adness and want of care for the morrow at all events prevailed
here also, and our skin-clad friends availed themselves of the
opportunity to exhibit a self-satisfied disdain of the simple
provisions from the _Vega_ which the day before they had begged for
with gestures so pitiful, and on which they must, in a day or two,
again depend. The children, who had fallen off during recent weeks,
if not in comparison with European children, at least with well-fed
Chukch ones, began speedily to regain their former condition, and
likewise the older people. Begging ceased for some days, but the
vessel's deck still formed a favourite rendezvous for crowds of men,
women, and children. Many passed here the greater part of the day,
cheerful and gay in a temperature of -40 deg. C, gossiped, helped
a little, but always only a little, at the work on board and so on.
The mild weather, the prospect of our getting free, and of an
abundant fishing for the Chukches, however, soon ceased. The
temperature again sank below the freezing-point, that is _of
mercury_, and the sea froze so far out from the shore that the
Chukches could no longer carry on any fishing. Instead we saw them
one morning come marching, like prisoners on an Egyptian or Assyrian
monument, in goose-march over the ice toward the vessel, each with a
burden on his shoulder, of whose true nature, while they were at a
distance, we endeavoured in vain to form a guess. It was pieces of
ice, not particularly large, which they, self-satisfied, cheerful
and happy at their new bit, handed over to the cook to get from him
in return some of the _kauka_ (food) they some days before had
despised.

The first time the temperature of the air sank under the
freezing-point of mercury, was in January. It now became necessary
to use instead of the mercury the spirit thermometers, which in
expectation of the severe cold had been long ago hung up in the
thermometer case. When mercury freezes in a common thermometer, it
contracts so much that the column of mercury suddenly sinks in the
tube; or if it is short, goes wholly into the ball. The position of
the column is therefore no measure of the actual degree of cold when
the freezing takes place. The reading of -89 deg., or even of -150 deg.,
which at a time when it was not yet known that mercury could
at a low temperature assume the solid form, was made on a mercurial
thermometer in the north of Sweden,[258] and which at the time
occasioned variou