our, as in the distance they resembled a snowstorm of
which the great flakes were parti-coloured.

At last the _Hvalross_ was seen floating on the clear water, looking
welcome and bright in the sunshine; and so clear was everything that as
they neared her she looked doubled, one vessel keel to keel with
another, whose funnel and masts lay low in the depths of the fiord.

"Dinner's quite ready, gentlemen," said the cook as they reached the
deck; and that night, in spite of the soft glow of the sun, Steve slept
as soundly as if it were as dark as any that he had ever known at home.

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX.

THE DOCTOR'S SHOT.

Captain Marsham had given his orders over-night, and hence the steam was
up by breakfast time, and directly after that meal the vessel was
gliding northward with her propeller churning up the deep water into a
silvery foam, while two ever-extending waves ran toward the sides of the
fiord, and broke upon the perpendicular rocks which ran down into deep
water.

Steve felt a little regret at quitting their anchorage, till he recalled
that there was an equally beautiful one at the foot of the frozen fall;
and he had just come to the conclusion that it was a very wise change,
for it suggested imprisonment to be shut in on three sides by the
towering rocks and the piled-up ice-floes, when the captain said to Mr
Handscombe:

"This will be a wonderful change for the better."

"But you will not go on loading the vessel with oil now?" said the
doctor.

"Why not? We shall have grand opportunities to do that, and make
expeditions inland as well, on the chance of finding that our friends
may also have been driven up here."

"But the vessel--we can never extricate her, so why load her?"

"Because the chances here are so many. It looks at the first blush as
if the vessel is bound to stay here till she has rotted and the engine
rusted away, but we are not going to despair. Who could, in weather
like this, eh, Steve?"

"Of course not," said the boy. "Why, we can set to work and build a
ship big enough to carry us back to Norway out of the planks, if the ice
behind us does not melt."

The captain nodded, and then he resumed his task of keeping a sharp
look-out forward in search of rocks, but his search was vain, for the
water was immensely deep and clear, and they reached the open part of
the fiord, and cast anchor a short distance away from the mouth of the
black chasm and in full view of the gl