so silent, so lifeless, so soulless they seemed to be.

With precaution I would go up the side of my own particular corpse,
and would feel her as cold as ice itself and as slippery under my
feet. My cold berth would swallow up like a chilly burial niche my
bodily shivers and my mental excitement. It was a cruel winter.
The very air seemed as hard and trenchant as steel; but it would
have taken much more than this to extinguish my sacred fire for the
exercise of my craft. No young man of twenty-four appointed chief
mate for the first time in his life would have let that Dutch
tenacious winter penetrate into his heart. I think that in those
days I never forgot the fact of my elevation for five consecutive
minutes. I fancy it kept me warm, even in my slumbers, better than
the high pile of blankets, which positively crackled with frost as
I threw them off in the morning. And I would get up early for no
reason whatever except that I was in sole charge. The new captain
had not been appointed yet.

Almost each morning a letter from my owners would arrive, directing
me to go to the charterers and clamour for the ship's cargo; to
threaten them with the heaviest penalties of demurrage; to demand
that this assortment of varied merchandise, set fast in a landscape
of ice and windmills somewhere up-country, should be put on rail
instantly, and fed up to the ship in regular quantities every day.
After drinking some hot coffee, like an Arctic explorer setting off
on a sledge journey towards the North Pole, I would go ashore and
roll shivering in a tramcar into the very heart of the town, past
clean-faced houses, past thousands of brass knockers upon a
thousand painted doors glimmering behind rows of trees of the
pavement species, leafless, gaunt, seemingly dead for ever.