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.