Читать книгу Minos of Sardanes - Charles B. Stilson - Страница 6

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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.

Gloomy and silent always through the centuries since their ancestors had found the valley, now the towering peak of the Gateway to the Future blazed with a fury that dimmed the moons of all its sister mountains. That sight smote the Sardanians with terror. With upraised arms, they stood among their snorting beasts, their staring, affrighted faces ghastly in the flare.

Beneath their feet they felt the rock-strewn bosom of the plain heave gently, and, after a short space, again. They moaned in terror.

Of a mold to be daunted little by natural or supernatural, Minos the king was less moved than the others. While they groaned and called on Hephaistos, he strode among them with a quieting word.

"Old Mother Nature played a trick for her amusement," he said. "She hath lighted Sardanes brighter than ever before, and now she melteth the snows of the wilderness. Look! Never saw I such a mist!"

He pointed to the east. Extending from the foothills below the Gateway, northeast, as far as their eyes might see, a rolling bank of fog hung over the snow-lands.

"Bring in the sledges as soon as may be," Minos ordered. "There will be many a shaken heart in Sardanes at yonder sight. I will hasten on."

He leaped on his own sledge, gave the word to his dogs, and in a moment the swift snow-runners had carried him around a bend in the pathway toward the valley. As he went, he heard the dull booming of the huge drum that hung in the hall of the Judgment House, whereon some lusty wight was making play with all the strength of his two arms.

So it happened that, as Analos crossed the green stone bridge over the river, the king entered the valley through the north pass, both of them bound in haste for the Judgment House.

As was his custom, Minos left his sledge in a rock-built shelter at the base of the pass cliffs, where the snows broke into bare ground and rock. With his gray beasts in leash, he hurried through the pass and set off across the valley at a loping, light-footed gait. Skirting the marshes, where the river lost itself in its subterranean channels at the lower end of the valley, the king and his shaggy companions crossed the bridge and took a path above the main road that led them over the slopes through groves of gigantic hymanan trees.

The yellow-bronze and rustling foliage of the forest monarchs reflected the radiance of the mountain moons in a shimmer of whispering gold. Among their gnarled trunks the shadows lay thick. He was still ten minutes' journey from the Judgment House when the gleam of a white robe in the dusk and a subdued growl from the dogs told the king that some one loitered in the path ahead of him. He heard a woman's voice raised in anger, a voice that thrilled him to his heart's core.

Silencing the muttering beasts, he went forward cautiously.

A black-haired girl stood with her back to the bole of a tree, against which her white arms were thrown out at each side. Her head was tilted defiantly. Her bosom heaved and her black eyes snapped. In front of her the dark form of a man barred her way. He was draped in a long robe, the cowl of which obscured his features.

"How darest thou!" Her tones bit scornfully. "How darest thou lay a hand on the daughter of the Lord Karnaon? I care not for thy threats of powers. I tell thee that wert thou twice what thou art, to me thou wouldst be all that is foul and abhorrent. Mate with thee!" She laughed shortly. "I'd sooner mate with the meanest of my father's servants than with thee."

Analos, for he it was whom opportunity had tempted thus to tarry, shook his clenched fists over the head of the girl. Brave as she was, his face turned so hideous in its leering rage that she shrank.

"Twice hast thou flouted me, girl," he said in a choked, hard voice, "me, the minister and mouthpiece of the Lord Hephaistos. It shall not be so again." He tossed an arm toward the flaming crown of the mountain whence he had come. "Yonder the god ruleth in all his splendor, and I am his faithful servant. To the Gateway shalt thou come, whether thou willst or no. Thither shouldst thou go this moment had I not more pressing business elsewhere."

A strong and open hand smote the words from the priest's lips. In an instant he was gurgling on the ground, his neck beneath the heel of Minos, and the dogs were sniffing about him, anxious to lay hold.

"The Lady Memene may go her ways in peace," said the king quietly, bowing low.

No word of thanks got Minos for his timely coming. The girl flashed him one quick look, and then passed by him hastily with head up. He gazed after her, ruefully.

