my boy," said the captain. "Keep
up your spirits, and other people's if you can. I want every one to
have a good store of health and strength before the long night comes."

CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN.

A NOCTURNAL VISITOR.

And that long night which was on everybody's lips, and when silent in
everybody's mind, was coming on surely and gradually, but to all on
board the _Hvalross_ very fast; for the captain never let the men rest.
After every heavy fall of snow--and these came at shorter intervals--the
crew were set to work banking it up against the sides of the ship.

"But it will make it so much colder," Steve protested.

"No, my lad, so much warmer," said the captain. "Do you know what is
our greatest enemy here that we shall have to fight?"

"Yes, the bears. They'll smell the meat--Johannes said so; and you're
making an extremely easy way up to the deck."

"Well, yes, if they come. But if they do, we must be ready for them.
We can keep them off from our fortress, I daresay. But that was not the
enemy I meant."

"Oh, I see; you mean the cold."

"Yes, my boy; but in one form. I mean the wind. I daresay we could
stand thirty degrees below zero without wind better than we could stand
zero with wind. That is the enemy we have to fight against. The still
cold will not affect us like the storms."

And so it passed, day after day. The men were out hunting one morning,
when it was the coldest by the thermometer they had yet felt; but no one
suffered. The men came back with their beards quite masses of ice, but
the exercise in the still air kept them all aglow; while the very next
day they had a walk along the lane they had trampled down in the snow as
far as the piled-up ice-floe which had shut them up in the peaceful
fiord, and coming back they had to face a piercing north wind which
carried with it a fine snow-dust which seemed to cut into the skin.

"The coldest day we have had yet," said the doctor as they stepped on
deck; but the captain went at once to the instruments which were placed
ready for taking the observations duly entered in a journal, and turned
back, shaking his head.

"Twenty degrees warmer than it was yesterday."

"You amaze me," said Mr Handscombe. "I never felt it so cold before."

"He meant twenty degrees not quite so cold, sir," said Steve, who was
rubbing and beating his half-numbed hands. "It isn't warmer."

The wind dropped at sundown, if it could be called sundown, whe