FROM EDINBURGH TO THE ANTARCTIC 121 
It is cheerful on a bright, exhilarating day like this, 
with the racing waves seeming to burst with pleasure, and 
the air tingling with life, to think of the happy hunting 
grounds to come. We feel confident on such a day that a 
dive and a short smother beneath the green sea would 
be well repaid by the bright awakening in our next place 
in Nature's procession, perhaps in a land where men can 
live as man should, and no chapmen enter. But it would 
have been an awful thing to go out into the unknown, cold 
and shivering, on a night such as last night ! It was black 
as sin, lit into an eerie daylight with hideous quivering 
wild-fire, with wind enough to blow one's teeth out In 
the early part of the evening the breeze had fallen away, 
and as it grew dark, we had light rain-showers and puffs 
of warm damp air, and the barometer fell half an inch. 
We had lit the cabin lamp and were sitting down to a 
calm evening of work, Bruce at science and the artist 
illustrating Ossian, when a tropical storm burst on us. 
First a deluge of rain came pouring down, sounding on the 
deck like the rush of many feet. Then came the wind 
with a blow that nearly turned us turtle ; down we went 
on our beam-ends, more and more over till you could 
walk on the sides of the cabin. For a few seconds there 
was nothing but the sound of the blast and the hissing of 
the sea. Then came orders for shortening sail, bellowed 
along the deck from aft, the men in the darkness shouting 
them over again as they passed them forward. The 
yeo-hoing and yeo-hi-hoing in all keys increasing as both 
watches caught on to the ropes — a continuous, blood- 
curdling discord — halyards clack, clacking against the 