"It seems that I am no more welcome than thou," he said, and dragged Analos to his feet. "What doings are these, priest, and what passeth yonder in the Gateway that doth so affright Sardanes? Answer, thou!" He shook the burly priest like a refractory child.

However wicked in spirit, Analos lacked not in bravery. He snatched an ilium dagger from his girdle and struck fiercely at Minos's chest. The big man saw the flash of the weapon, but made no parrying move. Instead, he shoved the priest from him with one powerful arm, and so violently that Analos spun many feet and brought up against the trunk of another tree.

Minos called the dogs back, which would have followed eagerly.

"Wouldst thou, Analos, indeed?" said the king with a laugh. "The time cometh, I can see it plainly, priest, when thou and I must try a fall for place in the kingdom. Thou growest insolent. At least there be two in Sardanes who fear thee not." He laughed again. "Now, an thou hast naught to say, begone on that most pressing business of thine, and cross not my path again in such pursuits as I found thee but now, lest I be tempted to waste a spear on thy dirty carcass."

Twice the priest essayed to answer, but each time his words were choked. Then there burst from his throat an inarticulate bellow of rage. He turned and dashed madly away into the shadows, his black robe flying out behind him.

"He groweth troublesome, as did Kalin, who opposed Helicon, my brother," mused Minos; "but he hath not Kalin's mettle. For myself, I did like the man Kalin passing well."

Another burst from the great drum recalled his errand to the king, and he hastened on.

For more than an hour had Gallando the smith smitten the drum that hung in the pillared hall of the Judgment House until he was aweary. Far through the valley and over the hills had its thunderous summons rolled, calling to all Sardanes.

Those who labored had ceased, and those who slept had wakened. They had come until nearly two-thirds of the inhabitants of the valley were gathered. Those abroad when the first spurt of flame had leaped from the peak of the Gateway and the earth had quaked had let everything fall and hastened in. Those indoors had followed soon. From the open façade of the hall more than a thousand white faces were turned toward the flaming hill. From the upper reaches of the valley, nearly a score of miles away, others were coming with other tales to tell. Black fear sat heavy upon the shoulders of all.

"Where is Minos the king?" "Analos? Is he here?" "Doth Hephaistos smite his people?" These and many other cries rang in the hall. One stupendous liar swore that he had seen the shape of the god himself outlined in fire on the crest of the Gateway—and many believed his tale.

Women, their high-plaited hair disheveled, tunics all awry, clung to their husbands. Bewildered children added their shrieks to the din and confusion. Never had Sardanes been so shaken.

Not until the somber figure of Analos was seen ascending the marble steps of the dais at the upper end of the hall was the clamor quieted. The priest crossed the platform and sat himself on the black stone seat of his predecessors. He stared gloomily out over the sputtering of the torches in their cressets about the hall, an occasional sob or murmur of a frightened child, the singing of the river, and the far-away roaring of the hills.

Some minutes passed, and from the door at the rear of the dais came Minos. His dogs trooped in with him, bristling at sight of the priest. The king took his seat on the ancient, raised throne of his forefathers, with its plinth above, whereon were carved the words

MINOEBAEIVEYETHEEAPAANHEOH

(Minos, Basileustes Sardanes Ho Hekaton, or Minos, hundredth King of Sardanes.)

A number of the nobles climbed up the steps from the lower hall, and took their stations below the throne.

Scarcely was the king in his place when the tumult of affright again broke forth, an unintelligible clamor of many voices. Minos raised his hands to still it. He addressed his people calmly, with the demeanor and smile that long before had earned for him the name of the Smiling Prince.

"Tradition saith, and the writings of history which the priest keep do confirm," he said, "that in time very long ago our ancestors came to Sardanes from a great, bright world to the north, a world wherein they were part of a mighty people. By a strange mischance came they to Sardanes, and might return no more whence they came. Here have their descendants lived in peace and plenty. But a little time agone two strangers, that Polaris—of the Snows, and the Rose girl, came among us. They, too, told us of the outer world—a place so different from this that we scarce could conceive of it. There the sun shineth always. Here he is hid from us for half of each year. There all things live in his warmth. Here are we warmed by the ring of fire-mountains, and all without is the bleak desert of ice and snow.

