hore, and the ground was strewn with slabs and
boulders of granite and basalt. I found there a dead she-bear, two
well-grown cubs, and a fox, the latter having evidently fallen from the
cliffs; in three places the snow was quite red, overgrown with a red
lichen, which at first I took for blood. I did not even yet feel secure
from possible bears, and took care to make my den fairly tight, a work
which occupied me nearly four weeks, for I had no tools, save a hatchet,
knife, and metal-shod ski-staff. I dug a passage in the ground two feet
wide, two deep, and ten long, with perpendicular sides, and at its north
end a circular space, twelve feet across, also with perpendicular sides,
which I lined with stones; the whole excavation I covered with
inch-thick walrus-hide, skinned during a whole bitter week from four of
a number that lay about the shore-ice; for ridge-pole I used a thin
pointed rock which I found near, though, even so, the roof remained
nearly flat. This, when it was finished, I stocked well, putting in
everything, except the kayak, blubber to serve both for fuel and
occasional light, and foods of several sorts, which I procured by merely
stretching out the hand. The roof of both circular part and passage was
soon buried under snow and ice, and hardly distinguishable from the
general level of the white-clad ground. Through the passage, if I passed
in or out, I crawled flat, on hands and knees: but that was rare: and in
the little round interior, mostly sitting in a cowering attitude, I
wintered, harkening to the large and windy ravings of darkling December
storms above me.

* * * * *

All those months the burden of a thought bowed me; and an unanswered
question, like the slow turning of a mechanism, revolved in my gloomy
spirit: for everywhere around me lay bears, walruses, foxes, thousands
upon thousands of little awks, kittiwakes, snow-owls, eider-ducks,
gulls-dead, dead. Almost the only living things which I saw were some
walruses on the drift-floes: but very few compared with the number
which I expected. It was clear to me that some inconceivable catastrophe
had overtaken the island during the summer, destroying all life about
it, except some few of the amphibia, cetacea, and crustacea.

On the 5th December, having crept out from the den during a southern
storm, I had, for the third time, a distant whiff of that self-same
odour of peach-blossom: but now without any after-eff