As we were without fuel, we had to eat cold food. Frozen reindeer meat taken raw is not an appetizing dish, but this, together with hard bread and pounded soup-ball, formed our diet for the next few days. As we had but few fish left, the dogs were put on short allowance. In this snowy prison we were held for four mortal days, and were obliged to climb out every three or four hours and relieve the tarpaulin of the weight of snow. Our furs were damp, caused by our breath, which congealed and thawed again from the warmth of the body; to say the very least of it, we were extremely uncomfortable. At last it got so bad that I gave orders to burn one of the sledges, and that day we feasted on hot tea. Our deer meat was all gone, so we stopped feeding the dogs, and appropriated the remaining fish to our own use. The result was that the dogs began gnawing their harness, and had to be chained up with dog-chains which we carried for the purpose. The time spent in our snow retreat was not entirely lost. To while away the tedious hours I gave my arctic friends some lessons in astronomy, using snowballs as object-lessons. It was not an ideal observatory, but there was at least snow enough to have represented all the heavenly bodies, down to fixed stars of the fourteenth magnitude. It all began by their asking how God made the aurora. On the side of our excavation I made a rough bas-relief of the great masonic temple in Chicago. They looked at it very politely, but I could see that they took me for the past master of lying. I told them all about elections, telephones, phonographs, and railroads, and gathered from their expression that they thought I had gone mad from the cold and exposure. They looked at one another and muttered, "Duroc, duroc," which is Russian for crazy. I also amused myself at their expense by the use of a compass and a little pocket magnet; the latter I palmed and with it made the magnetic needle play all sorts of antics. They asked what made the needle move about continually, and I replied that it would point to any place that I might designate, by simply requesting it to do so. Chrisoffsky, the skeptical, thought he had caught me, for he immediately asked me to make it point toward Ghijiga. Now I happened to know about where Ghijiga lay, for just before the storm came on I had caught a glimpse of a mountain near that town. So I put the compass in my lap, palmed the magnet, and began muttering and waving my hand over the compass. At the same time I repeated, in sepulchral tones, the magic formula: Ere eirie ickery Ann, Fillisy follisy Nicholas John, Queevy quavy English navy, Stickelum stackelum Johniko buck!