"They told us also, did the strangers, of the nature of the fires which spout yonder, and of the mighty forces in the earth from which they are sprung. Wherefore tremble ye now, my people? Because a hill shaketh? Because a fire flameth anew that perhaps flamed aforetime, long before your forefathers came? Fear not. These things be of nature, and of nature only, and will pass. I, Minos, your king, am sure that no great harm impendeth, and that all things will be again as they have been."

Reassuring as were his words and his calmness, murmurs broke out anew from the people.

"Never hath it been so chill in the time of the great darkness as now it is," cried a voice.

"Hephaistos! Hephaistos! These things must be of the great god, who is sore wroth with Sardanes. The priests have said it," called another. Above the many-tongued murmur swelled the name of the high priest.

"Analos! Analos! Let us hear from the wise priest of the Gateway!" they shouted.

With a smile of grim defiance at the king, Analos glided from his seat and stood at the edge of the platform. He drew his long, black cloak around him, and stood poised like a bird of dark omen, wrapped in its sable pinions. His somber eyes glowed.

Good actor was the priest. He spoke never a word until the silence of death in the hall told him that he had the attention of every straining ear.

"Angered is the great Hephaistos," he began slowly, in hollow tones. "And hath he not borne much? Is it a little thing that the kings of Sardanes lead the people from their god? Aye, and that one of his own chief ministers hath turned false? Now the god turneth his face from the valley. Punishment falleth apace. Already hath the doom of Kalin, the traitor priest, struck. It was revealed to me in a vision that he and the outlanders perished in torture in the wilderness—but first Hephaistos used the man of the snows as an instrument of vengeance against those in high places who turned against their master.

"Remember ye the deaths of Helicon, the king, of Morolas, his brother, and of many others? Take warning and tremble, ye of Sardanes! A greater vengeance is at hand—"

He was interrupted by the clatter of flying hoofs on the roadway down the valley from the south, and the rumbling of a two-wheeled chariot. Four ponies driven at furious speed drew the chariot. Down the long roadway they dashed, and brought up with clashing hoofs on the stones of the paved court without the hall. Their driver, a tall, black-bearded man, sprang from his car and pushed through the press in the hall, tossing his arms wildly.

"From the mansion of the Lord Ukalles in upper Sardanes am I come!" he screamed as he reached the steps to the dais. "And this my message: Quenched in darkness are the moons of Mount Helior and Mount Tanos, and there is ice to the thickness of a man's hand on the holy river Ukranis, where never was ice before!"

Like standing grain in a chill wind the people quivered, as a thrill of abject terror ran through them—a despairing murmur.

Joy that was demoniac lighted the countenance of the priest. He leaned far out from the verge of the dais and spread his arms with fingers hooked and clutching at the air.

His voice broke in on the echo of the courier's dire message.

"Woe to fair Sardanes!" he howled. "Hephaistos smiteth and spareth not. For the sins of the few shall the many be smitten. Woe to Sardanes! I have read it in the Gateway that the doom shall fall until the punishment is completed, and every soul in the valley bendeth to the will of the ancient god!"

Back from a hundred throats was flung the cry:

"It shall be done!" And from a thousand: "What is the will of the god? How may we be saved? Tell us quickly, Analos!"

To his full height drew the priest. His face was alight with triumph. He had chosen his words and his time well. Advantage was with him.

He cast a glance over his shoulder at Minos. The king had come down from his throne. The nobles were grouped around him. To this new terror Minos had found no answer. He had no comfort to give his frenzied people to which they would listen. Superstition and fear and the wild words of the priest held them in thrall. Analos had full sway.

Not for an instant was the crafty priest at a loss. His god was in the ascendant. Now was the time to wrest into his own hands the power he desired in the valley. With the blind faith of a fanatic, he believed in the ancient religion; but, like many another priest in the world before him, be invested his own person with much of the power of the godhead he preached.

Troubled not a whit was he by the calamity that threatened in the valley. That was punishment merely—how dire or how long he cared not. When it was completed Sardanes would be in the hollow of his hand.

