Farthest North Volume I Part 20

"Kennels for the dogs have been built this week--a row of splendid ice-houses along the port side of the ship; four dogs in each house; good warm winter quarters. In the meantime our eight little pups are thriving on board; they have a grand world to wander round--the whole fore-deck, with an awning over it. You can hear their little barks and yelps as they rush about among shavings, hand-sledges, the steam-winch, mill-axle, and other odds and ends. They play a little and they fight a little, and forward under the forecastle they have their bed among the shavings--a very cozy corner, where 'Kvik' lies stretched out like a lioness in all her majesty. There they tumble over each other in a heap round her, sleep, yawn, eat, and pull each other's tails. It is a picture of home and peace here near the Pole which one could watch by the hour.

"Life goes its regular, even, uneventful way, quiet as the ice itself; and yet it is wonderful how quickly the time pa.s.ses. The equinox has come, the nights are beginning to turn dark, and at noon the sun is only 9 degrees above the horizon. I pa.s.s the day busily here in the work cabin, and often feel as if I were sitting in my study at home, with all the comforts of civilization round me. If it were not for the separation, one could be as well off here as there. Sometimes I forget where I am. Not infrequently in the evening, when I have been sitting absorbed in work, I have jumped up to listen when the dogs barked, thinking to myself, who can be coming? Then I remember that I am not at home, but drifting out in the middle of the frozen Polar Sea, at the commencement of the second long Arctic night.

"The temperature has been down to 1.4 Fahr. below zero (-17 C.) to-day; winter is coming on fast. There is little drift just now, and yet we are in good spirits. It was the same last autumn equinox; but how many disappointments we have had since then! How terrible it was in the later autumn when every calculation seemed to fail, as we drifted farther and farther south! Not one bright spot on our horizon! But such a time will never come again. There may still be great relapses; there may be slow progress for a time; but there is no doubt as to the future; we see it dawning bright in the west, beyond the Arctic night.

"Sunday, September 23d. It was a year yesterday since we made fast for the first time to the great hummock in the ice. Hansen improved the occasion by making a chart of our drift for the year. It does not look so very bad, though the distance is not great; the direction is almost exactly what I had expected. But more of this to-morrow; it is so late that I cannot write about it now. The nights are turning darker and darker; winter is settling down upon us.

"Tuesday, September 25th. I have been looking more carefully at the calculation of our last year's drift. If we reckon from the place where we were shut in on the 22d of September last year to our position on the 22d of September this year, the distance we have drifted is 189 miles, equal to 3 9' lat.i.tude. Reckoning from the same place, but to the farthest north point we reached in summer (July 16th), makes the drift 225 miles, or 3 46'. But if we reckon from our most southern point in the autumn of last year (November 7th) to our most northern point this summer, then the drift is 305 miles, or 5 5'. We got fully 4 north, from 77 43' to 81 53'. To give the course of the drift is a difficult task in these lat.i.tudes, as there is a perceptible deviation of the compa.s.s with every degree of longitude as one pa.s.ses east or west; the change, of course, given in degrees will be almost exactly the same as the number of degrees of longitude that have been pa.s.sed. Our average course will be about N. 36 W. The direction of our drift is consequently a much more northerly one than the Jeannette's was, and this is just what we expected; ours cuts hers at an angle of 59. The line of this year's drift continued will cut the northeast island of Spitzbergen, and take us as far north as 84 7', in 75 east longitude, somewhere N.N.E. of Franz Josef Land. The distance by this course to the Northeast Island is 827 miles. Should we continue to progress only at the rate of 189 miles a year it would take us 4.4 years to do this distance. But a.s.suming our progress to be at the rate of 305 miles a year, we shall do it in 2.7 years. That we should drift at least as quickly as this seems probable, because we can hardly now be driven back as we were in October last year, when we had the open water to the south and the great ma.s.s of ice to the north of us.

