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Polaris is a young man who lives at the South Pole and finds himself in treacherous adventures within unforgiving milieus.

He was born in a little house in the snows, and his mother died but a few months afterward. The only human being he knew was his father, who called him Polaris. Life was a round of ceaseless work and study. The boy grew strong, and his mind was constantly fed, too. He learned the history of the world beyond the snows; he learned many of the languages of this world, particularly the languages of classic literature: Greek and Latin. And he learned further that one day he would be sent north to deliver a message to the world--a message which his crippled father could not take back himself.

And finally the day came. His father called him, saying, "North! North! To the north, Polaris. Tell the world--you must go, Polaris!"

Throwing the covers from his low couch, the old man arose and stood, a giant, tottering figure. With a last desperate rallying of his failing powers, he extended his right arm and pointed to the north. Then he fell, as a tree falls, quivered, and was still. Polaris never had seen a human being die; and now he was utterly alone. He was no more than twenty-four years old.

From his father's books, he read the burial service that the old man would have wanted; from his reading, he deduced something of the proper preparation of the body for burial, then he carried his father's remains through a panel in the wall, where a cavern had been hollowed in the coal mine against which the house rested. Here, in a far corner, a gray boulder had been hewn into the shape of a tombstone. On its face were carved, side by side, two words: "Anne" and "Stephen." At its foot were a mound and an open grave, for Polaris' father had long since made full preparation for his death. The boy would be sent north with the message that his father had never been able to take back to civilization.

Polaris set out on his northward trek with a seven dog team, but a series of events would distract him; for he would discover woman, and then a strange occurrence would lead him to a land that no one in the world suspected could possibly exist in the Antarctic-Sardanes, where people dressed and spoke like the Greeks of olden times.

"It is fitting," said Zenas Wright to Polaris Janess, "that the man who discovered Sardanes should be the man to save her."

Born in the wilderness of the Antarctic by one of the strangest freaks of circumstance, Polaris had reached manhood without seeing any other human being besides the father who had reared him. When his father died the young man started to break his way through to civilization.

In his adventurings northward, he had found Rose Emer, an American heiress, lost in the snows. Where they made camp an ice foe broke up and they were whirled down the coast to the south again on an enormous berg. Inland, they had found the kingdom of Sardanes, a volcanic valley set like an emerald in the white fastnesses of the Antarctic, blooming with tropical verdure and peopled with a fragment of the ancient Greek nation, the Hellenes, of whose victories Homer sang. Polaris and Rose were the first people from the outer world of men to set foot there in nearly three thousand years.

In Sardanes, a king would have married the American Girl, but Polaris fought his way out of the valley with his dogs and guns, saving Rose and taking with them Kalin, the young high priest of Sardanes. The priest had died in the snowlands, but the man and the girl had come at last to the ship Felix, commanded by Captain James Scoland, From which the girl had strayed.

Long before they reached America, Rose had lost a not-too-warm admiration for the captain in a great love for the man who had saved her. Scoland, the explorer who had reached the South Pole in an airship, saw the girl won from him by the man from the wilderness.

Fearing lest the girl was enamored of the adventures which they had shared, and might later come to scorn the barbarian that he was, Polaris delayed to wed her for a year, a year which he devoted to an intense study of men and their ways. Of books he knew much; of men he knew little.

Before the year was out came Zenas Wright, with a report from the Smaley and Hinson expedition into Ross Sea, telling of a mighty volcanic eruption there. The scientist declared it to be an outpouring of the fires that warmed Sardanes. With the going of these fires, he asserted, the valley was doomed to return to wasteland, and its wonderful people to die.

Polaris said farewell to Rose and started south to face the perils of the Antarctic once more. His parting with Minos, known as the Smiling Prince, who had ascended the throne of Sardanes when Polaris slew the reigning king and the heir apparent--in his attempt to save Rose from an odious marriage--had not been on the most friendly terms. Yet he wanted to save Prince Minos and his people, if this were possible.

But Minos of Sardanes sat uneasy on his throne; there was portents of doom around him, and the priests were inciting the people to mutiny.

Now our cast of adventurers are on the U.S. cruiser Minnetonka, and here we have the story that old Zenas Wright told on his return to America.

For the Minnetonka rescued a man floating in the sea on some drift material, a man clad in golden armor, and who could breathe with his head under water. But this was only the beginning of the events which led to the destruction of the cruiser by weapons undreamed of, and the taking of the survivors to an even stranger land than Sardanes--a land of wonder and horror, of super science and superstition.

But most fantastic of all, this was a land where a lovely woman known as the Goddess Glorian had awaited Polaris arrival for centuries--in accordance with an ancient prophecy which foretold him as the savior of the kingdom of Ruthar.