six o'clock in the morning
At length the mate reappeared on deck and Hearne followed him ! By a miracle , neither the bulkheads , nor the ribs , nor the planking had yielded at the place where the sealing-master was confined . Hearne rejoined his comrades without opening his lips , and we had no further trouble about him . Towards six o'clock in the morning the fog cleared off , owing to a marked fall in the temperature . We had no longer to do with completely frozen vapour , but had to deal with the phenomenon called frost-rime , which often occurs in these high latitudes . Captain Len Guy recognized it by the quantity of prismatic threads , the point following the wind which roughened the light ice-crust deposited on the sides of the iceberg . Navigators know better than to confound this frost-rime with the hoar frost of the temperate zones , which only freezes when it has been deposited on the surface of the soil .