During these days Ferratoni had almost nothing to say. He walked the deck for hours as we pushed through the drifting ice, listening to its crushing under the iron sheathing below and looking always to the south, as if something lay there from which, across that wireless, frozen waste, to him alone came tidings. Now and then he ascended to our fighting-top to peer still farther into those polar depths. We all felt very close to creation’s secrets here in this primeval world, but we realized that Ferratoni was nearer to the invisible than the others. “I feel sometimes that he can read our very souls and all the mystery of the air,” Edith Gale said to me, after one of these visits. “When he looks at me I know that I may as well have put my thoughts into words. He believes, too, you know, that we shall be able to converse mentally, by and by, and at any distance. It would be simply the chording of the thought vibration, he says, and that there is really no need of words—that they are but a poor medium at best, and, as somebody has said, invented more to conceal thought than to convey it.” “We shall have wordless telepathy, then, instead of wireless telegraphy,” I assented, “and I believe Ferratoni is nearer right than most people would admit. Why, when we are up here alone together, sometimes, it seems to me that we——” I hesitated, and she interrupted me rather hastily. “Yes, when we are looking out at all this, we are so often silent because there are no words to convey it; but I know what you are thinking better than if you tried to tell it.” I do not think this was quite what I had started to say, but I was grateful for the interruption. I should doubtless have got into deep water and difficulties. Each day the sun rose earlier, shone warmer, and set later. What we referred to as night no longer bore even the semblance of a night, and its darkest hour was but a brief period of lambent twilight. The weather continued unusually good for the latitude, and Thanksgiving Day, on the edge of the Antarctic Zone, was a complete golden cycle. After a bounteous dinner planned by Mr. Sturritt, and joined in by all the officers of the Billowcrest, we ascended by turns to the fighting-top to look for the first time on the midnight sun. Captain Biffer came back to the deck rather solemnly. “It’s more than likely we won’t see it again, right away,” he announced. “If I’m not mistaken, there’s a blow coming off there to the northeast.” The Captain was _not_ mistaken, this time. Within an hour after midnight we were pitching in the midst of real darkness, fearsome and impenetrable. Icy waves were breaking over the decks of the Billowcrest, and the crash of ice under her hull was terrifying in its deafening fury.