REFRACTION. 
299 
and found ourselves in latitude about 72° 16''. At this 
time another marvel rose before us — Land. The mon- 
ster was to the W.S.W., in the shape of two round- 
topped hills, lifted up for the time into our field of 
view. An hour or two later, while the day was wan- 
ing, these hills became mountains, and then a line of 
truncated cones, the spectre of some distant coast. 
Looking a few minutes later out of the little door in 
our felt house, the port gangway of the log-hook, to 
where for this last fortnight a bleak sameness of snow 
has been stretching to the far north, we saw a couple 
of icebergs standing alone in the sky, and at their 
shadowy tops their phantom repetitions inverted. By 
this time the mountains also had become twain, and 
the long line of resurrected coast was duplicated in the 
clouds. A stratum of false horizon separated the two 
sets of images. 
“We have been now for many months without see- 
ing the icebergs. They were beautiful objects, monu- 
ments of power, when we met them on the coast of 
Greenland, floating along on a liquid sea. Now they 
admonish us only of our helplessness and of perils 
before us. We should be glad to keep them in the 
clouds. 
“The sun begins to make himself felt, though as 
yet feebly enough. My large spirit thermometer, in 
the shade of a hummock some hundred yards from the 
brig, gave us at noon —21° and on the sunny side 
of the same hummock — 12°. The same thermometer, 
before a blackboard exposed to the sun, was at —7°. 
Twenty minutes later, the thermometer at the black- 
board rose to +2°, and twenty minutes later still it 
was at —2°. The ice formed within the twenty-four 
hours in the fire-hole measured four and a quarter 
