CHAPTER I

THE DRIVE AGAINST DEATH

Two men stood on the bridge of a speeding ship in a place of ice and fire. A storm rode with them, a tempest that shrieked and moaned and tore, and around the ship seethed and tossed the waters of the furious Antarctic Sea. Ice floes cracked and crashed. Giant bergs, staggering under the lash of the gale, added the dull thunder of their impact to the wild din.

Yet all the fury and clamor afloat paled in comparison with the appalling splendor of that which was taking place on shore.

On the port side of the vessel, a scant league across the heaving frenzy of wave and ice, lay land. Once a stark, bleak mountain range, rising inland from its beetling shore cliffs, now it was gashed and quivering in the throes of a terrific volcanic outburst. Rocky hillsides were laced with streams of molten, iridescent fire. Above them mighty peaks tottered and crumbled. The titanic detonations of sundered mountains, with each new outpouring of the tremendous forces struggling for release, drowned all the strident discord of shrilling air and booming sea.

For a full score of miles along the inland range the mountain crests had been riven to loose the internal torrents. Cascades of white-hot lava poured down their calcined sides, in places streaming over the foothills themselves, to be quenched in clouds of roaring steam where the sea met them. Geysers of flame shot skyward from some of the more lofty peaks, and spread out like the unfolding petals of monstrous, unholy lilies, thrust into bloom from the underworld.

Above them loomed masses of vapor, rolling and shifting, and were lost in the murk of the Antarctic night. Below, the raging fires lighted land and sea for leagues, the colors of blue and green and violet reflected back from the myriad facets of the whirling icebergs with dazzling magnificence. Across the churning chaos, where every wave was a dancing flame, each mass of ice a lustrous opal, six miles to the west, the great fires shone against the cliffs and peaks of another shore, that lay cold and quiet and snowbound.

Destruction, many hued and fantastic, menaced the ship in a thousand glittering shapes, but she tore forward through the turmoil. A long gray cruiser she was, her sides sheathed in steel, and with the Stars and Stripes whipping from her bow.

One of the men on the swaying bridge, a blond and youthful colossus, clothed from head to foot in skins of the white bear, leaned toward his companion and lifted his voice to a shout, to carry above the screaming pandemonium.

"Hinson, your friend spoke truly," he cried. "Here, indeed, are the great fires." With a sweep of his arm shoreward, he indicated the long arrays of flaming furies.

It was the first time for hours that either of the men had spoken. Indeed, since the ship had entered this arm of the sea and come upon the stupendous eruption of nature's vitals, there had been little conversation aboard, with the exception of sharp orders and a few subdued comments among the crew. Volcanoes they had expected to find, but no such tremendous display as here confronted and overawed them.

"Now, this is Ross Sea. Back there to the northwest lie Mount Sabine and Mount Melbourne. Here, where the great hills burn, is King Edward VII Land," pursued the young man. "Yonder," he pointed ahead to the south, "lies the pathway to Sardanes. Shall we be in time, old Zenas Wright, or will the end have struck already?"

Zenas Wright, member of the American Geographic Society, one of the first geologists of his day and world famous as an authority on volcanic phenomena, tore his gaze unwillingly from the most splendid exhibit of his favorite science his eyes had ever seen. He shook his shaggy, white old head slowly.

"I can not tell, my son," he said. "Often the great changes of nature are of slow growth, and may be months or years in the making. Again, they are done in a day. An outburst of such violence as this one I've never seen before. It would seem to me that the end must be at hand down there, if not already passed. We must make haste."

He turned his short, wide-shouldered figure. Clutching the bridge rail with mittened hands, he settled his ears again into the protection of his great ulster, and feasted his eyes on a sight of which he would never tire.

From the wheelhouse another man came onto the bridge. He was tall, lean and weather-beaten with close-set eyes above high cheekbones, and the alert and upright carriage of a soldier. For a moment the three conferred, the newcomer tugging impatiently at his sparse, black mustache, while he took in the scene around him with sharp glances.

"Speed, and speed, and more speed, Scoland," said the old scientist.

"Aye, speed," echoed the young giant, "all the speed in your good ship, Captain, while yet there is open water. Yonder, ahead, the ice gathers for the drive, and there we must needs go slowly. So speed while speed we may."

