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When we had found our way out of it it was full daylight, the rim of the rising sun peeping over the edge of the great snow-plain and turning it crimson from end to end. I halted my Hussars and Lancers under the shadow of the wood, and I studied the country. Close to us there was a small farm-house. Beyond, at the distance of several miles, was a village.
They are not high enough to obstruct the view, nor to mar its ocean-like effect. In the middle distance you may see a farm windmill from sail to platform, but away across the snow-plain sea you catch only the uppermost part of the white sails.
In the snow-plain, which was the centre of this northern desolation, they dug the grave of the living man. I watched from afar held by what hideous power I knew not and I saw them roll him over into the trench they had dug, and shovel the snow quickly upon him.
The sub-ray lights!" The search-beams from our towers were inordinately active. Sweeping the empty snow-plain and the empty sky. Empty? To my fevered imagination they were peopled with enemies. And then one of the towers flashed on a sub-ray the dull infra-red for envisaging the slow rays below the power of human sight. And another tower with its faint purple beam was using the ultra-violet.
They had dug the grave early in the evening, out on the great snow-plain, free of the trees; and as the fire they had built lighted up their dark, round faces MacVeigh saw the five little black men who had borne forth Scottie Deane leaning over the shallow hole in the frozen earth. Scottie was already gone.
High peaks, impassable cliffs, steep snow-slopes, and sharply descending glaciers were prominent features in all directions, with stretches of snow-plain over laying the ice-sheet of the interior. The slope we were ascending mounted to a ridge and our course lay direct to the top.
While the Union Jack blew out stiffly in the icy gale that cut us to the bone we looked south with powerful glasses, but could see nothing but the dead white snow-plain. There was no break in the plateau as it extended toward the pole, and we felt sure that the goal we have failed to reach lies on this plain.
But the greater surprise was the view from my window, a view over a sunlit fjord, away to mountain peaks, snow-capped and shining; and between them to a vista of an endless snow-plain, white, dazzling, and not altogether unmonotonous, yet relieved by the nearer patches of green and almost garden-land which seemed to stretch towards the sea.
Stretching to the northward was a brilliantly illuminated, level, and slightly drifted snow-plain, our imperial highway, presenting a spectacle grand and sublime; and we were truly grateful and inwardly prayed that this condition would last indefinitely. Without incident or accident, we marched on for fifteen hours, pacing off mile after mile in our steady northing, and at nine P. M. we halted.
I followed him down the passage to the beach, where he blew a whistle sharp and shrill, and the note had a strange ring as it echoed through the cañon. "That'll wake 'em on the ship," he explained. "I'm not afeard of these, but there's fighting to be done now lie behind me, and don't show till you're wanted." He advanced towards the snow-plain and sang out
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