esembling the smeared palette of some
turbulent painter of the skies, or mixed battle of long-robed seraphim,
and looking the very symbol of tribulation, tempest, wreck, and
distraction. I, for the first time, was sick.

It was with a dizzy brain, therefore, that I went off watch to my bunk.
Soon, indeed, I fell asleep: but the rolls and shocks of the ship,
combined with the heavy Greenland anorak which I had on, and the state
of my body, together produced a fearful nightmare, in which I was
conscious of a vain struggle to move, a vain fight for breath, for the
sleeping-bag turned to an iceberg on my bosom. Of Clodagh was my gasping
dream. I dreamed that she let fall, drop by drop, a liquid, coloured
like pomegranate-seeds, into a glass of water; and she presented the
glass to Peters. The draught, I knew, was poisonous as death: and in a
last effort to break the bands of that dark slumber, I was conscious, as
I jerked myself upright, of screaming aloud:

'Clodagh! Clodagh! _Spare the man...!_'

My eyes, starting with horror, opened to waking; the electric light was
shining in the cabin; and there stood David Wilson looking at me.

Wilson was a big man, with a massively-built, long face, made longer by
a beard, and he had little nervous contractions of the flesh at the
cheek-bones, and plenty of big freckles. His clinging pose, his smile of
disgust, his whole air, as he stood crouching and lurching there, I can
shut my eyes, and see now.

What he was doing in my cabin I did not know. To think, my good God,
that he should have been led there just then! This was one of the
four-men starboard berths: _his_ was a-port: yet there he was! But he
explained at once.

'Sorry to interrupt your innocent dreams, says he: 'the mercury in
Maitland's thermometer is frozen, and he asked me to hand him his
spirits-of-wine one from his bunk...'

I did not answer. A hatred was in my heart against this man.

The next day the storm died away, and either three or four days later
the slush-ice between the floes froze definitely. The _Boreal's_ way was
thus blocked. We warped her with ice-anchors and the capstan into the
position in which she should lay up for her winter's drift. This was in
about 79 deg. 20' N. The sun had now totally vanished from our bleak sky,
not to reappear till the following year.

Well, there was sledging with the dogs, and bear-hunting among the
hummocks, as the months, one by one, went by. One day Wilson, by