Scoland nodded shortly and strode back to the wheelhouse. Down the speaking-tube to the engine-room went his call:

"Crowd her, Mac, crowd her!"

"Aye, Meester Scoland, aye! But, mon, is she no doin' beautifully the noo?" The grizzled MacKechnie turned from the tube in the bowels of the cruiser, to bellow his orders among cursing, panting stokers and sweating coal-passers.

For this was a race with death; not the death of one man, or of a ship's crew, but the extinction of a nation.

Down this swirling pathway one of the men on the ship had passed once before. No stout ship swam under his feet on that journey. He rode on a careening iceberg. He was the fur-clad young viking on the bridge. His name was Polaris Janess.

Born in the wilderness of the Antarctic by one of the strangest freaks of circumstances, Polaris had reached manhood seeing no human being besides the father who had reared him. When that father died the young man started to break his way to civilization.

In his wild adventurings northward he had found Rose Emer, an American heiress, lost in the snows. Where they made their camp an ice floe broke up, and they were whirled down the coast to the south again on an enormous berg. Inland, they had found the kingdom of Sardanes—Sardanes, the mystical volcanic valley, set like an emerald in the white fastnesses of the Antarctic, blooming with tropical verdure, and peopled with a fragment of the ancient Greek nation, the Hellenes, whose victories Bard Homer sang. And they were the first people from the outer world of men to set foot there in nigh upon three thousand years.

There a king would have wedded the American Rose, but Polaris fought his way out of that valley with his dogs and guns, saving the girl, and taking with them Kalin, the young high priest of Sardanes. The priest had died in the snow-lands, but the man and the girl had come at last to the ship Felix, Scoland's ship, from which the girl had strayed.

Long before they reached America, Rose Emer had lost a not-too-warm admiration for the captain in a great love for the man who had saved her. Scoland, the daring explorer, who had reached the South Pole in an airship, saw the girl won from him by the man from the wilderness.

Fearing lest the girl was glamoured by the strange events through which they had passed, and might come to scorn the half barbarian that he was, Polaris delayed to wed her for a year, which he devoted to intense study of men and their ways. Of books he knew much, and commanded many languages; of men he knew little.

Before the year was ended came Zenas Wright, with a report from the Smaley and Hinson expedition into Ross Sea, telling of a mighty volcanic outbreak there. The scientist declared it to be an outpouring of the fires which warmed Sardanes. With the going of those fires, he asserted, the mystic valley was doomed to return to the wastes, and its wonderful people to die.

"It is fitting that the man who discovered Sardanes should be the man to save her," said Zenas Wright to Polaris, "and without you, who know the way and the people, the trip would be well-nigh hopeless."

Polaris had responded to the call of what he deemed to be an almost sacred duty. Still unwed, he said farewell to his Rose maid for another long year, to start south and face the hardships and perils of the Antarctic once more, and to fetch to America the two thousand or so inhabitants of Sardanes, or as many of them as should be found alive.

With tireless haste a relief expedition was organized. Dogs were brought down from the upper reaches of the Yukon. Men whose lives and callings had inured them to the perils of the colds and the tempests of the snow-lands were enlisted for the great errand.

Foremost among those who came to enlist for the venture was Captain James Scoland. He came with a heart full of hot hate for the man who had balked him, and whom he considered little more than a half-mad barbarian. But he hid his hate well, and bided his time. With Polaris Janess, the enmity that had been between himself and the captain was a closed book. He had forgotten and forgiven. Scoland was a man of unquestioned bravery, a born leader of others. Above all, he had the knowledge of the Antarctic that made him an invaluable ally.

Polaris accepted his proffered services gladly.

Through the influence of Zenas Wright and of Scoland, the United States second-class cruiser Minnetonka was turned over for the use of the expedition, and manned. All the great fortune his father had left him Polaris had guaranteed in payment for the expenses of the expedition. Danger and death lay before him. He would be a poor man if he returned. He did not falter.

