The big Norseman smiled.
“Because, sir, it is not coming; it has already come.”
“Come?”
“Yes,” said Johannes, raising his hand, and pointing to the dazzling peaks of ice and the glistening snow coming quite low down on the slopes, leading gradually to the lake-like shores of the fiord; “there it is, sir.”
“Oh, but ice and snow have been there all the summer.”
“What we call the summer, sir; but it seems to me that the winter is always here. It rises a little when the sun comes back and a part of the snow melts; but if we climb up into the mountains a little way, it freezes every night, and the winter is always there. And now the sun rises a little less high every day, and there is real night which grows longer as the days grow shorter.”
“Yes, I noticed that the days grew shorter,” said Steve, as he looked up at the realm of eternal winter with aching eyes.
“Much, sir; and if we measured we should soon see that the snow up yonder was creeping down toward us week by week.”
Steve was silent for a few minutes, as he tried to familiarise himself with these wonderful facts about nature in the arctic circle.
“I say, Johannes,” he said at last, “what about the ice down at the opening of the fiord—will it give way this year?”