I902] DEPARTURE OF THE SUN 215 



' The sun does not now rise sufficiently high to shine on 

 the ship, but about noon one can see it from the eminence of 

 Hut Point. . . .' 



^ April 20. — A bright day with moderate northerly wind. 

 The young ice just formed over the open strait crowded down 

 on the old and rode over it in many places. The sun is very 

 near its departure ; to-day it appeared a highly refracted 

 elliptical ball of red, giving little light and no appreciable heat. 

 For a few minutes it bathed the top of Observation Hill in soft 

 pink light, then vanished beneath a blood-red horizon.' 



This was the last we saw of the sun till it returned to us 

 more than four months later. Its actual date of disappearance 

 was the 23rd, but after the 20th we had a return to what, at 

 this time, appeared the normal weather conditions, and for the 

 three following days my daily journal opens with the same 

 remark : ' Wind still blowing hard with an overcast sky.' It 

 was not a very enlivening prelude to the coming darkness, but 

 it would have taken far more than this to depress us in our 

 novel surroundings, and all felt the propriety of the celebrations 

 on the night of the 23rd, when hilarity reigned supreme, and 

 with a liberal allowance of extra grog we drank to a speedy 

 passage of the long night. 



The winter was now upon us. The ice about the ship had 

 been firmly fixed for nearly a month, and there seemed little 

 reason to suppose that the heaviest gale could move it before 

 the following summer. For good or ill we were now a fixture, 

 destined to spend our winter nearly 500 miles beyond the 

 point at which any other human beings had wintered, and 

 therefore about to face conditions at which we could only 

 guess. 



Before us lay a weary spell of darkness, but we came to it 

 in full health and vigour, and all that skill could devise to pro- 

 vide for our comfort and lighten its monotony seemed within 

 our grasp. Each day would bring us nearer to the longed-for 

 spring, and to the day when, with high hopes, we should step 

 forth on those new trails which met at our door and vanished 

 in the unknown. 



