Zenas Wright reached him a gnarled hand. "I'm with you, my lad," said he. "I had hoped to lay a report of some moment before my colleagues of the Geographical Society. I still have that hope. If there is a man in the world who can guide us safely through the dangers which face us, you are that man. And, if we fail, and leave our bones on the road—well—I'm for the North."
Polaris translated to the two Sardanians. "Not two courses, my brother, but one, let us say," said Minos gravely, and he, too, put his hand in the hand of Polaris. "Let us fare along the northern road, and win through or die. Myself and my princess, with only our poor knowledge, would have tried that path had we lived until the light came, if you had not come seeking us."
After a day's rest they turned their faces to the east and followed the chain of the barrier range until they reached once more the Hunters' Road. There they made a camp in the trail, while Polaris took the gray dogs of Minos, which were stronger, and which had learned to obey him, and drove through to Sardanes. From the cave on Mount Latmos he took of the stores of meats and grain all that he dared to load onto the sledge. They would need all the supplies that they might carry with them.
Fearless in the face of their disasters, the members of the little party rested their hopes on the broad shoulders of the son of the wilderness, and they began their bitter drive. That leader set his tireless strength and will of iron to the task, with a silent tongue and a flame in his heart—a flame and a vision of a dear face a continent and a half away to the north, that he swore he would live to see again.
When men had failed them and fortune had seemed to turn her face away, a mighty friend aided them—no less a one than old Mother Nature. The path that might have been so beset with hardships, she elected to make smooth, and tempered even her wild winds, so that the going of the travelers was more swift than they had dared to hope.
Long before they came to the notch in the chain of ice mountains, through which Polaris had passed north on his previous journey, they reached the monstrous seam that the furious volcanic fires had left across the southern continent when they had poured from their ancient bed in Sardanes to rear their flaming bulwarks on the shores of Ross Sea.
Where the fiery torrents had burst through under the barrier range, the mountains must have been but empty shells of volcanoes active ages agone. One of them had collapsed. Where once it had reared its snow-capped peak, was now a jagged gash like a broken wall.
Through that gash the travelers went. It took them all of an arduous day's labor to reach a spot from where they could see on ahead—labor that was wasted, should they find that the lands beyond offered no hope of a pathway. Most of the way the dogs were useless. The brutes finally had been whipped into a semblance of amity, and flocked along without fighting; more, it is true, through fear of the ready lash than because of any love between the two breeds. With all their weights of food and trappings the sledges were lifted by the son of the snows and the Sardanian, and carried over many a torn and twisted scar in the half-healed breast of the mountain.
If the thews of Polaris were more mighty than those of the king, in endurance the men were equal. They performed feats that perhaps no other two men in the whole world could have accomplished.