They passed down through the scintillant, magical sheen, their moccasins rhythmically crunching the snow and their breaths wreathing mysteriously from their lips in sprayed opalescence.  Neither spoke, nor cared to speak, so wonderful was it all.  At their feet, under the great vault of heaven, a speck in the midst of the white vastness, huddled the golden city—­puny and sordid, feebly protesting against immensity, man’s challenge to the infinite!

Calls of men and cries of encouragement came sharply to them from close at hand, and they halted.  There was an eager yelping, a scratching of feet, and a string of ice-rimed wolf-dogs, with hot-lolling tongues and dripping jaws, pulled up the slope and turned into the path ahead of them.  On the sled, a long and narrow box of rough-sawed spruce told the nature of the freight.  Two dog-drivers, a woman walking blindly, and a black-robed priest, made up the funeral cortege.  A few paces farther on the dogs were again put against the steep, and with whine and shout and clatter the unheeding clay was hauled on and upward to its ice-hewn hillside chamber.

“A zone-conqueror,” Frona broke voice.

Corliss found his thought following hers, and answered, “These battlers of frost and fighters of hunger!  I can understand how the dominant races have come down out of the north to empire.  Strong to venture, strong to endure, with infinite faith and infinite patience, is it to be wondered at?”

Frona glanced at him in eloquent silence.

“‘We smote with our swords,’” he chanted; “’to me it was a joy like having my bright bride by me on the couch.’  ’I have marched with my bloody sword, and the raven has followed me.  Furiously we fought; the fire passed over the dwellings of men; we slept in the blood of those who kept the gates.’”

“But do you feel it, Vance?” she cried, her hand flashing out and resting on his arm.

“I begin to feel, I think.  The north has taught me, is teaching me.  The old thing’s come back with new significance.  Yet I do not know.  It seems a tremendous egotism, a magnificent dream.”

“But you are not a negro or a Mongol, nor are you descended from the negro or Mongol.”

“Yes,” he considered, “I am my father’s son, and the line goes back to the sea-kings who never slept under the smoky rafters of a roof or drained the ale-horn by inhabited hearth.  There must be a reason for the dead-status of the black, a reason for the Teuton spreading over the earth as no other race has ever spread.  There must be something in race heredity, else I would not leap at the summons.”

“A great race, Vance.  Half of the earth its heritage, and all of the sea!  And in threescore generations it has achieved it all—­think of it! threescore generations!—­and to-day it reaches out wider-armed than ever.  The smiter and the destroyer among nations! the builder and the law-giver!  Oh, Vance, my love is passionate, but God will forgive, for it is good.  A great race, greatly conceived; and if to perish, greatly to perish!  Don’t you remember: