, and hauled everything to what seemed the most solid
portion of the berg. Instinctive seemed the wisdom that guided the man.
The twin bergs, driven on by the last impulse of the current, plowed
through the drift ice like a stately ship, and were broken asunder
across the point of the promontory. Their revolutions laid them right
across the snow-covered point of land.
As they swung on, the berg which they had quitted was southernmost.
There was a dull shock of impact, and beneath their feet the solid
ice quivered. The farther berg pushed on around the point in a swirl
of foam and ice. Their own ice castle swung to the north side of the
promontory, keeled over at a terrifying angle, and began to settle.
Above them loomed the beetling masses of ice with the dark shadow of
the cave mouth. Below was the nose of the promontory, covered deep with
snow. Farther and farther leaned the berg.
"We have but a moment!" cried Polaris. "We must leap. The berg will
fall on the land or slide into the sea. It is turning over!"
He seized the sledge, half lifted it, and hurled it from the tilting
berg into the snow. Then he caught the girl in his arms and leaped,
putting all his strength into the jump.
Out into the air they shot, and down, down. Around them as they fell
the sky seemed to be showering dogs as the seven of the pack followed
their master. Then man and girl and dogs vanished in the soft snow, and
the iceberg went thundering and crashing to its fall.