And from that day he and I had hardly exchanged ten words, in spite of our constant companionship in the vessel; and one day, standing alone on a floe, I found myself hissing with clenched fist:  ’If he dared suspect Clodagh of poisoning Peters, I could kill him!’

Up to 78 deg. of latitude the weather had been superb, but on the night of the 7th October—­well I remember it—­we experienced a great storm.  Our tub of a ship rolled like a swing, drenching the whimpering dogs at every lurch, and hurling everything on board into confusion.  The petroleum-launch was washed from the davits; down at one time to 40 deg. below zero sank the thermometer; while a high aurora was whiffed into a dishevelled chaos of hues, resembling the smeared palette of some turbulent painter of the skies, or mixed battle of long-robed seraphim, and looking the very symbol of tribulation, tempest, wreck, and distraction.  I, for the first time, was sick.

It was with a dizzy brain, therefore, that I went off watch to my bunk.  Soon, indeed, I fell asleep:  but the rolls and shocks of the ship, combined with the heavy Greenland anorak which I had on, and the state of my body, together produced a fearful nightmare, in which I was conscious of a vain struggle to move, a vain fight for breath, for the sleeping-bag turned to an iceberg on my bosom.  Of Clodagh was my gasping dream.  I dreamed that she let fall, drop by drop, a liquid, coloured like pomegranate-seeds, into a glass of water; and she presented the glass to Peters.  The draught, I knew, was poisonous as death:  and in a last effort to break the bands of that dark slumber, I was conscious, as I jerked myself upright, of screaming aloud: 

‘Clodagh!  Clodagh! Spare the man...!’

My eyes, starting with horror, opened to waking; the electric light was shining in the cabin; and there stood David Wilson looking at me.

Wilson was a big man, with a massively-built, long face, made longer by a beard, and he had little nervous contractions of the flesh at the cheek-bones, and plenty of big freckles.  His clinging pose, his smile of disgust, his whole air, as he stood crouching and lurching there, I can shut my eyes, and see now.

What he was doing in my cabin I did not know.  To think, my good God, that he should have been led there just then!  This was one of the four-men starboard berths:  his was a-port:  yet there he was!  But he explained at once.

’Sorry to interrupt your innocent dreams, says he:  ’the mercury in Maitland’s thermometer is frozen, and he asked me to hand him his spirits-of-wine one from his bunk...’

I did not answer.  A hatred was in my heart against this man.

The next day the storm died away, and either three or four days later the slush-ice between the floes froze definitely.  The Boreal’s way was thus blocked.  We warped her with ice-anchors and the capstan into the position in which she should lay up for her winter’s drift.  This was in about 79 deg. 20’ N. The sun had now totally vanished from our bleak sky, not to reappear till the following year.