“I said as desolate as before. But O, it was a thousand times more desolate now than ever,—as the night is darker for the lightning flash that has died away, or a cloudy noon is colder for a single ray of sunshine that has broken through the vapors.
“Yet on and on we ran and ran, until we could run no more.
“And then we laid us down upon the snow and wept, and bemoaned our hard, hard fate; but no word was spoken. The disappointment was too great for words; and, after a short rest in the chilly air upon the frozen sea, we wandered slowly back to our poor hut; and after many weary hours we reached it, not so much alive as dead,—for through miles and miles of heavy snow we had run after the sledge, and through these same miles we had trudged back again, with the cruel disappointment rankling in our hearts, and with no hope to buoy us up.
“Strange—was it not?—that at no period of our life upon the desert island were we so unhappy as we were that day,—never so utterly cast down, never so broken-spirited, never looking on the future with such hopelessness.
“And in this state of mind we crawled beneath our furs, feeling too lonely and forsaken to have a thought to cook a meal, and so very, very weary with the labor we had done, in running and wading through the heavy snow, that we did not care for food; and in deep sleep we buried up the heaviest sorrow that we had ever known,—the grievous sorrow of a dead, dead hope,—the hope of rescue that had come and gone from us, as the cloud-shadow flies across the summer field.”
CHAPTER XVII.
A very Peculiar Person appears and disappears, and the Castaways are filled alternately with Hope and Fear
“How long we slept I have not the least idea. It may have been a whole day, or it may have been two days. It was not a twenty years’ sleep, (how we wished it was!) like that of Rip Van Winkle, yet it was a very long sleep; and, indeed, neither of us cared how long it lasted, we were so heartbroken about what seemed to be the greatest misfortune that had yet happened to us. If we woke up at any time, we went to sleep again as quickly as possible, not caring at all to come back any sooner than was necessary to the contemplation of our miserable situation,—never reflecting for a moment that the situation had not been changed in the least by the unknown man who had appeared and disappeared in such a mysterious way. But the sight of him had brought our thoughts freshly back to the world from which we had been cut off,—a world with human beings in it like ourselves; and it was not unnatural, therefore, that we should be made miserable by the event. And so we slept on and on, and thus we drowned everything but our dreams, which are everywhere very apt to be most bright and cheering in the most gloomy and despondent times. Such, at least, was the case with me; and if I could have kept dreaming and dreaming on forever, about pleasant things to eat, and pleasant people talking to me, I should have been quite well satisfied.