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68 This was alarming news. The lads plunged into the snow deep in their tracks; the penguins danced and signalled with their flippers, as if in sympathy, or pleasure, at the occurrence. The lads sank deeply in the white carpet, shouting at times to the doctor. The stillness of the air enabled him to hear their cries, and by them he was made aware of the state of the case, which he had hitherto not suspected. But he had evidently gained the confidence of the two "Bears," for they plunged, waded, or swam to the assistance of the lads, and rescued them, dripping, freezing, numbed, from the grasp of the ice-king; they were all assisted on board the derelict by the surgeon.

He had lighted a fire; and when the half-frozen and wholly saturated lads and the "Bears" had been rescued, the former were put into bunks in the cabin and fed with hot broth. The savages did not mind the wetting; they dried by the fire, and were also fed. But when, late next day, the lads dressed, their clothes were ruined. They looked as if they had purchased the wardrobe of a "scarecrow" from a rag-and-bone merchant who had become insolvent.

The sun was setting in the southward as they came up. One can hardly say "setting," though, because it only dipped into the horizon a little way, and came up again on the rim of the ice-field. The silence was peculiar, the air sparkling and bracing, by no means very cold. The sea, where visible, was like a mirror; the mist had receded to the north, the south was clear. The floes were intersected by canals of sea-water, and the distant ice-fields looked like a series of snow-clad water-meadows in which the channels had been half frozen. Farther away the "canals" closed up, and apparently composed a level ice-continent to the sky-line. The effect was beautiful, charming, and altogether delightful; the colours of sky, ice, and water being immensely varied and most artistically combined on Nature's pallet.