Held fast in the swirl of the sinking ship, every soul on the Minnetonka went down with her. From Everson, kneeling on his deck, to the lowliest coal-passer in the depths of the cruiser, there was no man but bowed his face to the waters.
Clasping his sweetheart with one arm, Polaris struck out fiercely. For a moment he cherished the hope that he might keep to the surface and reach the land beyond. But the suction of the sinking ship was too strong for even his giant strength. He saw the others, his friends struggling about him. The water came between his dear lady's face and his. He strove to reach her lips with his own. His lungs seemed bursting. His senses swayed.
Through the green waters he saw a great golden shape like a globe approaching him. Another fantasy. Strong hands gripped him. They, too, must be dreams.
The blackness became absolute.
CHAPTER II
THE LONG BLACK ROAD TO ADLAZ
In illimitable darkness a spark glowed and lived, and the soul of Polaris Janess awoke and once more knew it was a soul. The silence of oblivion was broken by a roaring as of a thousand mighty rivers torrenting on their courses far underground. One by one the man endured the tortures that those must endure who come back from the claim of the sea. Slowly and with exquisite agony came the consciousness that his body still lived—an agony so keen that he fain would have wrenched himself free of the flesh and departed it. Fire, liquid and intolerable, raced through his every vein and artery. His head, no longer tenanted by a brain, it seemed, was a vast and empty cavern, through which wild winds moaned.
An age it was in seeming that the soul fought its way through travail, back to command of the faculties it had quitted, until it had regained the mastery of its two provinces, the brain and the body. The fiery rivers were quenched. The winds ceased their roaring. With a groan and a shudder the son of the snows once more took up the burden of living. Weak and dizzy and deathly sick, he opened his eyes.
He lay on a soft bed of furs in a small and swaying room. Almost at his elbow he heard the splash of waves against metal walls. Above him, an expression of sympathy and concern on his ruddy face, bent the red-haired stranger.