“How long has this wind been blowing, Ferriss?”

“Since a week ago to-day,” answered the other.

Bennett continued his writing.

“...Incessant gales of wind for over a week.  Impossible to move against them in our weakened condition.  But to stay here is to perish.  God help us.  It is the end of everything.”

Bennett drew a line across the page under the last entry, and, still holding the book in his hand, gazed slowly about the tent.

There were six of them left—­five huddled together in that miserable tent—­the sixth, Adler, being down on the shore gathering shrimps.  In the strange and gloomy half-light that filled the tent these survivors of the Freja looked less like men than beasts.  Their hair and beards were long, and seemed one with the fur covering of their bodies.  Their faces were absolutely black with dirt, and their limbs were monstrously distended and fat—­fat as things bloated and swollen are fat.  It was the abnormal fatness of starvation, the irony of misery, the huge joke that arctic famine plays upon those whom it afterward destroys.  The men moved about at times on their hands and knees; their tongues were distended, round, and slate-coloured, like the tongues of parrots, and when they spoke they bit them helplessly.

Near the flap of the tent lay the swollen dead body of Dennison.  Two of the party dozed inert and stupefied in their sleeping-bags.  Muck Tu was in the corner of the tent boiling his sealskin footnips over the sheet-iron cooker.  Ferriss and Bennett sat on opposite sides of the tent, Bennett using his knee as a desk, Ferriss trying to free himself from the sleeping-bag with the stumps of his arms.  Upon one of these stumps, the right one, a tin spoon had been lashed.

The tent was full of foul smells.  The smell of drugs and of mouldy gunpowder, the smell of dirty rags, of unwashed bodies, the smell of stale smoke, of scorching sealskin, of soaked and rotting canvas that exhaled from the tent cover—­every smell but that of food.

Outside the unleashed wind yelled incessantly, like a sabbath of witches, and spun about the pitiful shelter and went rioting past, leaping and somersaulting from rock to rock, tossing handfuls of dry, dust-like snow into the air; folly-stricken, insensate, an enormous, mad monster gambolling there in some hideous dance of death, capricious, headstrong, pitiless as a famished wolf.

In front of the tent and over a ridge of barren rocks was an arm of the sea dotted with blocks of ice moving silently and swiftly onward; while back from the coast, and back from the tent and to the south and to the west and to the east, stretched the illimitable waste of land, rugged, gray, harsh; snow and ice and rock, rock and ice and snow, stretching away there under the sombre sky forever and forever; gloomy, untamed, terrible, an empty region—­the scarred battlefield of chaotic forces, the savage desolation of a prehistoric world.