“D’ye think, sorr,” said Paddy O’Connell, touching the doctor gently on the sleeve,—“d’ye think there’s any danger at all, at all?”
“The danger is this, Paddy,” replied the doctor: “the snow is very soft and powdery. We are thirty miles from the ship; and if it comes on to blow, we will never reach her alive.”
“Then, the Lord help me mother and me poor sister Biddy,” said Paddy, piously.
But some time after midnight the thunderstorm retired, growling over the distant hills, and with it went every cloud.
Then oh! to see the beauty of the newly fallen snow, its purity, its whiteness, its stars of many shapes and ever-changing colours of light and radiance.
After two days of a wind that blew steadily from the south, the silence of that great inland sea was suddenly broken.
You might have imagined you were on some great battle-field, there was a constant series of rifle-like reports in all directions, with now and then a louder report, as if a piece of artillery had been discharged. And amid these ominous sounds you could hear, as it were, the shrieks of the wounded and the groans of the dying.
It was the breaking up of the inland sea of ice, and the noise continued for a whole day, and still the soft wind blew from the south.