“What, all the time?” asked William.
“Yes,” replied the Captain; “dark all the time.”
“How dark?” asked Fred.
“Dark as dark can be. Dark at morning and at evening. Dark at noon, and dark at midnight. Dark all the time, as I have said. Dark all the winter through. Dark for months and months.”
“How dreadful!” exclaimed Fred.
“Dreadful enough, as I can assure you, with no light, all the whole winter-time, except the moon and stars. A dreadful thing to live along for days and days, and weeks and weeks, and months and months, without the blessed light of day,—without once seeing the sun come up and brighten everything and make us glad, and the pretty flowers to unfold themselves, and all the living world praise the Lord for remembering it. That’s what you never see in all the Arctic winter,—no sunshine ever streaming up above the hills and making all the rainbow colors in the clouds. That’s what you never see at all, no more than if you were blind and couldn’t see.
“But never mind just now about the winter. We haven’t done with the summer yet, nor with Sunday either, for that matter.
“As I have said before, the loss of Sunday much grieved the Dean. So, you see, we had nothing else to do but make one on our own account.”
“What, make a Sunday!” exclaimed William. “I’ve heard of people making almost everything, even building castles in the air; but I never heard before of anybody putting up a Sunday.”
“Well, you see, we did the best we could. It is not at all surprising that we should have lost our reckoning in this way, seeing that the sun was shining, as I have told you, all the time; and we worked and slept without much regard to whether the hours of night or day were on us. So we had good reason for a little mixing up of dates. In fact we could neither of us very well recall the day of the month that we were cast away. It was somewhere near the end of June, that we knew; but the exact day we could not tell for certain. We remembered the day of the week well enough, and it was Tuesday; but more than this we could not get into our heads; and so it seemed that there was nothing for us but to sink all days into the one long day of the Arctic summer, and nevermore know whether it was Sunday, or Monday, or Friday, or what day it was of any month; and if it should be Heaven’s will that we should live on upon the island until the New Year came round, and still other years should come and go, we should never know New Year’s day.