As they were eating it they were suddenly startled by an explosion so tremendous that their tree seemed to have been struck by lightning. Out went Robinson, with his mouth full, on to a snowdrift four feet high. He looked up and saw the cause of the fracas. A large bough of a neighboring tree had parted from the trunk with the enormous weight of the snow. Robinson climbed back to George and told him. Supper recommenced, but all over the wood at intervals they now heard huge forks and boughs parting from their parent stems with a report like a thirty-two-pounder ringing and echoing through the wood. Others so distant that they were like crackers.
These sounds were very appalling in the ghostly wood. The men instinctively drew closer to each other; but they were no chickens; use soon hardened them even to this. They settled it that the forks they were sitting on would not give way, because there were no leaves on them to hold a great burden of snow; and soon they yielded to nature and fell fast asleep in spite of all the dangers that hemmed them.
At his regular hour, just before sunrise, Robinson awoke and peeped from below the blanket. He shook George.
“Getup directly, George. We are wasting time when time is gold.”
“What is it?”
“'What is it?' There is a pilot in the sky that will take us out of this cursed trap, if the day does not come and spoil all.”
George's eye followed Robinson's finger, and in the center of the dark vault of heaven this glittered.
[Southern Cross constellation]