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.