from six to eight days. Within twenty minutes of the time Peters had
suggested to Pym the danger of freezing to be apprehended, Lilama and
her maids were safely placed in the cellar, and were making merry over
their strange surroundings and attire. Then Pym and Peters hastened from
the house, to see what could be done for others.

"And now was witnessed the influence on man, of heredity and
environment, and the insurmountable difficulties in the way, even under
the most pressing need, of overcoming such influence. The Hili-lites in
more than a thousand years had fought only one battle, and that five
hundred years before; nor had they found necessary any struggle for
food, or against rigorous climate. They were a brainy people, and were
almost superhumanly perceptive in every sense organ and in every nerve.
But they were wanting in that quality possessed by most European peoples
and by Americans, which takes practical cognizance of the fact that
prompt action and fearlessness is the true protection against danger. In
the face of this great calamity among the Hili-lites, even the leading
men seemed paralyzed. Not that they displayed a particle of fear--it was
simply not in them to move rapidly, and to face joyfully great dangers.
With them, when mental processes failed to subdue, there was not much
left. They could have conquered a modern warship, provided they could
have come in contact with its officers, by controlling in some strange
way the minds of those men; but against a storm, or the course of
inanimate nature in any other direction, they were as powerless as any
other people, and their sense of powerlessness was paralyzing to them.
On the other hand, Pym and Peters had sprung from races that had in the
past thousand years gone through hundreds of struggles, amid every kind
of danger, for existence; and Peters, on the mother's side, she being an
American Indian, belonged to a race which had gone through what was
infinitely worse than a barbarian invasion--namely, a 'civilized' and