"Back to your homes, ye Sardanians!" he thundered. "And pray to the Lord Hephaistos for mercy. On the third day from now shall word come to you from the Gateway, the word of the ancient god. When the word cometh, obey it, or he shall not spare you. Let the word go forth through the valley that the captains of all the crafts and the nobles of the land be assembled here in the Judgment House on the third day. Then shall the commands of Hephaistos be made known to them. Away! Away! Analos hath spoken."

He threw his mantle over his head, passed out through the narrow portal at the side of the dais, and was gone, on his way through the gloom to the Gateway. In subdued silence the people trooped from the hall and slipped away to their homes.

Soon the thrashing propellers of the Minnetonka carried her beyond the radius of light sent out across the sea from the bursting volcanoes. It lay far behind, a garish bar athwart the waters. That faded also, until only a reflection could be seen against the sky, a waving, lambent radiance, like that of the Aurora Australis—which the voyagers had deemed it to be when first they had sighted it on their way into Ross Sea.

As they passed into the gloom of the Antarctic night their perils grew apace, and their real fighting began. Everywhere the bergs lay about them. Now here, now there, darted the cruiser, backing, turning, and zigzagging, seeking the safety course. Again rolling clouds made stygian gloom, and the cruiser fought on through the unquiet seas by the rays of her powerful searchlights.

One good turn of fortune came when the fury of the gale was abated. But the icebergs drove on in the clutch of a racing current, a constant menace. A hundred times the stout ship pushed through between drifting masses of ice that closed their scintillant, clashing jaws behind her, thrilling those on deck with the nearness of complete disaster. As many times were the engines reversed in furious haste, to back the steel-clad adventurer from a closing trap that would have crushed her like a toy.

Here it was that the cool captain in command showed all his resourcefulness, had need for all the splendid seamanship and the reckless daring that had brought his ships unscathed through three voyages into the polar zones.

Fortunate was the foresight that had armed the ship for the dangers she was to meet. From her bow projected an immense ram of wrought steel, almost razor keen at its cutting edge. All around her sides she was rimmed with a protection of triple rails of the same metal, clamped fast to her hull, and set with powerful springs, to withstand the shock of impact with the floating ice. Ever her twin-screw propellers whirled within a sheltering hood of steel. She had been dismantled of many of her trappings and remodeled to conserve the two qualities most needed in her present straits—speed and strength.

Useless as he was in the management of the ship, Polaris spent four hours on deck to one in his cabin.

"Better to meet death up here in the free air, if death be fated for us, than to strangle down there like a trapped beast," he said to Zenas Wright. When perils thickened, he abandoned his cabin altogether, brought a huge bearskin on deck and slept there, when sleep he must.

Although in life's evening, the scientist was almost as active. For days Scoland seemed never to sleep at all. Under his guidance the Minnetonka pierced the dangers like a projectile launched from a cannon of the gods, and directed by a calm, clear mind that lived within it.

When they reached the lower end of Ross Sea a pale, uncertain light that shone in the north behind told them of the coming of the polar day. There a new and formidable obstacle confronted them. Where the sea narrowed to a three-mile channel, beyond which lay wider water, great ice floes had drifted in and barred the way. They were formed of drift and flat ice, of no great thickness, but lay acres in extent in a mighty jam. All along the edge of that field fretted and stormed the giant bergs that had come down with the tide.

Back and forth across the narrowed sea the Minnetonka steamed, playing her searchlights in vain. No passage was open. Scoland called a conference.

"There are two things we can do," he said. "We can hew ourselves a safe harbor and wait for the jam to break up, when we can fight our way through the channel with the bergs; or we can smash a way through ourselves with the ram and explosives. We can't remain as we are, for the big fellows are getting thicker. Every hour lost adds to the danger of being crushed in where we can't get out, perhaps of being sunk. Which shall it be?"

Lieutenant Everson, second in command of the Minnetonka, said nothing. Zenas Wright, who was a scientist first and a sailor very far second, said as much.

"The snug harbor idea likes me varra weel," remarked Engineer MacKechnie, and he peered across the glistening floes and out at the drifting bergs with anxious eyes.

"It may mean weeks," suggested Scoland. "What do you say, Janess?"

