Straight toward the north, day and night, our destination compass led
us after the fleeing flier upon which it had remained set since I first
attuned it after leaving the thern fortress.
Early in the second night we noticed the air becoming perceptibly
colder, and from the distance we had come from the equator were assured
that we were rapidly approaching the north arctic region.
My knowledge of the efforts that had been made by countless expeditions
to explore that unknown land bade me to caution, for never had flier
returned who had passed to any considerable distance beyond the mighty
ice-barrier that fringes the southern hem of the frigid zone.
What became of them none knew—only that they passed forever out of the
sight of man into that grim and mysterious country of the pole.
The distance from the barrier to the pole was no more than a swift
flier should cover in a few hours, and so it was assumed that some
frightful catastrophe awaited those who reached the “forbidden land,”
as it had come to be called by the Martians of the outer world.
Thus it was that I went more slowly as we approached the barrier, for
it was my intention to move cautiously by day over the ice-pack that I
might discover, before I had run into a trap, if there really lay an
inhabited country at the north pole, for there only could I imagine a
spot where Matai Shang might feel secure from John Carter, Prince of
Helium.
We were flying at a snail’s pace but a few feet above the
ground—literally feeling our way along through the darkness, for both
moons had set, and the night was black with the clouds that are to be
found only at Mars’s two extremities.
Suddenly a towering wall of white rose directly in our path, and though
I threw the helm hard over, and reversed our engine, I was too late to
avoid collision. With a sickening crash we struck the high looming
obstacle three-quarters on.
The flier reeled half over; the engine stopped; as one, the patched
buoyancy tanks burst, and we plunged, headforemost, to the ground
twenty feet beneath.
Fortunately none of us was injured, and when we had disentangled
ourselves from the wreckage, and the lesser moon had burst again from
below the horizon, we found that we were at the foot of a mighty
ice-barrier, from which outcropped great patches of the granite hills
which hold it from encroaching farther toward the south.
What fate! With the journey all but completed to be thus wrecked upon
the wrong side of that precipitous and unscalable wall of rock and ice!