"The past summer seems to me to have proved that while the ice is very unwilling to go back south, it is most ready to go northwest as soon as there is ever so little easterly, not to mention southerly, wind. I therefore believe, as I always have believed, that the drift will become faster as we get farther northwest, and the probability is that the Fram will reach Norway in two years, the expedition having lasted its full three years, as I somehow had a feeling that it would. As our drift is 59 more northerly than the Jeannette's, and as Franz Josef Land must force the ice north (taking for granted that all that comes from this great basin goes round to the north of Franz Josef Land), it is probable that our course will become more northerly the farther on we go, until we are past Franz Josef Land, and that we shall consequently reach a higher lat.i.tude than our drift so far would indicate. I hope 85 at least. Everything has come right so far; the direction of our drift is exactly parallel with the course which I conjectured to have been taken by the floe with the Jeannette relics, and which I p.r.i.c.ked out on the chart prepared for my London Address. [66] This course touched about 87 1/2 north lat.i.tude. I have no right to expect a more northerly drift than parallel to this, and have no right to be anything but happy if I get as far. Our aim, as I have so often tried to make clear, is not so much to reach the point in which the earth's axis terminates, as to traverse and explore the unknown Polar Sea; and yet I should like to get to the Pole, too, and hope that it will be possible to do so, if only we can reach 84 or 85 by March. And why should we not?

"Thursday, September 27th. Have determined that, beginning from to-morrow, every man is to go out snow-shoeing two hours daily, from 11 to 1, so long as the daylight lasts. It is necessary. If anything happened that obliged us to make our way home over the ice, I am afraid some of the company would be a terrible hinderance to us, unpractised as they are now. Several of them are first-rate snow-sh.o.e.rs, but five or six of them would soon be feeling the pleasures of learning; if they had to go out on a long course, and without snow-shoes, it would be all over with us.

"After this we used to go out regularly in a body. Besides being good exercise, it was also a great pleasure; every one seemed to thrive on it, and they all became accustomed to the use of the shoes on this ground, even though they often got them broken in the unevennesses of the pressure-ridges; we just patched and riveted them together to break them again.

"Monday, October 1st. We tried a hand-sledge to-day with a load of 250 pounds. It went along easily, and yet was hard to draw, because the snow-shoes were apt to slip to the side on the sort of surface we had. I almost believe that Indian snow-shoes would be better on this ground, where there are so many k.n.o.bs and smooth hillocks to draw the sledges over. When Amundsen first began to pull the sledge he thought it was nothing at all; but when he had gone on for a time he fell into a fit of deep and evidently sad thought, and went silently home. When he got on board he confided to the others that if a man had to draw a load like that he might just as well lie down at once--it would come to the same thing in the end. That is how practice is apt to go. In the afternoon I yoked three dogs to the same little sledge with the 250-pound load, and they drew it along as if it were nothing at all.

"Tuesday October 2d. Beautiful weather, but coldish; 49 Fahr. of frost (-27 C.) during the night, which is a good deal for October, surely. It will be a cold winter if it goes on at the same rate. But what do we care whether there are 90 of frost or 120? A good snow-shoeing excursion to-day. They are all becoming most expert now; but darkness will be on us presently, and then there will be no more of it. It is a pity; this exercise is so good for us--we must think of something to take its place.

"I have a feeling now as if this were to be my last winter on board. Will it really come to my going off north in spring? The experiment in drawing a loaded hand-sledge over this ice was certainly anything but promising; and if the dogs should not hold out, or should be of less use than we expect; and if we should come to worse ice instead of better--well, we should only have ourselves to trust to. But if we can just get so far on with the Fram that the distance left to be covered is at all a reasonable one, I believe that it is my duty to make the venture, and I cannot imagine any difficulty that will not be overcome when our choice lies between death--and onward and home!

"Thursday, October 4th. The ice is rather impa.s.sable in places, but there are particular lanes or tracts; taking it altogether, it is in good condition for sledging and snow-shoeing, though the surface is rather soft, so that the dogs sink in a little. This is probably chiefly owing to there having been no strong winds of late, so that the snow has not been well packed together.

"Life goes on in the regular routine; there is always some little piece of work turning up to be done. Yesterday the breaking in of the young dogs began. [67] It was just the three--'Barbara,' 'Freia,'

and 'Susine.' 'Gulabrand' is such a miserable, thin wretch that he is escaping for the present. They were unmanageable at first, and rushed about in all directions; but in a little while they drew like old dogs, and were altogether better than we expected. 'Kvik,' of course, set them a n.o.ble example. It fell to Mogstad's lot to begin the training, as it was his week for looking after the dogs. This duty is taken in turns now, each man has his week of attending to them both morning and afternoon.

