Forgotten now his bonds and all his pain. Forgotten even the perilous situation. Stern's great vision of a reborn race had swallowed minor evils. And with a sudden glow of pride that some of his own race had still survived the vast world catastrophe, he cheered again, eager as any schoolboy.
Suddenly he heard the girl's voice calling to him:
“Something ahead, Allan--land, maybe. A big light through the mist!”
He wrenched his head a trifle up and now perceived that through the vapors a dim yet steady glow was beginning to shine, and on each side of it there stretched a line of other, smaller, blue-green lights. These, haloed by the vapor with the most beautiful prismatic rings, extended in an irregular row high above water level.
Lower down other lights were moving slowly to and fro, gathering for the most part at a point toward which the boats were headed.
“A settlement, Beatrice! A town, maybe! At last--men, men!” he cried.
Forward the boats moved, faster now, as the rowers bent to their tasks; and all at once, spontaneously, a song rose up. First from one boat, then another, that weird, strange melody drifted through the dark air. It blended into a spectral chorus, a vague, tremulous, eerie chant, ghostlike and awful, as though on the black stream of Acheron the lost souls of a better world had joined in song.
Nothing could Stern catch of the words; but like some faint and far re-echoing of a half-heard melody, dream-music perhaps, a vaguely reminiscent undertone struck to his heart with an irresistible, melancholy, penetrant appeal.
“That tune! I know it--if I could only think!” the engineer exclaimed. “Those words! I almost seem to know them!”
Then, with the suddenness characteristic of all that drew near in the fog, the shore-lights grew rapidly bigger and more bright.