“Yes, Paddy,” says the doctor, “that’s all very cheerful and entertaining, but decidedly unscientific, and you didn’t tell us how you got here.”
“Not he!” said Scudds, growling; “I thought it war going to be a real ghost.”
“I say, look at him!” said Bostock.
But nobody would stop to look at him; the men shuffling off once more—all but the doctor and myself—as that figure regularly melted away before our eyes—body, bones, clothes, everything; and at the end of five minutes there was nothing there but a little dust and some clear ice.
“It’s very wonderful!” the doctor said; “but it won’t do. We must find another, take him up carefully, and not thaw him out, but get him back to Hull in his ice, like a glass case.”
“Come back, lads; the Irishman’s gone,” I said; and they came back slowly; and we had to set up the tent in a fresh place, and, while we did it, the doctor found another body, and set us to work to get it out.
We got this one out capitally; the ice running like in a grain; and after six hours’ hard work, there lay the body, like an ornament in a glass paper-weight, and the doctor was delighted.
About two hours after, as we were all sitting together in the tent, we heard a sharp crack, and started; but the doctor said it was only the ice splitting with the heat of the sun; and so it proved, for five minutes after, in came a gaunt, weird-looking figure, with a strange stare in his glimmering, grey eyes; a wild toss in his long yellow hair and beard, both of which were dashed with patches of white, that looked as though the colour had changed by damp or mildew, or the bitter, searching cold. With such a dreamy, far-off gaze, he looked beyond the men who sat opposite, that they turned involuntarily and glanced over their shoulders, as though they expected to see something uncanny peering at them from behind. His long limbs and wiry frame, together with this strange, eerie expression, give him the air of some old viking or marauding Jute come to life again, and ready to recite a Norse rune, or to repeat a mystic saga of the deep, impenetrable North.
“Eh,” he said, “I was just thinkin’ a bit aboot the time when I went wi’ Captain Parry to his expedition.”
“Why, you weren’t with Captain Parry?” said the doctor.