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° 20' N. The sun had now totally vanished from our bleak sky,
not to reappear till the following year.

Well, there was sledging with the dogs, and bear-hunting among the
hummocks, as the months, one by one, went by. One day Wilson, by far our
best shot, got a walrus-bull; Clark followed the traditional pursuit of