Again it was Oolak who spoke. He pointed at the headland from which they had started. It was dim, shadowy, half lost in the grey twilight.
"Him all go back," he said, as though he were making the most ordinary announcement.
Then he pointed at something nearer. It was just beyond where the sled had been overturned.
"Him all break up. So."
His tone had changed. There was that in his harsh voice which was utterly new to it.
It was the moment of Steve's awakening from the dream of triumph he had dreamed. It was the moment of the shattering of the confidence of years. A wide fissure, of the proportions of a chasm, had opened up just beyond where the mishap had occurred. It was as Oolak said. The grey headland looked to be moving backwards, vanishing in the shadows of the Arctic night.
The approach to the heart of Unaga was yielding a reality that had been entirely uncalculated.
The widening chasm, stretching far as the eye could see on either hand, had completely cut off all retreat. Steve and his men were standing on a belt of ice that was moving. It was slipping away from the parent body, gliding ponderously almost without tangible motion, down the great glacial slope. They were trapped on the bosom of a glacial field in the titanic throes of its death agony; a melting, groaning mass riding monstrously to its own destruction in those far-off, mist-laden depths of the valley below.
It must have been unbelievable but for the definite evidence of it all. Here, in the depths of an Arctic winter, with the whole earth shadowed under a grey of frigid night, a glacial field, which a thousand years could not have built up, was melting under a heat no less than the summer of lower latitudes.
It was a moment for panic. But Steve resisted with all his might.