ration of our souls. As for me, never could I have conceived that
savagery so heinous could brood in a human bosom as now I felt it brood
in mine. If men could enter into a country specially set apart for the
habitation of devils, and there become possessed of evil, as we were so
would they be.

* * * * *

As we advanced, the ice every day became smoother; so that, from four
miles a day, our rate increased to fifteen, and finally (as the sledges
lightened) to twenty.

It was now that we began to encounter a succession of strange-looking
objects lying scattered over the ice, whose number continually
increased as we proceeded. They had the appearance of rocks, or pieces
of iron, incrusted with glass-fragments of various colours, and they
were of every size. Their incrustations we soon determined to be
diamonds, and other precious stones. On our first twenty-mile day Mew
picked up a diamond-crystal as large as a child's foot, and such objects
soon became common. We thus found the riches which we sought, beyond all
dream; but as the bear and the walrus find them: for ourselves we had
lost; and it was a loss of riches barren as ashes, for for all those
millions we would not have given an ounce of fish-meal. Clark grumbled
something about their being meteor-stones, whose ferruginous substance
had been lured by the magnetic Pole, and kept from frictional burning in
their fall by the frigidity of the air: and they quickly ceased to
interest our sluggish minds, except in so far as they obstructed our
way.

* * * * *

We had all along had good weather: till, suddenly, on the morning of the
13th April, we were overtaken by a tempest from the S.W., of such mighty
and solemn volume that the heart quailed beneath it. It lasted in its
full power only an hour, but during that time snatched two of our
sledges long distances, and compelled us to lie face-downward. We had
travelled all the sun-lit night, and were gasping with fatigue; so as
soon as the wind allowed us to huddle together our scattered things, we
crawled into the sleeping-bags, and instantly slept.

We knew that the ice was in awful upheaval around us; we heard, as our
eyelids sweetly closed, the slow booming of distant guns, and brittle
cracklings of artillery. This may have been a result of the tempest
stirring up the ocean beneath the ice. Whatever it was, we did not care:
we slept deep.

We were with