m_ to
perish of cold, there's an end; it is preordained, and it is as easy as
drowning, anyhow, and better than hanging; and with that I pulled out
the ham and found it soft enough to cut, finding philosophy (which, as
the French cynic says, triumphs over past and future ills) not so hard
because somehow I did not myself then particularly feel the cold--I
mean, I was not certainly suffering here from that pain of frost which I
had felt in the open boat.

Having heartily supped, I brewed a pint of punch, and, charging my pipe,
sat smoking with my feet against the furnace. It was after eight o'clock
by the watch I was wearing. I knew by the humming noise that it was
blowing a gale of wind outside, and from time to time the decks rattled
to a heavy discharge of hail. All sounds were naturally much subdued to
my ear by the ship lying in a hollow, and I being in her with the
hatches closed; but this very faintness of uproar formed of itself a
quality of mystery very pat to the ghastliness of my surroundings. It
was like the notes of an elfin storm of necromantic imagination; it was
hollow, weak, and terrifying; and it and the thunder of the seas
commingling, together with the rumbling blasts and shocks of splitting
ice, disjointed as by an earthquake, loaded the inward silence with
unearthly tones, which my lonely and quickened imagination readily
furnished with syllables. The lanthorn diffused but a small light, and
the flickering of the fire made a movement of shadows about me. I was
separated from the great cabin where the figures were by the little
arms-room only, and the passage to it ran there in blackness.

It strangely and importunately entered my head to conceive, that though
those men were frozen and stirless they were not dead as corpses are,
but as a stream whose current, checked by ice, will flow when the ice
is melted. Might not life in them be suspended by the cold, not ended?
There is vitality in the seed though it lies a dead thing in the hand.
Those men are corpses to my eye; but said I to myself, they may have the
principles of life in them, which heat might call into being.
Putrefaction is a natural law, but it is balked by frost, and just as
decay is hindered by cold, might not the property of life be left
unaffected in a body, though it should be numbed in a marble form for
fifty years?

This was a terrible fancy to possess a man situated as I was, and it so
worked in me that again and again I caught