The next day gave us fresh temperature fluctuations. At nine A. M. it clouded and rose to 35° below, by noon it had cleared again and the thermometer fell to 55° below, and at nine P. M. it stood once more at 65° below. The milder weather of the morning sent all hands out breaking trail, save myself, for with all our stuff in a cabin without a door it was not wise to leave it altogether--a dog might break a chain and work havoc--so I stayed behind in the little dark hovel, a candle burning all day, and read some fifty pages of Boswell's _Life of Samuel Johnson_ over again. Some such little India-paper classic it is my habit to carry each winter. Last year I reread Pepys's _Diary_ and the year before much of the _Decline and Fall_. Certain places are for ever associated in my mind with the rereading of certain old books. The Chandalar River is to me as much the scene of _Lorna Doone_, which I read for the sixth or seventh time on my first journey along it, as Exmoor itself; and _The Cloister and the Hearth_, that noble historical romance, belongs in my literary geography to the Alatna-Kobuk portage. So will Boswell always bring back to me this trip across country from the Koyukuk to the Yukon through the deep snow. The boys came back after dark, having broken some nine miles of trail and having suffered a good deal from the cold. I had supper cooked, and when that was done and the dogs fed we fell to reading the Gospels and Epistles for the Epiphany season, the boys reading aloud by turns. The all-day fire had warmed the little hut thoroughly, and despite the cold outside we were snug and comfortable within. [Sidenote: SEVENTY BELOW ZERO] That night the thermometer touched 70° below zero, within 2° of the greatest cold I have recorded in seven years' winter travel; a greater cold, I believe, than any arctic expedition has ever recorded, for it is in a continental climate like Siberia or interior Alaska, and not in the marine climate around the North Pole, that the thermometer falls lowest. Save for an hour or two getting wood, we all lay close next day, for the temperature at noon was no higher than 64° below. It is impossible to break trail at such temperature, or to travel as slowly as we were travelling. In the strong cold one must travel fast if one travel at all. Indeed, it is distinctly dangerous to be outdoors. As soon as one leaves the hut the cold smites one in the face like a mailed fist. The expiration of the breath makes a crackling sound, due, one judges, to the sudden congealing of the moisture that is expelled. From every cranny of the cabin a stream of smoke-like vapour pours into the air, giving the appearance that the house is on fire within. However warmly hands and feet may be clad, one cannot stand still for a minute without feeling the heat steadily oozing out and the cold creeping in.