360 MARVELS OF THE NORTH 



its veil of glittering silver — changing now to yellow, now to green, now to 

 red. It spreads, it contracts again, in restless change; next it breaks into 

 waving, many-folded bands of shining silver, over which shoot billows of 

 glittering rays, and then the glory vanishes. Presently it shimmers in tongues 

 of flame over the very zenith, and then again it shoots a bright ray right up 

 from the horizon, until the whole melts away in the moonlight, and it is as 

 though one heard the sigh of a departing spirit. Here and there are left a 

 few waving streamers of light, vague as a foreboding — they are the dust 

 from the aurora's glittering cloak. But now it is growing again; now light- 

 nings shoot, and the endless game begins afresh. And all the time this utter 

 stillness, impressive as the symphony of infinitude. I have never been able to 

 grasp the fact that this earth will some day be spent and desolate and empty. 

 To what end, in that case, all this beauty, with not a creature to rejoice in it?- 

 Now I begin to divine it. This is the coming earth — here are beauty and 

 death. But to what purpose? Ah, what is the purpose of all these spheres? 

 Read the answer, if you can, in the starry blue firmament." 

 At another point Nansen's journal says: 



AURORA BOREALIS BY DAY. 



"Thursday, November 2d. The temperature keeps at about 22 degrees 

 below zero ( — 30 degrees C. ) now; but it does not feel very cold, the air is 

 so still. We can see the aurora borealis in the day-time too. I saw a very 

 remarkable display of it about 3 this afternoon. On the southwestern horizon 

 lay the glow of the sun ; in front of it light clouds were swept together — like 

 a cloud of dust rising above a distant troop of riders. Then dark streamers 

 of gauze seemed to stretch from the dust-cloud up over the sky, as if it came 

 from the sun, or perhaps rather as if the sun were sucking it in to itself from 

 the whole sky. It was only in the southwest that these streamers were dark; 

 a little higher up, farther from the sun-glow, they grew white and shining, 

 like fine, glistening silver gauze. They spread over the vault of heaven above 

 us, and right away towards the north. They certainly resembled aurora 

 borealis ; but perhaps they might be only light vapors hovering high up in the 

 sky and catching the sunlight? I stood long looking at them. They were 

 singularly still, but they ^uere northern lights, changing gradually in the south- 

 west into dark cloud-streamers, and ending in the dust-cloud over the sun. 

 Hansen saw them too. later, when it was dark. There was no doubt of 



