Fearless in the face of their disasters, the members of the little party rested their hopes on the broad shoulders of the son of the wilderness, and they began their bitter drive. That leader set his tireless strength and will of iron to the task, with a silent tongue and a flame in his heart--a flame and a vision of a dear face a continent and a half away to the north, that he swore he would live to see again. * * * * * When men had failed them and fortune had seemed to turn her face away, a mighty friend aided them--no less a one than old Mother Nature. The path that might have been so beset with hardships, she elected to make smooth, and tempered even her wild winds, so that the going of the travelers was more swift than they had dared to hope. Long before they came to the notch in the chain of ice mountains, through which Polaris had passed north on his previous journey, they reached the monstrous seam that the furious volcanic fires had left across the southern continent when they had poured from their ancient bed in Sardanes to rear their flaming bulwarks on the shores of Ross Sea. Where the fiery torrents had burst through under the barrier range, the mountains must have been but empty shells of volcanoes active ages agone. One of them had collapsed. Where once it had reared its snow-capped peak, was now a jagged gash like a broken wall. Through that gash the travelers went. It took them all of an arduous day's labor to reach a spot from where they could see on ahead--labor that was wasted, should they find that the lands beyond offered no hope of a pathway. Most of the way the dogs were useless. The brutes finally had been whipped into a semblance of amity, and flocked along without fighting; more, it is true, through fear of the ready lash than because of any love between the two breeds. With all their weights of food and trappings the sledges were lifted by the son of the snows and the Sardanian, and carried over many a torn and twisted scar in the half-healed breast of the mountain. If the thews of Polaris were more mighty than those of the king, in endurance the men were equal. They performed feats that perhaps no other two men in the whole world could have accomplished. At last they gained a height in the pass from where the miles lay spread out before them. As far as their eyes could see was a mark across the land, as though a mighty iron wheel, white hot, had turned its slow way northward, searing everything that it could not crush. Not all the snows that had fallen had been sufficient to obliterate that trail. "There, my son, lies a road that we cannot lose," said Zenas Wright when he set eyes on it. "And we know where it leads to--straight to Ross Sea. There, above the volcanic area, is the most likely place of all in the Antarctic regions for a ship to come."