But the following day the Norwegian coast was in sight, and at all hazards I must see it; so I crawled on deck more dead than alive, looked at a row of mountains of moderate elevation, their tops at this early season still sparkling with their snowy covering, and then hurried back, benumbed by the piercing icy wind, to my good warm feather-bed.
Those who have never experienced it can have no conception of the biting, penetrating coldness of a gale of wind in the northern seas.

The sun shone high in the heavens; the thermometer (I always calculate according to Reaumur) stood 3 degrees above zero; I was dressed much more warmly than I should have thought necessary when, in my fatherland, the thermometer was 8 or 10 degrees _below_ zero, and yet I felt chilled to the heart, and could have fancied that I had no clothes on at all.
On the fourth night we sailed safely past the Shetland Islands; and on the evening of the fifth day we passed so near the majestic rocky group of the Feroe Islands, that we were at one time apprehensive of being cast upon the rocks by the unceasing gale.

{19} Already on the seventh day we descried the coast of Iceland.

Our passage had been unprecedentedly quick; the sailors declared that a favourable gale was to be preferred even to steam, and that on our present voyage we should certainly have left every steamer in our wake.

But I, wretched being that I was, would gladly have dispensed with the services both of gale and steam for the sake of a few hours' rest.