"If all were well, there should be at least some flare of fires against this dull sky," he muttered, "yet I see none."
Guiding the dogs into the road, Polaris urged them on at a pace faster than any they had yet taken, for he knew that this path was free from obstacles or pitfalls. As they came nearer to their goal, both men grew taciturn. Zenas Wright was absorbed with the food for thought that his eager old eyes supplied him. Polaris was oppressed with a prescience of tragedy. Why were there no fires on the horizon, and why no signs of travel on the white reaches of the Hunters' Road?
Once more they camped against a bluff cliff at a turn in the road, and then went on again. First with the glasses, and then with their eyes alone, they picked upon the dim outlines of the Sardanian mountain ring, dull white against the dun skies. Polaris shook his head gloomily.
"Much my heart does misgive me, old Zenas Wright," he said, "for I fear we are too late. Green, yon hills should be, and dark at their summits, but they are white. The breeze blows from them to us, but is tempered with no warmth. I fear that the great calamity which your science has foretold is complete, and that all Sardanes is passed away."
As they drew nearer to the mountain ring, out to their left across the snow-fields, they saw the evidences of a mighty disturbance of the face of the earth. Hills riven in twain, tremendous fissures and pits marked a long, wide scar that extended from the base of the hills and reached northward farther than they could see.
"Some giant force has passed that way," Polaris said, "the like of which I never saw in these lands. It is not unlike the track of a giant's sledge across the face of the country. How do you read it?"
"It is the path taken by the volcanic fires on their way from here to where we found them blazing on Ross Sea," Zenas Wright answered. "As they tore their way through the channels opened to them, they writhed and shook the earth and rock above them, and left this appearance when they had gone. That would have been a sight worth watching and study. The earth out there must have pitched and tossed like waves of the sea."
He paused, and his face was very solemn.
"I, too, am afraid that it's all no use," he said slowly. "That seam out there is cold, or there would be a fog above it so thick we could not trace it. That means that the fires have been gone for some time. It looks bad. But let us hurry on and see for ourselves."