"Oh, yes, it all sounds crazy," Steve hurried on as Marcel stirred. "It's too crazy I guess for a scientific head like your father's. But he hadn't listened to Oolak's fool dream, and he never saw the thing I've seen—twice."
"You've seen?"
Marcel could deny himself no longer. Intense excitement urged him. Steve shook his head.
"I haven't found it—yet," he said. "No. The thing I've seen you've seen, too. You were just a bit of a kiddie and won't remember. I'll try and fix up the picture of what I saw then in the far-away distance, and what I see now in my crazy mind's eye."
He paused. Then, with a swift movement that had something of excitement in it, he flung out an arm pointing while his voice took on a new note, and his words came rapidly.
"Somewhere out there," he cried. "A land of glacial ice, endless snow and ice. Hills everywhere, broken, bald, immense. A range of mountains. In the midst of 'em a giant hill bigger and higher than anything I've ever dreamed. A hill of blasting, endless fire. It never dies out. It burns right along, belching the fiery heart out of the bowels of the earth. And everywhere about, for maybe miles, a blistering tropical heat that defies the deadliest cold the Arctic hands out. Do you get it? Sure you do. You're getting my crazy notion, that isn't so crazy. Well, what then? Winter. A temperature that turns a snowstorm into a pleasant summer rain, and the buzzard into a summer gale. Vegetation starts into growth. I can't guess how the absence of sun fixes it. Maybe it grows—white. But it grows—grows all the time, like those things of the folk who grow out of season. Then spring, and the sun again. Rising temperature. The heat from this hell ripens the stuff quick, and the sun makes it green again. This Adresol. A great field of dead white. Then, as swiftly, it dies. Dies before the Indians come. Burnt up by the rising temperature of the advancing season and the blistering volcanic heat."
Marcel started up from his chair with an excited cry.
"You're right, Uncle," he cried, completely carried away. "But where? Where's this place? This old hill? I've seen it? Where?"
"It's north, boy. Away north. God knows how far."
Steve's voice had lost something of its note of inspiration before the hard facts which Marcel's question had brought home to him. He paused for a moment with his eyes hidden. Then, with a curious movement which suggested the determined squaring of his shoulders, he broke out again.