Polaris glanced down the barred lane of the channel with heightened color. "I am no man of the seas," he answered quietly, "but I say, break through. For, look you, the wind rises again. Here all is held. Yonder in the open sea the bergs drive on. Where we break a pathway, no berg may follow us. When we are come through, the gale will have cleared the waters beyond, and we shall find our sailing smooth, ahead of the jam and behind the bergs that are gone before."

"Aye, mon, mon, the boy is right," cut in MacKechnie. "This ship's not a plaything. Yon is varra hard cutting, but she can do it, dinna fear."

Scoland turned to one of the mates. "Jameson, bring up the lyddite," he ordered.

Where the floe fields seemed weakest and narrowest, near the left of the channel, the captain sent men onto the ice with drills and explosive, charge after charge of which was sunk into the floe and exploded from a battery in one of the cruiser's boats.

Scoland took personal charge of the mining. Under his orders, his men blasted out a large basin in the floe, a hundred yards in from its face.

"If we cut a channel straight in," he explained, "the pressure of the jam is likely to close it at once, or else shut it like a vise on the cruiser, after she is in. We will blast a narrow channel to the basin, drive the ship in, and then make another basin farther on, and a second channel. By zigzagging and letting the channels close in behind us, we will avoid the danger of being nipped and held fast in the floe."

Like a watchful sentinel, the Minnetonka patrolled the edge of the floe, nosing small vagrant bergs from her way, in an endeavor to keep cleared the spot where she would have to make her dash for the channel. Scoland stood on the bridge, tapping its rail with a nervous hand, his sharp eyes darting from one to another of the larger ice masses which might be disposed to contest a passage with his ship.

The men on the ice signaled that their lyddite train was laid and ready. They withdrew to a distance, one of them carrying the small battery, from which the slender connecting wires led to the sunken charges of explosive.

Picking up her boat, the Minnetonka, under reversed engines, backed away and stood ready for the dash to the basin. Twice the captain raised his megaphone to his lips to give the word, but each time he hesitated. Suddenly he dropped it and sprang into the wheelhouse. Immediately the ship lunged forward.

Keenly alive to these proceedings, Zenas Wright and Polaris, from their station near the forward davits, wondered at this new move.

"Now what has happened?" questioned the scientist. "One would think we were going into battle. See, they are manning the guns!"

Polaris glanced down the ship's rail and saw the eager-eyed gun crews tearing the coverings from their long-silent ordnance. Forth from their ports crept the grim muzzles of three of the Minnetonka's six-inch guns.

"Battle it is to be," said Polaris; "and yonder floats the enemy." He pointed to where a huge iceberg had broken from its mooring at the edge of the floe, and, momentarily gaining headway, was drifting in to bar the channel way.

The ship swung about sharply. One of her powerful searchlights played steadily on the face of the looming ice cliffs as it came on, its hundred towers and crags glittering and flashing in the brilliant ray, a mass of floating silver. A sharp word of command, and the three gun captains, bronzed and alert, bent to their levers with machinelike precision. The crackling of the floes and the grinding of the bergs were lost in the thunder of the guns.

At that point-blank range, the effect of the volley was terrific. Where the shells struck, the surface of the berg flew to pieces. The air in the radius of the searchlight was filled with a shower of scintillating splinters. Larger masses of ice slid from the face of the slow-moving mountain and plunged sullenly into the tossing waves. A cavern was made from which a thousand gleaming fissures shot into the darker body of the ice behind.

Working like beavers, the gunners reloaded and sent another crashing discharge into the floating wall at its water-line. As a small chunk of ice is parted by a few blows from an ice pick, so the repeated impact of the exploding shells shattered the berg and sundered it. Pitching and toppling, down came its lofty towers into the sea. Its giant menace crumbled into scores of insignificant blocks and a spreading bank of drift.

Again the Minnetonka backed and pointed her nose toward the floe, whither her searchlights were concentrated. Scoland reappeared on the bridge.

"Fire!" he shouted frenziedly through his megaphone.

A dark figure on the floe let its hand fall on the battery knob. A succession of thunderous detonations followed, and from every lyddite mine was flung skyward a column of water and glittering debris. For many yards the mighty floe pitched and heaved.

