A flight of steps sank into the darkness of the interior, and a cold strange smell floated up, with something of a dry earthiness of flavour and a mingling of leather and timber. I fell back a pace to let something of this smell exhale before I ventured into an atmosphere that had been hermetically bottled by the ice in that cabin since the hour when this little door was last closed. Superstition was active in me again, and when I peered into the blackness at the bottom of the hatch I felt as might a schoolboy on the threshold of a haunted room in which he is to be locked up as a punishment. I put my foot on the ladder and descended very slowly indeed, my inclination being strong the other way, and I kept on looking downwards in a state of ridiculous fright as though at any moment I should be seized by the leg; being in too much confusion of mind to consider that it was impossible anything living could be below, whilst a ghostly shadow could not catch hold of me so as to cause me to feel its grasp. But then if fear could reason, it would cease to be fear. On reaching the bottom I remained standing close against the ladder, striving to see into what manner of place I was arrived. The glare of the whiteness of the decks and rocks hung upon my eyes like a kind of blindness charged with fires of several colours, and I could not obtain the faintest glimpse of any part of this interior outside the sphere of the little square of hazy light which lay upon the deck at the foot of the steps. The darkness, indeed, was so deep that I concluded this was no more than a narrow well formed of bulkheads, and that the cabin was beyond, and led to by a door in the bulkhead. To test this conjecture I extended my arms in a groping posture and stepped a pace forward, feeling to right and left, till, having gone five or six paces from the ladder, my fingers touched something cold, and feeling it, I passed my hand down what I instantly knew by the projection of the nose and the roughness of hair on the upper lip to be a human face! A little reflection might have prepared me for this, but I had not reflected, at least in this direction, and was therefore not prepared; and the horrible thrill of that black chill contact went in an agony through my nerves, and I burst into a violent perspiration.