"It seems to me that a very satisfactory state of feeling prevails on board at present, when we are just entering on our second Arctic night, which we hope is to be a longer, and probably also a colder, one than any people before us have experienced. There is appreciably less light every day; soon there will be none; but the good spirits do not wane with the light. It seems to me that we are more uniformly cheerful than we have ever been. What the reason of this is I cannot tell; perhaps just custom. But certainly, too, we are well off--in clover, as the saying is. We are drifting gently, but it is to be hoped surely, on through the dark unknown Nivlheim, where terrified fancy has pictured all possible horrors. Yet we are living a life of luxury and plenty, surrounded by all the comforts of civilization. I think we shall be better off this winter than last.

"The firing apparatus in the galley is working splendidly, and the cook himself is now of opinion that it is an invention which approaches perfection. So we shall burn nothing but coal-oil there now; it warms the place well, and a good deal of the heat comes up here into the work-room, where I sometimes sit and perspire until I have to take off one garment after another, although the window is open, and there are 30 odd degrees of cold outside. I have calculated that the petroleum which this enables us to keep for lighting purposes only will last at least 10 years, though we burn it freely 300 days in the year. At present we are not using petroleum lamps at the rate a.s.sumed in my calculation, because we frequently have electric light; and then even here summer comes once a year, or, at any rate, something which we must call summer. Even allowing for accidents, such as the possibility of a tank springing a leak and the oil running out, there is still no reason whatever for being sparing of light, and every man can have as much as he wants. What this means can best be appreciated by one who for a whole year has felt the stings of conscience every time he went to work or read alone in his cabin, and burned a lamp that was not absolutely necessary, because he could have used the general one in the saloon.

"As yet the coals are not being touched, except for the stove in the saloon, where they are to be allowed to burn as much as they like this winter. The quant.i.ty thus consumed will be a trifle in comparison with our store of about 100 tons, for which we cannot well have any other use until the Fram once more forces her way out of the ice on the other side. Another thing that is of no little help in keeping us warm and comfortable is the awning that is now stretched over the ship. [68] The only part I have left open is the stern, abaft the bridge, so as to be able to see round over the ice from there.

"Personally, I must say that things are going well with me; much better than I could have expected. Time is a good teacher; that devouring longing does not gnaw so hard as it did. Is it apathy beginning? Shall I feel nothing at all by the time ten years have pa.s.sed? Oh! sometimes it comes on with all its old strength, as if it would tear me in pieces! But this is a splendid school of patience. Much good it does to sit wondering whether they are alive or dead at home; it only almost drives one mad.

"All the same, I never grow quite reconciled to this life. It is really neither life nor death, but a state between the two. It means never being at rest about anything or in any place--a constant waiting for what is coming; a waiting in which, perhaps, the best years of one's manhood will pa.s.s. It is like what a young boy sometimes feels when he goes on his first voyage. The life on board is hateful to him; he suffers cruelly from all the torments of sea-sickness; and being shut in within the narrow walls of the ship is worse than prison; but it is something that has to be gone through. Beyond it all lies the south, the land of his youthful dreams, tempting with its sunny smile. In time he arises, half dead. Does he find his south? How often it is but a barren desert he is cast ash.o.r.e on!

"Sunday, October 7th. It has cleared up this evening, and there is a starry sky and aurora borealis. It is a little change from the constant cloudy weather, with frequent snow-showers, which we have had these last days.

