o say these Sleepers don't know a thing but
the stuff they find, and never have known in all their history. I
believe that some where away back their ancestors found the dead weed,
and maybe used it to smoke like other weeds some of the Northern Indians
use. Maybe it doped them in the pipe. Maybe some bright squaw tried
boiling it into a drink. It's a guess. You can't say how they came to
use it as dope. Anyway the thing just developed, and has gone on without
them getting wise to any of the things your father knew."

"Oh, yes, it all sounds crazy," Steve hurried on as Marcel stirred.
"It's too crazy I guess for a scientific head like your father's. But he
hadn't listened to Oolak's fool dream, and he never saw the thing I've
seen--twice."

"You've seen?"

Marcel could deny himself no longer. Intense excitement urged him. Steve
shook his head.

"I haven't found it--yet," he said. "No. The thing I've seen you've
seen, too. You were just a bit of a kiddie and won't remember. I'll try
and fix up the picture of what I saw then in the far-away distance, and
what I see now in my crazy mind's eye."

He paused. Then, with a swift movement that had something of excitement
in it, he flung out an arm pointing while his voice took on a new note,
and his words came rapidly.

"Somewhere out there," he cried. "A land of glacial ice, endless snow
and ice. Hills everywhere, broken, bald, immense. A range of mountains.
In the midst of 'em a giant hill bigger and higher than anything I've
ever dreamed. A hill of blasting, endless fire. It never dies out. It
burns right along, belching the fiery heart out of the bowels of the
earth. And everywhere about, for maybe miles, a blistering tropical heat
that defies the deadliest cold the Arctic hands out. Do you get it? Sure
you do. You're getting my crazy notion, that isn't so crazy. Well, what
then? Winter. A temperature that turns a snowstorm into a pleasant
summer rain, and the buzzard into a summer gale. Vegetation starts into
growth. I can't guess how the absence of sun fixes it. Maybe it
grows--_white_. But it grows--grows all the time, like those things of
the folk who grow out of season. Then spring, and the sun again. Rising
temperature. The heat from this hell ripens the stuff quick, and the sun
makes it green again. This Adresol. A great field of dead white. Then,
as swiftly, it dies. Dies before the Indians come. Burnt up by the
rising temperature of the advancing season _and