“Och! sure then,” cried Rory, losing all his seriousness at once, “we’ll have a shot at the old boy, that’s all?”
Chapter Twenty Three.
The Great Black Frost—Funny Jack Frost—The Cold Half-Hour—A Terrible Apparition under the Ice—Blowing Soap-Bubbles—Strange Effect—Snow and Snow-Shoes.
For week after week the great black frost continued, seeming only to wax more and more intense as the time went on. With the exception of the mysterious pool, mentioned in last chapter, and the small hole kept open alongside the yacht, there was no water to be met with anywhere. The sea, as far as the eye could reach, was a smooth unbroken sheet of glass, two feet in thickness if a single inch. If there was any ripple or swell in the now far-off blue water, it did not affect the ice for miles around the Snowbird in the slightest. There was never a crack and never a flaw in it. It was hard, solid, and black, adamantine one might almost say in its extreme hardness. The chips broken off from the edge of the ice-hole looked like pieces of greenish rock crystal. The ice-hole itself required to be broken every time a bucket was dipped in it.
Meanwhile the days grew shorter and shorter, but there was never a breath of wind, and never a cloud in the sky. And the sun looked cold and rayless, yet at night the stars shone out with extraordinary brilliancy.
Breakfast was now a meal to be partaken of by lamplight, and so too was dinner, but they both passed off none the less pleasantly for that.
“It seems to me,” said Allan one morning, “that one of these days the sun won’t trouble to get up at all.”
“We are just in the latitude,” remarked McBain, “where even at midsummer there is a little night, and at mid-winter a little day.”