k, Ferriss trying to free himself
from the sleeping-bag with the stumps of his arms. Upon one of these
stumps, the right one, a tin spoon had been lashed.

The tent was full of foul smells. The smell of drugs and of mouldy
gunpowder, the smell of dirty rags, of unwashed bodies, the smell of
stale smoke, of scorching sealskin, of soaked and rotting canvas that
exhaled from the tent cover--every smell but that of food.

Outside the unleashed wind yelled incessantly, like a sabbath of
witches, and spun about the pitiful shelter and went rioting past,
leaping and somersaulting from rock to rock, tossing handfuls of dry,
dust-like snow into the air; folly-stricken, insensate, an enormous, mad
monster gambolling there in some hideous dance of death, capricious,
headstrong, pitiless as a famished wolf.

In front of the tent and over a ridge of barren rocks was an arm of the
sea dotted with blocks of ice moving silently and swiftly onward; while
back from the coast, and back from the tent and to the south and to the
west and to the east, stretched the illimitable waste of land, rugged,
gray, harsh; snow and ice and rock, rock and ice and snow, stretching
away there under the sombre sky forever and forever; gloomy, untamed,
terrible, an empty region--the scarred battlefield of chaotic forces,
the savage desolation of a prehistoric world.

"Where's Adler?" asked Ferriss.

"He's away after shrimps," responded Bennett.

Bennett's eyes returned to his journal and rested on the open page
thoughtfully.

"Do you know what I've just written here, Ferriss?" he asked, adding
without waiting for an answer: "I've written 'It's the end of
everything.'"

"I suppose it is," admitted Ferriss, looking about the tent.

"Yes, the end of everything. It's come--at last.... Well." There was a
long silence. One of the men in the sleeping-bags groaned and turned
upon his face. Outside the wind lapsed suddenly to a prolonged sigh of
infinite sadness, clamouring again upon the instant.

"Dick," said Bennett, returning his journal to the box of records, "it
_is_ the end of everything, and just because it is I want to talk to
you--to ask you something."

Ferriss came nearer. The horrid shouting of the wind deadened the sound
of their voices; the others could not hear, and by now it would have
mattered very little to any of them if they had.

"Dick," began Bennett, "nothing makes much difference now. In a few
hours we shall all be like Dennis