He stood on the deck of the rushing ship, his topaz eyes turned toward the blazing, thundering mountains on the shores of Ross Sea. Their weird lights shone on his handsome, high-featured face, but at times he saw them not. Persistently there arose before him a picture of a quaint old New England garden, bright with its sunshine, its phlox and marigolds and honeysuckle. He looked again into the gray eyes of the garden-woman; long eyes, wet with tears. He felt her soft lips cling to his. In the moaning of the wind he heard again her sad voice pleading, "Oh, Polaris—how can I let you go?" and a great gray dog that answered to the name of Marcus stood by them, whining and ill at ease.

From his reverie the voice of Zenas Wright recalled him.

"The bergs are getting thicker," the old man said. "Stout as this ship is, we will have to slow down soon, or risk worse than we've risked already. You say the sea narrows down there ahead?"

"Aye, old man, it narrows, and then sweeps wide again, so wide that from one coast you may not see the other for many a long day," Polaris answered. When he spoke it was with the quaintness of expression that had come to him from the pages of the "Ivanhoe" of Scott, a treasure he had found among the few of his father's books that were not of science, and over which he had pored and pondered lovingly through many years. A few short months of civilization had not worn that custom from him.

Zenas Wright gazed aft. "Well, whatever happens to me now," he said, "I've seen a sight to-day few men have ever seen."

He waved his old hand toward the spouting hills, which they were now leaving behind him. "I'd like to study that eruption and write a book on it," he added regretfully. Despite his age, and the long hours he had spent on the bridge he left it with a vigorous springy step as he went below.

At racing speed, wherever the way lay clear, the stanch Minnetonka tore forward, her nose of steel pointed straight into the dark, mysterious South, hurling her eight thousand tons through every available gap in the ice flotilla with all the strength of her twenty-one thousand horsepower.

Down the seas behind the vessel, faster and ever faster, crept the dawn of a six-months' day.

CHAPTER II

THE CURSE OF ANALOS

On the brink of the ledge of death in the crater of the Gateway to the Future crouched Analos, high priest in Sardanes. Two hundred feet below him in the monstrous funnel of the crater, seethed the lake of undying fires. Billowing vapors wafted from that troubled caldron passed upward beyond him, an endless procession of many-hued wraiths. First mist, smoke and sulfurous gases intermingled, spiraled and coiled in the drafts that blew through the mountain's cone, and passed on to the vent of the enormous flue, three hundred feet above.

The rumble and muttering of the raging flames smote his ears continually. Beneath his feet the solid rock of the hollow hill vibrated and trembled. Anon as the wreaths and curtains of vapor shifted and curled, disclosing their furious source, the weird light shone garishly on his red vestments of office. His high-templed, crafty face, above its black beard, turned livid in the glare.

It was evident from the tense bearing of the man that he was himself in the grip of an inward fire that threatened to break forth with consuming fury. He ground his teeth, and blood ran from his bitten lips into his beard.

"Curse them, O Lord Hephaistos! Curse them, for thy sake and for thy servant's!" he prayed as he prayed many times before. He stretched his arms out over the gasping pit, raised himself on one knee and sent his voice wailing out across the fire-shot depths.

"Aye, curse them and spare them not! Curse him that was before me here! May Kalin be accursed! Curse him who now opposeth my will! May Minos be accursed! Curse her who hath flouted me, thy priest! May she be thrice accursed! Curse them all, and for all the years to come! May they know no rest in Sardanes or in the world! May they find no peace in that far place beyond, whither thy gateway leadeth!"

Panting for breath, he paused. His writhing features were hideous in the flare from the chasm. Again he tossed his arms wildly.

"Come to my aid, Hephaistos!" he screamed. "Aid thou thy servant! Give me a sign, that I may know. A sign, Master, send me a sign!"

Booming up from the depths, his answer came—a mighty diapason from the throat of the crater that seemed to carry with it every chord of nature's tonal gamut. As if the hammer of Hephaistos, indeed, had smitten, the solid rock beneath him quivered to a terrific shock from the bowels of the earth.

Almost jarred from his foothold, the man, by a quick spring backward, saved himself from toppling into the fiery funnel. Crawling on hands and knees, he approached the brink of the ledge again, and there lay flat. His eyeballs bulged and his senses swam when he gazed downward.

He saw the fire-fretted sides of the giant crater swept free of all their clouding vapors, every glittering vein, every projection, every detail of their many strata, revealed in startling clearness by a blinding flood of light. He saw the fire-lake itself surge upward in its white-hot sheath. Up, up the sheer declivity of the crater it crept. As it came, for yards above it the rocks glowed red.

