ng above the mist.

"The sledge!" shouted the captain.

"It's eighty feet beneath us," answered Simpson.

"Is it all right?"

"All right."

"And the bear?" asked the doctor.

"What bear?" said Bell.

"A bear!" said Hatteras; "let's go down."

"No!" said the doctor; "we shall lose our way, and have to begin it
all over again."

"And if he eats our dogs--" said Hatteras.

At that moment Duke was heard barking, the sound rising through the
mist.

"That's Duke!" shouted Hatteras; "there's something wrong. I'm going
down."

All sorts of howling arose to their ears; Duke and the dogs were
barking furiously. The noise sounded like a dull murmur, like the roar
of a crowded, noisy room. They knew that some invisible struggle was
going on below, and the mist was occasionally agitated like the sea
when marine monsters are fighting.

"Duke, Duke!" shouted the captain, as he made ready to enter again
into the frost-rime.

"Wait a moment, Hatteras,--wait a moment! It seems to me that the fog
is lifting."

It was not lifting, but sinking, like water in a pool; it appeared to
be descending into the ground from which it had risen; the summits of
the icebergs grew larger; others, which had been hidden, arose like
new islands; by an optical illusion, which may be easily imagined, the
travellers, clinging to these ice-cones, seemed to be rising in the
air, while the top of the mist sank beneath them.

Soon the top of the sledge appeared, then the harnessed dogs, and then
about thirty other animals, then great objects moving confusedly, and
Duke leaping about with his head alternately rising and sinking in the
frozen mist.

"Foxes!" shouted Bell.

"Bears!" said the doctor; "one, two, three."

"Our dogs, our provisions!" cried Simpson.

A troop of foxes and bears, having come across the sledge, were
ravaging the provisions. Their instinct of pillaging united them in
perfect harmony; the dogs were barking furiously, but the animals paid
no heed, but went on in their work of destruction.

"Fire!" shouted the captain, discharging his piece.

[Illustration: "'Fire!' shouted the captain, discharging his piece."]

His companions did the same. But at the combined report the bears,
raising their heads and uttering a singular roar, gave the signal to
depart; they fell into a little trot which a galloping horse could not
have kept up with, and, followed by the foxes, they soon disappeared
amid the ice to the north.