Her twin propellers thrashing the water to foam, the Minnetonka drove her steel-clad length through the opened gap smashing the wreckage right and left, and came to rest in the basin beyond. She was scarcely in before, with a long, angry roaring, the great rift closed behind her.

As the cruiser pushed through the channel a cry of consternation rose from the men on the ice, drowned in the turmoil of her passing, but audible to one man on her decks whose ears were almost more than mortal keen. Another cry came from the gunners as Polaris dashed through them and hurled himself into the ice-strewn waters.

One of Scoland's sailors, separated by some distance from his fellows, had climbed to an icy eminence near the west side of the basin. In the disturbance which followed the blasting of the channel and its closing, the ice where he stood had parted from the floe, and, his footing riven from under him, the poor fellow had been pitched into the dark water in the midst of the pounding drift.

From the deck of the cruiser, Polaris heard his despairing cry, and, straining his eyes through the half twilight, saw his form silhouetted for an instant against the ice before he took the plunge.

Straight and true leaped the son of the snows. One of the things civilization had taught him that he had never known before was the art of swimming. The staring gunners saw his white-clad figure reappear once many feet distant from the side of the cruiser, and then he was gone, tearing his way with powerful strokes through the swirl of ice and water.

As fast as many willing hands could cast her loose, a boat was put out from the ship. The miners on the ice rushed to the spot where their comrade had disappeared. Across the drift one of the cruiser's searchlights swept a long finger of light. It played on sullen waves and heaving ice, but revealed no struggling swimmer.

"That is the last of Janess, and the finish of this expedition," rapped out Scoland.

Zenas Wright, standing at the rail of the ship beside him, groaned aloud. He did not see the fleeting, satisfied smile that accompanied the words of Scoland. A mist that was not of the air or sea rose and obscured his vision, and he wiped it away with his shaking old hand.

The boat had nearly reached the edge of the basin when a strong white arm shot up, not ten feet away from it, and laid hold of a projection on one of the larger pieces of drift. A glad cry arose from floe and ship as, with a lusty thrashing of feet, Polaris emerged from the water and sprawled his length across the slippery surface. Again the shout, when it was seen that he dragged after him a smaller darker form. Parkerson, the sailor, was unconscious, having struck his head against floating ice in his fall.

When the boat returned, and Polaris still bearing the senseless man in his arms climbed over the side, the cruiser's company cheered him as only American sailors can cheer a hardy deed bravely done.

Minos the king left the Judgment House shortly after the going of Analos, the high priest of Hephaistos. With the king went the nobles.

"When ye have slept, come ye on the morrow to the palace," he bade them "There is much to be considered, wherein I would have your counsel."

A short way from the Judgment House, on the slopes of Mount Latmos, stood the palace of the kings of Sardanes, a temple-like structure, reared of the green stone from the cliff quarries and faced with lofty pillars of white marble. Thither Minos walked slowly, pondering much. One of his household, a lad of some eighteen years, who had tarried when the people fled from the hall, now followed his master.

As they ascended the path through the great trees toward the royal hill, a scrap of conversation drifted to the ears of the king from the porch of the stone cottage of one of the tillers of the soil.

"The world hath rocked. Cold enters the valley. The dread high priest threateneth the king. What will the outcome be?" A woman's voice asked the question.

A man made answer: "Hephaistos ruleth the priests. Analos and fear rule the people. What can the king do?"

Minos smiled. What, indeed? Yet there were some things that he could and would do.

A booming stroke of the huge drum echoed through the valley, telling that the day was done, and that one faithful soul had not forsaken its post. The drum swung between two pillars in the center of the Hall of Judgment. Near to it was a vase of nearly the height of a man. In the bottom of the vase was drilled a tiny hole. The vase was filled with water from the holy River Ukranis. Usually a lad watched it.

When the water had seeped away and the vase was emptied, a process that consumed some ten hours, it was the duty of the watcher to smite a blow on the drum and to refill the vase. Then another took up the vigil. So the Sardanians kept rude reckoning of time.

When Minos reached his home he sent the lad to fetch parchment, brush, and pigment. By the flaring light of a torch he wrote: