waited for nothing. Even with the roar of sub-glacial thunders
hammering on his ear drums, he rushed to the man's assistance. Oolak
turned to his own dogs.

The din subsided almost in a moment. Steve reached the sled where
Julyman had beaten the dogs to the required condition. In a moment they
were at work setting things to rights. After that the dogs were strung
out afresh, and Julyman "mushed" them on, and brought them abreast of
the train of the waiting Oolak.

The dogs crouched down on the rough surface of the inhospitable ice.
Their great limbs were shaking under heavy coats of fur, and they
whimpered plaintively, stirred by some unspeakable apprehension. The men
were standing by, gazing back over the ghostly field of ice, with wonder
and disquiet in their eyes.

Again it was Oolak who spoke. He pointed at the headland from which they
had started. It was dim, shadowy, half lost in the grey twilight.

"Him all go back," he said, as though he were making the most ordinary
announcement.

Then he pointed at something nearer. It was just beyond where the sled
had been overturned.

"Him all break up. So."

His tone had changed. There was that in his harsh voice which was
utterly new to it.

It was the moment of Steve's awakening from the dream of triumph he had
dreamed. It was the moment of the shattering of the confidence of years.
A wide fissure, of the proportions of a chasm, had opened up just beyond
where the mishap had occurred. It was as Oolak said. The grey headland
looked to be moving backwards, vanishing in the shadows of the Arctic
night.

The approach to the heart of Unaga was yielding a reality that had been
entirely uncalculated.

The widening chasm, stretching far as the eye could see on either hand,
had completely cut off all retreat. Steve and his men were standing on a
belt of ice that was moving. It was slipping away from the parent body,
gliding ponderously almost without tangible motion, down the great
glacial slope. They were trapped on the bosom of a glacial field in the
titanic throes of its death agony; a melting, groaning mass riding
monstrously to its own destruction in those far-off, mist-laden depths
of the valley below.

It must have been unbelievable but for the definite evidence of it all.
Here, in the depths of an Arctic winter, with the whole earth shadowed
under a grey of frigid night, a glacial field, which a thousand years
could not have built up, was melting under a he