"Thoughts come and thoughts go. I cannot forget, and I cannot sleep. Everything is still; all are asleep. I only hear the quiet step of the watch on deck; the wind rustling in the rigging and the canvas, and the clock gently hacking the time in pieces there on the wall. If I go on deck there is black night, stars sparkling high overhead, and faint aurora flickering across the gloomy vault, and out in the darkness I can see the glimmer of the great monotonous plain of the ice: it is all so inexpressibly forlorn, so far, far removed from the noise and unrest of men and all their striving. What is life thus isolated? A strange, aimless process; and man a machine which eats, sleeps, awakes; eats and sleeps again, dreams dreams, but never lives. Or is life really nothing else? And is it just one more phase of the eternal martyrdom, a new mistake of the erring human soul, this banishing of one's self to the hopeless wilderness, only to long there for what one has left behind? Am I a coward? Am I afraid of death? Oh, no! but in these nights such longing can come over one for all beauty, for that which is contained in a single word, and the soul flees from this interminable and rigid world of ice. When one thinks how short life is, and that one came away from it all of one's own free will, and remembers, too, that another is suffering the pain of constant anxiety--'true, true till death.' 'O mankind, thy ways are pa.s.sing strange! We are but as flakes of foam, helplessly driven over the tossing sea.'

"Wednesday, October 10th. Exactly 33 years old, then. There is nothing to be said to that, except that life is moving on, and will never turn back. They have all been touchingly nice to me to-day, and we have held fete. They surprised me in the morning by having the saloon ornamented with flags. They had hung the 'Union' above Sverdrup's place. [69]

We accused Amundsen of having done this, but he would not confess to it. Above my door and on over Hansen's they had the pennant with Fram in big letters. It looked most festive when I came into the saloon, and they all stood up and wished me 'Many happy returns.' When I went on deck the flag was waving from the mizzenmast-head.

"We took a snow-shoeing excursion south in the morning. It was windy, bitter weather; I have not felt so cold for long. The thermometer is down to 24 Fahr. below zero (-31 C.) this evening; this is certainly the coldest birthday I have had yet. A sumptuous dinner: 1. Fish-pudding. 2. Sausages and tongue, with potatoes, haricot beans, and pease. 3. Preserved strawberries, with rice and cream; Crown extract of malt. Then, to every one's surprise, our doctor began to take out of the pocket of the overcoat he always wears remarkable-looking little gla.s.ses--medicine-gla.s.ses, measuring-gla.s.ses, test-gla.s.ses--one for each man, and lastly a whole bottle of Lysholmer liqueur--real native Lysholmer--which awakened general enthusiasm. Two drams of that per man was not so bad, besides a quarter of a bottle of extract of malt. Coffee after dinner, with a surprise in the shape of apple-cake, baked by our excellent cook, Pettersen, formerly smith and engineer. Then I had to produce my cigars, which were also much enjoyed; and of course we kept holiday all the afternoon. At supper there was another surprise--a large birthday cake from the same baker, with the inscription 'T. L. M. D.' (Til lykke med dagen, the Norwegian equivalent for 'Wishing a happy birthday'), '10.10.94.' In the evening came pineapples, figs, and sweets. Many a worse birthday might be spent in lower lat.i.tudes than 81. The evening is pa.s.sing with all kinds of merriment; every one is in good spirits; the saloon resounds with laughter--how many a merry meeting it has been the scene of!

"But when one has said good-night and sits here alone, sadness comes; and if one goes on deck there are the stars high overhead in the clear sky. In the south is a smouldering aurora arch, which from time to time sends up streamers; a constant, restless flickering.

"We have been talking a little about this expedition, Sverdrup and I. When we were out on the ice in the afternoon he suddenly said, 'Yes, next October you will, perhaps, not be on board the Fram.' To which I had to answer that, unless the winter turned out badly, I probably should not. But still I cannot believe in this rightly myself.

"Every night I am at home in my dreams, but when the morning breaks I must again, like Helge, gallop back on the pale horse by the way of the reddening dawn, not to the joys of Valhalla, but to the realm of eternal ice.

"'For thee alone Sigrun, Of the Saeva Mountain, Must Helge swim In the dew of sorrow.'

"Friday, October 12th. A regular storm has been blowing from the E.S.E. since yesterday evening. Last night the mill went to bits; the teeth broke off one of the toothed wheels, which has been considerably worn by a year's use. The velocity of the wind was over 40 feet this morning, and it is long since I have heard it blow as it is doing this evening. We must be making good progress north just now. Perhaps October is not to be such a bad month as I expected from our experiences of last year. Was out snow-shoeing before dinner. The snow was whistling about my ears. I had not much trouble in getting back; the wind saw to that. A tremendous snow squall is blowing just now. The moon stands low in the southern sky, sending a dull glow through the driving ma.s.ses. One has to hold on to one's cap. This is a real dismal polar night, such as one imagines it to one's self sitting at home far away in the south. But it makes me cheerful to come on deck, for I feel that we are moving onward.

