Author of "Polaris—of the Snows"
Copyright 1916 by Popular Publications, Inc.
Two men stood on the bridge of a speeding ship in a place of ice andfire. A storm rode with them, a tempest that shrieked and moaned andtore, and around the ship seethed and tossed the waters of the furiousAntarctic Sea. Ice floes cracked and crashed. Giant bergs, staggeringunder the lash of the gale, added the dull thunder of their impact tothe wild din.
Yet all the fury and clamor afloat paled in comparison with theappalling splendor of that which was taking place on shore.
On the port side of the vessel, a scant league across the heavingfrenzy of wave and ice, lay land. Once a stark, bleak mountain range,rising inland from its beetling shore cliffs, now it was gashedand quivering in the throes of a terrific volcanic outburst. Rockyhillsides were laced with streams of molten, iridescent fire. Abovethem mighty peaks tottered and crumbled. The titanic detonations ofsundered mountains, with each new outpouring of the tremendous forcesstruggling for release, drowned all the strident discord of shrillingair and booming sea.
For a full score of miles along the inland range the mountain crestshad been riven to loose the internal torrents. Cascades of white-hotlava poured down their calcined sides, in places streaming over thefoothills themselves, to be quenched in clouds of roaring steam wherethe sea met them. Geysers of flame shot skyward from some of the morelofty 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 lostin the murk of the Antarctic night. Below, the raging fires lightedland and sea for leagues, the colors of blue and green and violetreflected back from the myriad facets of the whirling icebergs withdazzling magnificence. Across the churning chaos, where every wave wasa dancing flame, each mass of ice a lustrous opal, six miles to thewest, the great fires shone against the cliffs and peaks of anothershore, that lay cold and quiet and snowbound.
Destruction, many hued and fantastic, menaced the ship in a thousandglittering shapes, but she tore forward through the turmoil. A longgray cruiser she was, her sides sheathed in steel, and with the Starsand 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 hiscompanion and lifted his voice to a shout, to carry above the screamingpandemonium.
"Hinson, your friend spoke truly," he cried. "Here, indeed, are thegreat fires." With a sweep of his arm shoreward, he indicated the longarrays 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 uponthe stupendous eruption of nature's vitals, there had been littleconversation aboard, with the exception of sharp orders and a fewsubdued 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 Sabineand Mount Melbourne. Here, where the great hills burn, is King EdwardVII Land," pursued the young man. "Yonder," he pointed ahead to thesouth, "lies the pathway to Sardanes. Shall we be in time, old ZenasWright, or will the end have struck already?"
Zenas Wright, member of the American Geographic Society, one of thefirst geologists of his day and world famous as an authority onvolcanic p