6. The arrangements of the officers’ mess-room are simple and in harmony with its purpose. Here stands a large table, used for study and for meals; the smaller berths, where the officers sleep, are round the sides of the mess-room—just large enough to enable a man to breathe in. There, in a recess between two pillars, an untold resource, the library (of about 400 volumes, chiefly scientific); close beside it the chronometers; and lastly, the inevitable evils, the medical stores, ranged round the mast. By the side of scientific works stand Petermann’s _Mittheilungen_; and between Milton’s _Paradise Lost_ and Shakespeare’s immortal works, a whole tribe of romances, which were read with never-tiring delight. Our instruments, too, frosted with ice, are here, and a chest containing our journals. Once a month a cask, filled with wine—the chemical wine—concocted of snow, alcohol, tannin, sugar, and glycerine, was placed there. Dr. Kepes was not only our physician, but our wine brewer. One thing more we have to mention, which, alas! incommoded us much too little—wine; that is, wine made in Austria, from grapes. As we have already mentioned, the want of room in the cabin prevented our laying in a large stock, and the supplies we had were frozen in a cellar below the mess-room, about the middle of December, for the temperature of even this place was about 16° F. or 14° F. Each, however, had a bottle of rum as an allowance for eighteen days. But quite inexhaustible was the supply of our common drink—melted snow—a great jar of which, filled to the brim, stood always on the table. Under the cabin were our supplies of alcohol and petroleum, accessible only by well-fitting pipes, but possible volcanoes as far as our safety was concerned. From the accumulation of so many combustible materials, together with 20,000 cartridges, and with several lamps constantly burning, it is clear that the danger of fire was great. But once only had we an alarm from this source—when Carlsen caused us much trepidation by accidentally discharging a rifle in the cartridge magazine.
7. Let us now turn to the persons who occupied this mess-room. Marola, the steward, lights the lamp, and kindles the fire, and awakens those who were not already awoke by the smoke from the stove, with the cry, “Signori, le sette e tre quarti, prego d’alzarsi;” and after a pause of a quarter of an hour, during which the sleepers seem carefully to deny their existence, he startles this silence of indifference by the second call: “Colazion’ in tavola.” Out of every berth now comes forth its occupant, each in picturesque costume; costumes teach us how superficial after all is civilization in man!