“We could not believe our eyes. Yes, a group of men was approaching our dwelling. It turned out to be about fifty seal-hunters, guided by Matiliss, a well-known veteran mariner, from Norway. They had been caught by the icebergs, just as we had been.
“‘How did you know that we were here?’ we asked.
“‘Old Johan, this very same old party, showed us the way’—they answered, pointing to a venerable-looking old man with snow-white locks.
“In sober truth, it would have beseemed their guide far better to have sat at home over his fire than to have been seal-hunting in polar lands with younger men. And we told them so, still wondering how he came to learn of our presence in this kingdom of white bears. At this Matiliss and his companions smiled, assuring us that ‘old Johan’ knew all. They remarked that we must be novices in polar borderlands, since we were ignorant of Johan’s personality and could still wonder at anything said of him.
“‘It is nigh forty-five years,’ said the chief hunter, ‘that I have been catching seals in the Polar Seas, and as far as my personal remembrance goes, I have always known him, and just as he is now, an old, white-bearded man. And so far back as in the days when I used to go to sea, as a small boy with my father, my dad used to tell me the same of old Johan, and he added that his own father and grandfather too, had known Johan in their days of boyhood, none of them having ever seen him otherwise than white as our snows. And, as our forefathers nicknamed him “the white-haired all-knower,” thus do we, the seal hunters, call him, to this day.’
“‘Would you make us believe he is two hundred years old?’—we laughed.
“Some of our sailors crowding round the white-haired phenomenon, plied him with questions.
“‘Grandfather! answer us, how old are you?’
“‘I really do not know it myself, sonnies. I live as long as God has decreed me to. As to my years, I never counted them.’