Stirling breathed deeply and studied the compass, then sheered to the true north, crashed through a ledge of locked ice, and won the way to an open lane which led toward the east and Baffin Bay.
The girl turned as a light struck across the churning waters, and cried out as she saw the orange disk of the sun rising in the south. It had broken through the snow flurry. It revealed the land and Sound, which were coated in places with the recent snow, and brought out the flying clouds as they scudded before the south wind.
She reached and clasped Stirling's arm. "The sun!" she exclaimed. "See, our beacon! We shall win through to open sea!"
Stirling brought the wheel up and steadied it, smiling down into the girl's glowing face. She watched him as he braced his legs and threw back his head, then he turned away from her with a regretful jerk and leaned down over the binnacle. He straightened up again as she quoted:
"The sanguine sunrise with his meteor eyes
And his burning plumes outspread,
Leaps on the back of my sailing rack
When the morning star shines dead."
"The morning star," Stirling said. "It's up there!" He pointed toward the zenith, and Helen Marr followed the direction of his steady arm, widening her eyes in amazement as she noted the lodestar almost overhead. She waited for a cloud to pass and traced out the light points of the Great Dipper. She saw then that what she had taken for overhead was fourteen or fifteen degrees from the true vertical line.
"We're in about seventy-six degrees," she said, with certainty. "Almost to the Pole!"
Stirling unclasped one hand from the spokes of the wheel and touched the frosted glass over the binnacle compass. "Run your eyes along the south line and you'll be looking toward the Pole. It's a long way down there, Miss Marr. We're trying to work in the other direction."
The ship had covered the worst of the passage and the parting floes showed the road to open sea. Stirling had made no mark of time, but he realized dimly that Slim and the others who had gone below were getting the utmost out of the boilers. The screw thrashed at its best speed, and the smudge of smoke which drifted toward the north blotted out the view of North Devon Island along which the course had led them.
Stirling breathed for the first time, sure of himself. He turned and smiled at Helen Marr. "Cape Hay," he said, "is somewhere over there!"