CHAPTER XI 
THE RESCUE 
Our first night at the whaling-station was blissful. Crean 
and I shared a beautiful room in Mr. Sorlle's house, with electric 
light and two beds, warm and soft. We were so comfortable 
that we were unable to sleep. Late at night a steward brought 
us tea, bread and butter and cakes^ and we lay in bed revelling 
in the luxury of it all. Outside a dense snow-storm, which 
started two hours after our arrival and lasted until the following 
day, was swirling and driving about the mountain-slopes. We 
were thankful indeed that we had made a place of safety, for 
it would have gone hard with us if we had been out on the 
mountaias that night. Deep snow lay everywhere when we 
got up the following morning. 
After breakfast Mr. Sorlle took us round to Husvik in a 
motor-launch. We were listening avidly to his account of the 
war and of all that had happened while we were out of the 
world of men. We were like men arisen from the dead to a 
world gone mad. Our minds accustomed themselves gradually 
to the tales of nations in arms, of deathless courage and un- 
imagined slaughter, of a world-conflict that had grown beyond 
all conceptions, of vast red battlefields in grimmest contrast 
with the frigid whiteness we had left behind us. The reader 
may not realize quite how difiicult it was for us to envisage 
nearly two years of the most stupendous war of history. The 
locking of the armies in the trenches, the sinking of the Litsi- 
tania, the murder of Nurse Cavell, the use of poison-gas and 
liquid fixe, the submarine warfare, the Gallipoli campaign, the 
hundred other incidents of the war, almost stunned us at first, 
and then our minds began to compass the train of events and 
develop a perspective. I suppose our experience was imique. 
No other civilized men could have been as blankly ignorant of 
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