"Sat.u.r.day, October 13th. Same wind to-day; velocity up to 39 feet and higher, but Hansen has taken an observation this evening in spite of it. He is, as always, a fine, indefatigable fellow. We are going northwest (81 32' 8'' north lat.i.tude, 118 28' east longitude).

"Sunday, October 14th. Still the same storm going on. I am reading of the continual sufferings which the earlier Arctic explorers had to contend with for every degree, even for every minute, of their northward course. It gives me almost a feeling of contempt for us, lying here on sofas, warm and comfortable, pa.s.sing the time reading and writing and smoking and dreaming, while the storm is tugging and tearing at the rigging above us and the whole sea is one ma.s.s of driving snow, through which we are carried degree by degree northward to the goal our predecessors struggled towards, spending their strength in vain. And yet....

"'Now sinks the sun, now comes the night.'

"Monday, October 15th. Went snow-shoeing eastward this morning, still against the same wind and the same snowfall. You have to pay careful attention to your course these days, as the ship is not visible any great distance, and if you did not find your way back, well--But the tracks remain pretty distinct, as the snow-crust is blown bare in most places, and the drifting snow does not fasten upon it. We are moving northward, and meanwhile the Arctic night is making its slow and majestic entrance. The sun was low to-day; I did not see it because of banks of cloud in the south; but it still sent its light up over the pale sky. There the full moon is now reigning, bathing the great ice plain and the drifting snow in its bright light. How a night such as this raises one's thoughts! It does not matter if one has seen the like a thousand times before; it makes the same solemn impression when it comes again; one cannot free one's mind from its power. It is like entering a still, holy temple, where the spirit of nature hovers through the place on glittering silver beams, and the soul must fall down and adore--adore the infinity of the universe.

"Wednesday, October 17th. We are employed in taking deep-water temperatures. It is a doubtful pleasure at this time of year. Sometimes the water-lifter gets coated with ice, so that it will not close down below in the water, and has, therefore, to hang for ever so long each time; and sometimes it freezes tight during the observation after it is brought up, so that the water will not run out of it into the sample bottles, not to mention all the bother there is getting the apparatus ready to lower. We are lucky if we do not require to take the whole thing into the galley every time to thaw it. It is slow work; the temperatures have sometimes to be read by lantern light. The water samples are not so reliable, because they freeze in the lifter. But the thing can be done, and we must just go on doing it. The same easterly wind is blowing, and we are drifting onward. Our lat.i.tude this evening is about 81 47' N.

"Thursday, October 18th. I continue taking the temperatures of the water, rather a cool amus.e.m.e.nt with the thermometer down to -29 C. (20.2 Fahr. below zero) and a wind blowing. Your fingers are apt to get a little stiff and numb when you have to manipulate the wet or ice-covered metal screws with bare hands and have to read off the thermometer with a magnifying-gla.s.s in order to insure accuracy to the hundredth part of a degree, and then to bottle the samples of water, which you have to keep close against your breast, to prevent the water from freezing. It is a nice business!

