Home! What a charm it has for a sailor’s heart!
Chapter Sixteen.
The Sun’s Return—Hopes and Fears.
Both Claude and the doctor were on a high hill-top next day to watch for the coming of the sun. Nor were they disappointed. About noon the sun duly put in an appearance, looking fiery-fierce and angry through a kind of blue-grey haze that lay along the horizon.
The doctor was ready prepared to take sights, and did so coolly enough, despite the sun’s angry glare—coolly in more ways than one, for as he could only work with bare hands, whenever his fingers came in contact with the brass parts of his instruments they seemed to freeze thereto, and the sensation was that of touching red-hot metal.
I do not know how it was, but after the sun had once more sunk, and twilight had commenced to deepen into night, the scenery of the bleak world around them—the rugged mountains, the rocks and cliffs that looked like bergs of ice, the wide expanse of snow-clad sea, with their vessel lying so cold and comfortless-looking—had a very saddening effect both on Claude and the doctor.
“It is like going back into the grave,” said Claude.
“Well,” the doctor replied, “we must not forget that the sun will—rise again to-morrow and stay a little longer with us, and so on, longer and longer, until he rises not to set again.”