“No, my lad, so much warmer,” said the captain. “Do you know what is our greatest enemy here that we shall have to fight?”
“Yes, the bears. They’ll smell the meat—Johannes said so; and you’re making an extremely easy way up to the deck.”
“Well, yes, if they come. But if they do, we must be ready for them. We can keep them off from our fortress, I daresay. But that was not the enemy I meant.”
“Oh, I see; you mean the cold.”
“Yes, my boy; but in one form. I mean the wind. I daresay we could stand thirty degrees below zero without wind better than we could stand zero with wind. That is the enemy we have to fight against. The still cold will not affect us like the storms.”
And so it passed, day after day. The men were out hunting one morning, when it was the coldest by the thermometer they had yet felt; but no one suffered. The men came back with their beards quite masses of ice, but the exercise in the still air kept them all aglow; while the very next day they had a walk along the lane they had trampled down in the snow as far as the piled-up ice-floe which had shut them up in the peaceful fiord, and coming back they had to face a piercing north wind which carried with it a fine snow-dust which seemed to cut into the skin.
“The coldest day we have had yet,” said the doctor as they stepped on deck; but the captain went at once to the instruments which were placed ready for taking the observations duly entered in a journal, and turned back, shaking his head.
“Twenty degrees warmer than it was yesterday.”
“You amaze me,” said Mr Handscombe. “I never felt it so cold before.”
“He meant twenty degrees not quite so cold, sir,” said Steve, who was rubbing and beating his half-numbed hands. “It isn’t warmer.”