MINOS OF SARDANES By Charles B. Stilson Author of "Polaris--of the Snows" _Copyright 1916 by Popular Publications, Inc._ 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.