Through their lips, which had become white, the refrain of the old song passed still, but like an aphonous thing, continued from time to time unconsciously. The excess of movement and noise had made them drunk; it was in vain that they were young, their smiles grimaced on their teeth which chattered in their trembling from the cold; their eyes, half-closed under burning, flickering eyelids, remained fixed in a grim atony. Lashed to the helm like two marble buttresses, they made, with their cramped, blue fingers, the efforts that were necessary, almost without thinking, by simple habit of the muscles. With streaming hair, and contracted mouths, they had become strange, and in them reappeared a whole background of primitive savagery. They could see no longer! They knew only that they were still there, side by side. At the moments of greatest danger, every time that behind them the new mountain of water rose up, overhanging, clamorous, horrible, dashing against their boat with a mighty thud, one of their hands moved involuntarily in the sign of the cross. They no longer thought of anything, not of Gaud, not of any women, nor of any marriage. It was lasting too long and they were past all thinking; their intoxication of noise, of weariness, of cold, obscured everything in their heads. They were now only two pillars of stiff flesh who kept the helm; only two vigorous beasts clinging there by instinct so that they should not die. From _The Iceland Fisherman_ by Pierre Loti. Published by Frederick A. Stokes Company. SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF NARRATIVES OF ADVENTURE The editors have found these additional selections very useful in teaching the writing of narratives of adventure. Grenfell, Wilfred. _Adrift on an Ice Pan._ Houghton Mifflin Company. London, Jack. _To Build a Fire_, from _Lost Face_. The Macmillan Company. Paine, Ralph D. _The Story of The Derelict Polly_, from _Lost Ships and Lonely Seas_. The Century Company. Roosevelt, Theodore. _A Book Lover’s Holidays in the Open_, pages 347-353. Charles Scribner’s Sons. Sharp, Dallas Lore. _The Spirit of the Herd_, from _Where Rolls the Oregon_. Houghton Mifflin Company. Stewart, Eleanor Rupert. _Letters on an Elk Hunt_, from _The Letters of a Woman Homesteader_. Houghton Mifflin Company. CHAPTER X _Narratives of Travel_ For more than six hundred years, Marco Polo has been a name to conjure with, but if you will turn to a biographical dictionary you will find only the dates of his birth and death, and the words, “A Venetian traveler in China.” It is true that travel has grown both easier and commoner since his day, but the human delight in the open road, or, lacking that, in another’s account of it, has not disappeared.