ry heart out
of her, before they perished?

These thoughts weighed heavily in me, but I toiled on nevertheless, and
having cleared the door of the snow that bound it, I prized it apart
with the hanger and then dragged at it; but the snow on the deck would
not let it open far, and as there was room for me to squeeze through, I
did not stop to scrape the obstruction away.

A flight of steps sank into the darkness of the interior, and a cold
strange smell floated up, with something of a dry earthiness of flavour
and a mingling of leather and timber. I fell back a pace to let
something of this smell exhale before I ventured into an atmosphere that
had been hermetically bottled by the ice in that cabin since the hour
when this little door was last closed. Superstition was active in me
again, and when I peered into the blackness at the bottom of the hatch I
felt as might a schoolboy on the threshold of a haunted room in which
he is to be locked up as a punishment.

I put my foot on the ladder and descended very slowly indeed, my
inclination being strong the other way, and I kept on looking downwards
in a state of ridiculous fright as though at any moment I should be
seized by the leg; being in too much confusion of mind to consider that
it was impossible anything living could be below, whilst a ghostly
shadow could not catch hold of me so as to cause me to feel its grasp.
But then if fear could reason, it would cease to be fear.

On reaching the bottom I remained standing close against the ladder,
striving to see into what manner of place I was arrived. The glare of
the whiteness of the decks and rocks hung upon my eyes like a kind of
blindness charged with fires of several colours, and I could not obtain
the faintest glimpse of any part of this interior outside the sphere of
the little square of hazy light which lay upon the deck at the foot of
the steps. The darkness, indeed, was so deep that I concluded this was
no more than a narrow well formed of bulkheads, and that the cabin was
beyond, and led to by a door in the bulkhead.

To test this conjecture I extended my arms in a groping posture and
stepped a pace forward, feeling to right and left, till, having gone
five or six paces from the ladder, my fingers touched something cold,
and feeling it, I passed my hand down what I instantly knew by the
projection of the nose and the roughness of hair on the upper lip to be
a human face!

A little reflection might have pre