"Ho, you! Quick!"
Steve had reached the rugged crest. A second shout came back to the floundering Indians.
"God! It's a—wonder!"
The moment was profound. Eyes that were prepared for well-nigh anything monstrous gazed out spellbound. Tongues had no words, and hearts were stirred to their depths. The whole world ahead was afire. It was a conflagration of incalculable immensity.
The horizon was one blaze of transcendent light. It was rendered a hundred-fold more amazing by its contrast against the grey of the Arctic night. At a given point, in the centre of all, a well of fire was belching skywards. It was churning the overhanging clouds of smoke, and lighting them with the myriad hues that belong to the tumbled glory of a stormy summer sunset. Then, too, rumblings and dull thunders came up to the watching men like the groanings of a world in travail.
For miles the hill-tops seemed to have been swept clear of ice and snow. They were shorn of their winter shroud. They stood up like black, unsightly, broken teeth, against a cavernous background of fire burning in the maw of some Moloch colossus. They stood out bared to the bone of the world's foundations.
Julyman shaded his eyes with hands that sought to shut out a vision his savage superstition could no longer support. Oolak had no such emotion. He turned from it to something which, to his mind, was of greater interest. Steve alone remained absorbed in that radiant beyond.
The Arctic night no longer reigned supreme. It seemed to have been devoured at a gulp. The heavenly lights had lost all power in face of this earthly glory. A mist of smoke had switched off the gleam of starlight, and the moon and mock-moons wore the tarnished hue of silver that has lost its burnish. The ghosts of the aurora no longer trod their measure of stately minuet. They had passed into the world of shadow to which they rightly belonged.
The heart of Unaga was bared for all to see, that fierce heart which drives the bravest Indian tongue to the hush of dread.