put on a sheepskin, and I
found my cousin Karl covered with a bearskin. After having each of us
swallowed two cups of scalding coffee, followed by glasses of liqueur
brandy, we started, accompanied by a gamekeeper and our dogs, Plongeon
and Pierrot.

From the first moment that I got outside, I felt chilled to the very
marrow. It was one of those nights on which the earth seems dead with
cold. The frozen air becomes resisting and palpable, such pain does it
cause; no breath of wind moves it, it is fixed and motionless; it bites,
pierces through you, dries, kills the trees, the plants, the insects,
the small birds themselves that fall from the branches onto the hard
ground, and become hard themselves under the grip of the cold.

The moon, which was in her last quarter and was inclining all to one
side, seemed fainting in the midst of space, and so weak that she did
not seem able to take her departure, and so she remained up yonder, also
seized and paralyzed by the severity of the weather. She shed a
cold, mournful light over the world, that dying and wan light which she
gives us every month, at the end of her resurrection.

Karl and I went side by side, our backs bent, our hands in our pockets
and our guns under our arms. Our boots, which were wrapped in wool, so
that we might be able to walk without slipping on the frozen river, made
no sound, and I looked at the white vapor which our dogs' breath made.

We were soon on the edge of the marsh, and we went into one of these
lanes of dry rushes which ran through this low forest.

Our elbows, which touched the long, ribbonlike leaves, left a slight
noise behind us, and I was seized, as I had never been before, by the
powerful singular emotion which marshes cause in me. This one was dead,
dead from cold, since we were walking on it, in the middle of its
population of dried rushes.

Suddenly, at the turn of one of the lanes, I perceived the ice-hut which
had been constructed to shelter us. I went in, and as we had nearly an
hour to wait before the wandering birds would awake, I rolled myself up
in my rug in order to try and get warm.

Then, lying on my back, I began to look at the misshapen moon, which had
four horns, through the vaguely transparent walls of this polar house.

But the frost of the frozen marshes, the cold of these walls, the cold
from the firmament penetrated me so terribly, that I began to cough.

My cousin Karl became uneasy. "So much the worse if