THE NEW YEAR IO9 



found them completely snowed under. In places the snow- 

 crust is hard enough to bear the weight of the body, but 

 oftener one sinks in six or eight inches, and in places the sur- 

 face snow has drifted considerably deeper. The temperature 

 is about —20°, and it has been thick and dark all day. Yes- 

 terday Verhoeff wenl upon the clifTs and found the minimum 

 thermometer registering only —24° as the lowest for the 

 month, while at Redcliffe we have had it down to —53°. 

 Strange that on the hill-tops it should be so much warmer 

 than here below. 



Tuesday, February 2. A beautiful, clear, cold day ; tem- 

 perature, — 35°. We now have daylight from ten A. M. until 

 three P. M., while there is a decided twilight from nine to ten 

 and from three to four. We were inspected in daylight by 

 the doctor, and we all show the efifects of the long dark night ; 

 Mr. Peary and Astrup, being the two fairest ones in the party, 

 look the most sallow. We walked out to the amphitheater 

 berg without snow-shoes. The left-hand column at the en- 

 trance to the theater is a massive pillar of ice, like the whitest 

 marble, about a hundred feet high ; inside the berg the snow 

 was very deep. The right-hand side of the entrance had re- 

 cently broken, and tons of the splintered ice were lying around. 

 We saw the new moon one quarter full for the first time over 

 the cliffs to the north, while the glow from the setting sun to 

 the southwest made a most beautiful picture ; the tops of the 

 bergs in the distance were completely hidden in the low line 

 of mist rising from the cracks in the ice, which gave them 