Another tremendous shock swayed the ledge where the priest lay. Masses of rock, reft from the precipitous walls near the mountain summit, hurtled past him down the chasm. Again the molten lava heaved up a great wave. Never in all the traditions of Sardanes had the fires of the Gateway leaped so far! From the center of that swirling maelstrom there arose a cone twenty feet high. It opened with a shriek as of a legion of devils released, and an appalling pillar of blue flame shot up from it and stood like a plume.

Although the highest reach of the flame was a full hundred feet below him, the blast of the heat was like to burst the veins of the watching priest. His very beard curled in it. Springing to his feet, Analos went back to the darkness of the passage that led to the terraces on the lower slope. Already it was hot to suffocation in the winding corridor.

Down the spirals ahead of him Analos heard the squealing of his affrighted priests as they scurried for the open. But Analos quaked not. He strode forth from the lofty arch of the portal and trod the upper terrace with the step of a master conqueror. He glanced up the outer acclivity of the mountain. He saw its peak ablaze with a crown of fire against the gloom of the Antarctic night—a crown which shone there for the first time since man had made history in the valley of Sardanes. He drew a deep breath, a breath of triumph and exaltation.

"Master, thy sign is sent!" he cried.

With head held high, Analos passed down the fire-lighted terraces. As he went, he heard through the red twilight of the valley cries of wonder and heart-rending wails of fear.

Afar on the Hunter's Road, twenty miles to the north and west of the valley, Minos the king and eight of his hunters followed the trail of the white bear. Two sledges they had with them, each hauled by six-horse teams of the sturdy little Sardanian ponies. But Minos coursed the snows more swiftly by far with a lighter sledge, whisked over the frozen crusts by a racing chain of beasts that could outstrip the small horses by two miles to one. Seven great gray dogs drew the sledge of Minos!

Now, a strange thing must be related. When Polaris fought his way out of Sardanes, along the crater ledge and through the rift in the wall of the Gateway to the Future, his team of splendid dogs battled with him. Their fighting fangs aided him fully as much as did his long, brown rifle and brace of revolvers in holding Minos and his men back until it was time to pass the rift and join Kalin the priest and the Rose maid. One of his fiercest charges was made to avenge the dog Pallas, when she was struck down by an ilium spear, and pitched over the brink of the ledge.

Although her master gave her up for lost, Pallas did not die. When Minos the king made his way back to the valley after his last struggle with the outlander, men came and told him that the beast lay sore wounded and moaning on a rock-ledge in the side of the crater pit, some score of feet below that from which she had fallen. They would have stoned her to death, or let torches fall to drive her into the fire lake, but Minos would not suffer it. The king himself ordered that he be let down the crater wall with ropes. There he bound and muzzled Pallas and brought her to the upper ledge and to his palace, and tended her hurts, for Minos was skilled in the rude surgery of the valley.

Analos, who succeeded Kalin as high priest in Sardanes, later demanded the brute to be a sacrifice to Hephaistos, but Minos withstood him and his priests, and the dog lived on.

Some six weeks after her rescue from the pit, Pallas whined her mother joy over six blind puppies. Twice the great darkness had fallen on the Southland since the man of the snows had left it, and the pups had grown tall and strong. Minos had given them much care, and it was his whim to train them and use them as had Polaris. Now, with Pallas as the leader, they drew the king's sledge.

Sardanians, who had never known dogs until the advent of the strangers, eyed them askance, but the will of Minos was an ill thing to tamper with.

The chase was fruitful. When the king and his hunters broke camp and turned homeward, where the red haze of the moons of Sardanes lighted the southern horizon, the carcasses of two monarchs of the wastes were lashed to their sledges in token of the huntsmen's prowess.

Three miles from the north pass into the valley they stopped to rest and to feed their beasts. Minos was busied straightening out a kink in a harness strap, when he heard a shout of amazement. A flash of light shone with startling brightness across the wilderness of rocks and ice hummocks and snow.

The king sprang to his feet and saw a mighty, flaming pillar spread fanwise heavenward from the summit of the looming bulk of the mountain that lay to the left, at the northeast sweep of the oval range that encompassed Sardanes.