Page:The Iron Pirate 1905.djvu/251

Rh leaving the dreadful picture to those that should care to gaze upon it. Yet its spell was too terrible, the morbid magnetism of it too potent; and I looked again and again, and turned away, and looked yet once more; and went to the ice to gaze more closely at the dead faces, and was so carried away with the trance of it that I seemed to forget the dead men, and thought that they lived. When I recalled myself, I observed Doctor Osbart watching me intently.

"A strange place, isn't it?" he said. "Observe it closely, for some day you will be here with the others."

I shuddered at his thought, and muttered, "God forbid!"

"Why?" he asked, hearing it. "It's not a very fearful thing to contemplate. I would sooner lie in ice than in earth—and that ice is not part of the glacier; it never moves. It is bound by the rock there which cuts it off from the main mass."

"It's a horrible sight!" I exclaimed, shivering.

"Not at all," he said. "These men have been our friends. I like to see them, and in a way one can talk to them. Who can be sure that they do not hear?"

It was almost the thought of a religious man, and it amazed me. I was even about to seek explanation, but a sudden excitement came upon him, and he raved incoherent words, crying—