Chapter Twenty One.
A Terrible Time—The Doctor’s Dream—The Wondrous Mirage.
It was the month of mid-winter. Sickness had come at last; the sickness that is born of privation and absence of vegetable food. The younger and more weakly of the men were first to succumb. They lost heart, felt weary, tired, depressed. They refused to work. Even Dr Barrett could not find it in his heart to force them. They grew pale and thin, even to emaciation, and their dilated pupils glittered on their sunken eyeballs.
Their stronger companions tried to cheer them, ay, and many a time went without food themselves to give it to them.
One dropped dead, and was carried away and buried in the ice-hole. “Buried by the light of glaring torches,” buried at sea you may call it,—a sailor’s funeral, but what a sad one!
It was Magnus Jansen, a fair-haired Shetland lad, who had been a great favourite with his messmates, owing to his kind and gentle nature and his ever willingness to oblige.
“We commit his body to the deep,” read Claude, “looking for the resurrection, when the sea shall give up her dead;” and more than one horny hand was raised to brush away a tear, as with deep and sullen plash the body sank into the sea.