air, as if from a furnace,
began to rush up and down past them. And the trail was growing steeper
still, and slippery as glass.

"What is it, Jim?" Tommy panted, as Dodd, leaving Haidia for a moment,
came back to him.

"I'd say lava," Dodd answered. "If only one could see something! I don't
know how she finds her way. My impression is that we are coming out
through the interior of an extinct volcano."

"But where are there volcanoes in the south polar regions?" inquired
Tommy.

"There are Mount Erebus and Mount Terror, in South Victoria Land, active
volcanoes discovered by Sir James Ross in 1841, and again by
Borchgrevink, in 1899. If that's where we're coming out--well, Tommy,
we're doomed, because it's the heart of the polar continent. We might as
well turn back."

"But we won't turn back," said Tommy. "I'm damned if we do."

"We're damned if we don't," said Dodd.

"Come along please!" sang Haidia's voice high up the slope.

They struggled on. And now a faint luminosity was beginning to penetrate
that infernal darkness. The rasping of the beetle-legs, too, was no
longer audible. Perhaps they had thrown Bram off their track! Perhaps in
the darkness he had not known which way they had gone after leaving the
whirlpool!

That thought encouraged them to a last effort. They pushed their
flagging limbs up, upward through an inferno of heated air. Suddenly
Dodd uttered a yell and pointed upward.

"God!" ejaculated Tommy. Then he seized Dodd in his arms and nearly
crushed him. For high above them, a pin-point in the black void, they
saw--a star!

They were almost at the earth's surface!

One more effort, and suddenly the ground seemed to give beneath them.
They breathed the outer air, and went sliding down a chute of sand, and
stopped, half buried, at the bottom.

CHAPTER VIII

_Recaptured_

"Where are we?" each demanded of the other, as they staggered out.

It was a moonless night, and the air was chill, but they were certainly
nowhere near the polar regions, for there was no trace of snow to be
seen anywhere. All about them was sand, with here and there a spiny
shrub standing up stiff and erect and solitary.

When they had disengaged themselves from the clinging sand they could
see that they were apparently in the hollow of a vast crater, that must
have been half a mile in circumference. It was low and worn down to an
elevation of not more than two or three hundred feet, and evidently the
volcano th