"There was a lovely aurora borealis at 8 o'clock this evening. It wound itself like a fiery serpent in a double coil across the sky. The tail was about 10 above the horizon in the north. Thence it turned off with many windings in an easterly direction, then round again, and westward in the form of an arch from 30 to 40 above the horizon, sinking down again to the west and rolling itself up into a ball, from which several branches spread out over the sky. The arches were in active motion, while pencils of streamers shot out swiftly from the west towards the east, and the whole serpent kept incessantly undulating into fresh curves. Gradually it mounted up over the sky nearly to the zenith, while at the same time the uppermost bend or arch separated into several fainter undulations, the ball in the northeast glowed intensely, and brilliant streamers shot upwards to the zenith from several places in the arches, especially from the ball and from the bend farthest away in the northeast. The illumination was now at its highest, the color being princ.i.p.ally a strong yellow, though at some spots it verged towards a yellowish red, while at other places it was a greenish white. When the upper wave reached the zenith the phenomenon lost something of its brilliancy, dispersing little by little, leaving merely a faint indication of an aurora in the southern sky. On coming up again on deck later in the evening, I found nearly the whole of the aurora collected in the southern half of the sky. A low arch, 5 in height, could be seen far down in the south over the dark segment of the horizon. Between this and the zenith were four other vague, wavy arches, the topmost of which pa.s.sed right across it; here and there vivid streamers shot flaming upward, especially from the undermost arch in the south. No arch was to be seen in the northern part of the sky, only streamers every here and there. To-night, as usual, there are traces of aurora to be seen over the whole sky; light mists or streamers are often plainly visible, and the sky seems to be constantly covered with a luminous veil, [70] in which every here and there are dark holes.

"There is scarcely any night, or rather I may safely say there is no night, on which no trace of aurora can be discerned as soon as the sky becomes clear, or even when there is simply a rift in the clouds large enough for it to be seen; and as a rule we have strong light phenomena dancing in ceaseless unrest over the firmament. They mainly appear, however, in the southern part of the sky.

"Friday, October 19th. A fresh breeze from E.S.E. Drifting northward at a good pace. Soon we shall probably have pa.s.sed the long-looked-for 82, and that will not be far from 82 27', when the Fram will be the vessel that will have penetrated farthest to the north on this globe. But the barometer is falling; the wind probably will not remain in that quarter long, but will shift round to the west. I only hope for this once the barometer may prove a false prophet. I have become rather sanguine; things have been going pretty well for so long; and October, a month which last year's experience had made me dread, has been a month of marked advance, if only it doesn't end badly.

"The wind to-day, however, was to cost a life. The mill, which had been repaired after the mishap to the cog-wheel the other day, was set going again. In the afternoon a couple of the puppies began fighting over a bone, when one of them fell underneath one of the cog-wheels on the axle of the mill, and was dragged in between it and the deck. Its poor little body nearly made the whole thing come to a standstill; and, unfortunately, no one was on the spot to stop it in time. I heard the noise, and rushed on deck; the puppy had just been drawn out nearly dead; the whole of its stomach was torn open. It gave a faint whine, and was at once put out of its misery. Poor little frolicsome creature! Only a little while ago you were gambolling around, enjoying an innocent romp with your brothers and sisters; then came the thigh-bone of a bear trundling along the deck from the galley; you and the others made a headlong rush for it, and now there you lie, cruelly lacerated and dead as a herring. Fate is inexorable!

"Sunday, October 31st. North lat.i.tude 82 0.2'; east longitude 114 9'. It is late in the evening, and my head is bewildered, as if I had been indulging in a regular debauch, but it was a debauch of a very innocent nature.

"A grand banquet to-day to celebrate the eighty-second degree of lat.i.tude. The observation gave 82 0.2' last night, and we have now certainly drifted a little farther north. Honey-cakes (gingerbread) were baked for the occasion first-cla.s.s honey-cakes, too, you may take my word for it; and then, after a refreshing snow-shoe run, came a festal banquet. Notices were stuck up in the saloon requesting the guests to be punctual at dinner-time, for the cook had exerted himself to the utmost of his power. The following deeply felt lines by an anonymous poet also appeared on a placard:

"'When dinner is punctually served at the time, No fear that the milk soup will surely be prime; But the viands are spoiled if you come to it late, The fish-pudding will lie on your chest a dead weight; What's preserved in tin cases, there can be no doubt, If you wait long enough will force its way out.

Even meat of the ox, of the sheep, or of swine, Very different in this from the juice of the vine!

Ramornie, and Armour, and Thorne, and Herr Thus, Good meats have preserved, and they taste not amiss; So I'll just add a word, friends, of warning to you: If you want a good dinner, come at one, not at two.'

