Their progress was necessarily slow because of the aged professor. Although the scientist was not the man to retard the party, Andy would let nobody take the lead but himself, so that he could watch the old man's flagging steps and call a halt whenever he thought it best for Mr. Henderson to rest.
"You are babying me, Andy!" ejaculated the professor, with some irritation.
"You're the most important person in this party, sir," declared the hunter. "We can lose any other person and not miss him much. But without you we'd be without a head."
Therefore, when they had clambered through the last steep cut and reached the farther slope of the cliff, the hunter called a halt and built a camp, determined to bivouac here although the oil man assured him that they were now less than twenty miles from Aleukan.
A few hours later they awoke to find the sun rising once more and the heat of the exposed hillside becoming unbearable. Were it not for the wonderful clearness of the air they could not have stood the heat at all. But all agreed that they would better descend the hill to the forest and so be sheltered from the direct rays of the sun.
The bearing of their extra clothing in this tropical heat was an effort, and they were all glad to find shelter beneath the huge-limbed trees at the foot of the slope.
There they lay in the shade and discussed the direction they should travel from this point. It was not until this time they discovered that their pocket compasses pointed the north as being in a totally different direction from what they had supposed. Phineas Roebach had declared the native settlement of Aleukan to be directly north and west of the place where he had tapped the mud-spouter. But now, although he was positive of the contour of the hills and the line of peaks of the Endicott Range under which Aleukan was established, their compasses made the direction southwest.
"Not at all strange, sir," said Professor Henderson. "In becoming detached from the old earth, our new planet was shifted a good bit, and that which was to the north is now almost west. If, by chance, this island in the air includes that point on the earth's surface which once represented the most northerly spot—the North Pole, in fact—it is the North Pole no longer. The magnetic needle points instead to a new North Pole, established on this fragment of a planet since it was shot off into space from its parent world."
Phineas Roebach grunted his disbelief in all this. He could not get it into his head that they were riding on a piece of the old earth far, far above that stable planet. He would not believe it. No marvel of this situation could change his belief. He would not accept the professor's theory of what had happened to them.
The sun went down again and the frost began to creep after it. Already the bulk of vegetation about them (save the hardy firs and kindred trees and shrubs) were black and dead. The change in climate had tolled the knell of all those plants that had withstood heretofore the rigors of the Alaskan summer.