errifying. Things grew to a size out of
all reason. The horizon was infinitely remote, lost in snow-mists,
fearful with the large-blown mirages of little things. Strange and
indeterminate somethings menaced on all sides, menaced in greater and
greater threat, until with actual proximity they mysteriously
disappeared, leaving behind them as a blind to conceal their real
identity such small matters as a stunted shrub, an exposed rock, the
shadow of a wind-rift on the snow. And low in the sky danced in unholy
revel the suns, sometimes as many as eight of them, gazing with the
abandoned red eyes of debauchees on the insignificant travellers groping
feebly amid phantasmagoria.

The great light, the dazzle, the glitter, the incessant movement of the
mirages, the shining of the mock suns, all these created an impression
of heat, of light, of the pleasantness of a warmed land. Yet still
persisted, only modified by the sun, the cold of the northern winter.
And this denial of appearance sufficed to render unreal all the round
globe, so that at any moment the eye anticipated its crumbling like a
dust apple, with its cold, its vastness, its emptiness, its hunger, its
indecently many suns, leaving the human soul in the abyss of space. The
North threw over them the power of her spell, so that to them the step
from life to death seemed a short, an easy, a natural one to take.

Nevertheless their souls made struggle, as did their bodies. They fought
down the feeling of illusion just as they had fought down the feelings
of hunger, of weariness, and of cold. Sam fashioned rough wooden
spectacles with tiny transverse slits through which to look, and these
they assumed against the snow-blindness. They kept a sharp watch for
freezing. Already their faces were blackened and parched by the frost,
and cracked through the thick skin down to the raw. Sam had frozen his
great toe, and had with his knife cut to the bone in order to prevent
mortification. They tried to talk a little in order to combat by unison
of spirit the dreadful influence the North was bringing to bear. They
gained ten feet as a saint of the early church gained his soul for
paradise.

Now it came to the point where they could no longer afford to eat their
pemmican. They boiled it, along with strips of the rawhide dog-harness,
and drank the soup. It sufficed not at all to appease the pain of their
hunger, nor appreciably did it give them strength, but somehow it fed
the vita