Ever the days grew shorter.  The sun swung above the horizon, low to the south, and dipped back as though pulled by some invisible string.  Slanting through the trees it gave little cheer and no warmth.  Early in the afternoon it sank, silhouetting the pointed firs, casting across the snow long, crimson shadows, which faded into gray.  It was replaced by a moon, chill and remote, dead as the white world on which it looked.

In the great frost continually the trees were splitting with loud, sudden reports.  The cold had long since squeezed the last drops of moisture from the atmosphere.  It was metallic, clear, hard as ice, brilliant as the stars, compressed with the freezing.  The moon, the stars, the earth, the very heavens glistened like polished steel.  Frost lay on the land thick as a coverlid.  It hid the east like clouds of smoke.  Snow remained unmelted two feet from the camp-fire.

And the fire alone saved these people from the enemy.  If Sam stooped for a moment to adjust his snow-shoe strap, he straightened his back with a certain reluctance,—­already the benumbing preliminary to freezing had begun.  If Dick, flipping his mitten from his hand to light his pipe, did not catch the fire at the second tug, he had to resume the mitten and beat the circulation into his hand before renewing the attempt, lest the ends of his fingers become frosted.  Movement, always and incessantly, movement alone could keep going the vital forces on these few coldest days until the fire had been built to fight back the white death.

It was the land of ghosts.  Except for the few hours at midday these people moved in the gloom and shadow of a nether world.  The long twilight was succeeded by longer night, with its burnished stars, its dead moon, its unearthly aurora.  On the fresh snow were the tracks of creatures, but in the flesh they glided almost invisible.  The ptarmigan’s bead eye alone betrayed him, he had no outline.  The ermine’s black tip was the only indication of his presence.  Even the larger animals,—­the caribou, the moose—­had either turned a dull gray, or were so rimed by the frost as to have lost all appearance of solidity.  It was ever a surprise to find these phantoms bleeding red, to discover that their flesh would resist the knife.  During the strife of the heavy northwest storms one side of each tree had become more or less plastered with snow, so that even their dark trunks flashed mysteriously into and out of view.  In the entire world of the great white silence the only solid, enduring, palpable reality was the tiny sledge train crawling with infinite patience across its vastness.

White space, a feeling of littleness and impotence, twilight gloom, burnished night, bitter cold, unreality, phantasmagoria, ghosts like those which surged about Aeneas, and finally clogging, white silence,—­these were the simple but dreadful elements of that journey which lasted, without event, from the middle of November until the latter part of January.