“Let me see,” said the doctor, putting on his spectacles. “To be sure—yes! Axes, quick!”
He took one himself, gave the block of ice a sharp blow, split it in halves, and, to our utter astonishment, a strange-looking animal like a woolly dog lay before us, frozen, of course, perfectly hard.
“A prize!” said the doctor; and we, under his orders, made a good-sized fire, laid the perfectly preserved animal by it, and at the end of a couple of hours had the satisfaction of seeing it move one leg, then another, and, at last, it rose slowly on all fours, raised one of its hind legs, scratched itself in the most natural way in the world, and then seemed to sink down all of a heap, and melt quite away, leaving some loose wool on the snow.
“Well,” said Scudds, rolling his one eye, “if I hadn’t ha’ seen that ’ere, I wouldn’t ha’ believed it!”
“Only a case of suspended animation, my man,” said the doctor, calmly. “We shall make more discoveries yet.”
The doctor was right; for this set all the men hunting about, he giving them every encouragement, so that at the end of an hour we had found another dog; but in dislodging the block of ice in which it was frozen, the head was broken off, so that the only good to be obtained by thawing it was the rough wool and some of the teeth, which the doctor carefully preserved.
“Isn’t it much colder here, doctor?” I said, for the wind seemed to go through me like a knife.
“Hush!” he whispered; “don’t let the men hear, or they’ll be discouraged. It’s perfectly frightful; the thermometers are stopped!”
“Stopped?” I said.
“Yes; the cold’s far below anything they can show. They are perfectly useless now. Let’s get on?”