ar from
smoothly on its worn runners; it became harder and harder to drag it;
their path grew more difficult; the land was of volcanic origin, and
all cut up with craters; the travellers had been compelled gradually
to ascend fifteen hundred feet to reach the top of the mountains. The
temperature was lower, the storms were more violent, and it was a
sorry sight to see these poor men on these lonely peaks.

[Illustration]

They were also made sick by the whiteness of everything; the uniform
brilliancy tired them; it made them giddy; the earth seemed to wave
beneath their feet with no fixed point on the immense white surface;
they felt as one does on shipboard when the deck seems to be giving
way beneath the foot; they could not get over the impression, and the
persistence of the feeling wearied their heads. Their limbs grew
torpid, their minds grew dull, and often they walked like men half
asleep; then a slip or a sudden fall would rouse them for a few
moments from their sluggishness.

January 25th they began to descend the steep slopes, which was even
more fatiguing; a false step, which it was by no means easy to avoid,
might hurl them down into deep ravines where they would certainly have
perished. Towards evening a violent tempest raged about the snowy
summit; it was impossible to withstand the force of the hurricane;
they had to lie down on the ground, but so low was the temperature
that they ran a risk of being frozen to death at once.

Bell, with Hatteras's aid, built with much difficulty a snow-house, in
which the poor men sought shelter; there they partook of a few
fragments of pemmican and a little hot tea; only four gallons of
alcohol were left; and they had to use this to allay their thirst, for
snow cannot be absorbed if taken in its natural state; it has to be
melted first. In the temperate zone, where the cold hardly ever sinks
much below the freezing-point, it can do no harm; but beyond the Polar
Circle it is different; it reaches so low a temperature that the bare
hand can no more touch it than it can iron at a white heat, and this,
although it is a very poor conductor of heat; so great is the
difference of temperature between it and the stomach that its
absorption produces real suffocation. The Esquimaux prefer severe
thirst to quenching it with this snow, which does not replace water,
and only augments the thirst instead of appeasing it. The only way the
travellers could make use of it was by melti