The lyric melancholy which here finds utterance must have been the outcome of many bitter disappointments, and furnishes a valuable internal evidence as to the anonymous author's profession. Meanwhile the guests a.s.sembled with tolerable punctuality, the only exception being your humble servant, who was obliged to take some photographs in the rapidly waning daylight. The menu was splendid: 1. Ox-tail soup. 2. Fish-pudding, with melted b.u.t.ter and potatoes. 3. Turtle, with marrowfat pease, etc., etc. 4. Rice, with multer (cloudberries) and cream; Crown malt extract. After dinner, coffee and honey-cakes. After supper, which also was excellent, there was a call for music, which was liberally supplied throughout the whole evening by various accomplished performers on the organ, among whom Bentzen specially distinguished himself, his late experiences on the ice with the crank-handle [71]

having put him in first-rate training. Every now and then the music dragged a bit, as though it were being hauled up from an abyss some 1000 or 1500 fathoms deep; then it would quicken and get more lively, as it came nearer to the surface. At last the excitement rose to such a pitch that Pettersen and I had to get up and have a dance, a waltz and a polka or two; and we really executed some very tasteful pas de deux on the limited floor of the saloon. Then Amundsen also was swept into the mazes of the dance, while the others played cards. Meanwhile refreshments were served in the form of preserved peaches, dried bananas, figs, honey-cakes, etc., etc. In short, we made a jovial evening of it, and why should we not? We are progressing merrily towards our goal, we are already half-way between the New Siberian Islands and Franz Josef Land, and there is not a soul on board who doubts that we shall accomplish what we came out to do; so long live merriment!

"But the endless stillness of the polar night holds its sway aloft; the moon, half full, shines over the ice, and the stars sparkle brilliantly overhead; there are no restless northern lights, and the south wind sighs mournfully through the rigging. A deep, peaceful stillness prevails everywhere. It is the infinite loveliness of death--Nirvana.

"Monday, October 22d. It is beginning to be cold now; the thermometer was -34.6 C. (30.2 Fahr. below zero) last night, and this evening it is -36 C. (32.8 Fahr. below zero).

"A lovely aurora this evening (11.30). A brilliant corona encircled the zenith with a wreath of streamers in several layers, one outside the other; then larger and smaller sheaves of streamers spread over the sky, especially low down towards S.W. and E.S.E. All of them, however, tended upward towards the corona, which shone like a halo. I stood watching it a long while. Every now and then I could discern a dark patch in its middle, at the point where all the rays converged. It lay a little south of the Pole-star, and approached Ca.s.siopeia in the position it then occupied. But the halo kept smouldering and shifting just as if a gale in the upper strata of the atmosphere were playing the bellows to it. Presently fresh streamers shot out of the darkness outside the inner halo, followed by other bright shafts of light in a still wider circle, and meanwhile the dark s.p.a.ce in the middle was clearly visible; at other times it was entirely covered with ma.s.ses of light. Then it appeared as if the storm abated, and the whole turned pale, and glowed with a faint whitish hue for a little while, only to shoot wildly up once more and to begin the same dance over again. Then the entire ma.s.s of light around the corona began to rock to and fro in large waves over the zenith and the dark central point, whereupon the gale seemed to increase and whirl the streamers into an inextricable tangle, till they merged into a luminous vapor, that enveloped the corona and drowned it in a deluge of light, so that neither it, nor the streamers, nor the dark centre could be seen--nothing, in fact, but a chaos of shining mist. Again it became paler, and I went below. At midnight there was hardly anything of the aurora to be seen.

"Friday, October 26th. Yesterday evening we were in 82 3' north lat.i.tude. To-day the Fram is two years old. The sky has been overcast during the last two days, and it has been so dark at midday that I thought we should soon have to stop our snow-shoe expeditions. But this morning brought us clear still weather, and I went out on a delightful trip to the westward, where there had been a good deal of fresh packing, but nothing of any importance. In honor of the occasion we had a particularly good dinner, with fried halibut, turtle, pork chops, with haricot beans and green pease, plum-pudding (real burning plum-pudding for the first time) with custard sauce, and wound up with strawberries. As usual, the beverages consisted of wine (that is to say, lime-juice, with water and sugar) and Crown malt extract. I fear there was a general overtaxing of the digestive apparatus. After dinner, coffee and honey-cakes, with which Nordahl stood cigarettes. General holiday.