job than a spell of
coal-shifting on board. It is a pity that such a useful thing as coal
should be so black! What we are doing now is only hoisting it from the
hold and filling the bunkers with it; but every man on board must help,
and everything is in a mess. So many men must stand on the coal-heap
in the hold and fill the buckets, and so many hoist them. Jacobsen
is specially good at this last job; his strong arms pull up bucket
after bucket as if they were as many boxes of matches. The rest of
us go backward and forward with the buckets between the main-hatch
and the half-deck, pouring the coal into the bunkers; and down
below stands Amundsen packing it, as black as he can be. Of course
coal-dust is flying over the whole deck; the dogs creep into corners,
black and toussled; and we ourselves--well, we don't wear our best
clothes on such days. We got some amusement out of the remarkable
appearance of our faces, with their dark complexions, black streaks
at the most unlikely places, and eyes and white teeth shining through
the dirt. Any one happening to touch the white wall below with his
hand leaves a black five-fingered blot; and the doors have a wealth
of such mementos. The seats of the sofas must have their wrong sides
turned up, else they would bear lasting marks of another part of the
body; and the table-cloth--well, we fortunately do not possess such a
thing. In short, coal-shifting is as dirty and wretched an experience
as one can well imagine in these bright and pure surroundings. One
good thing is that there is plenty of fresh water to wash with; we
can find it in every hollow on the floes, so there is some hope of
our being clean again in time, and it is possible that this may be
our last coal-shifting.

"Monday, September 25th. Frozen in faster and faster! Beautiful, still
weather; 13 degrees of frost last night. Winter is coming now. Had
a visit from a bear, which was off again before any one got a shot
at it."

CHAPTER VI

THE WINTER NIGHT

It really looked as if we were now frozen in for good, and I did not
expect to get the Fram out of the ice till we were on the other side of
the Pole, nearing the Atlantic Ocean. Autumn was already well advanced;
the sun stood lower in the heavens day by day, and the temperature
sank steadily. The long night of winter was approaching--that dreaded
night. There was nothing to be done except prepare ourselves for
it, and by degrees we converted our sh