Page:A Wild-Goose Chase - Balmer - 1915.djvu/217

Rh and circled before, after three hours, the whole party was together again.

The storm kept up, and under such conditions further travel was impossible. Even at noon light failed to penetrate the clouds; the world without the two tiny tents, now made into snow igloos, was all black wilderness. Only a crack of yellow light sometimes shone on the snow, which covered everything, to prove it was really white and not all inky like the sky. The dogs huddled close between the tents, buried in the snow.

Sixteen days this great black blizzard blew, days separated from each other only by recording the moving of the hands of a watch. The eight, crowded in their cramped shelters, cooked their rations over oil stoves and ate their food three times a day at intervals indicated by the watches. When the third of these times was passed and the watch told that it would be twelve hours before cooking a meal again, they stretched out and tried to go to sleep.

But sleep during such nights was slower and slower to come. The insomnia which attacks those confined and inactive in the long Arctic