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!