358 
NARWH ALS. 
“The stars at midnight remind me of our Lancas- 
ter Sound noondays. The peculiar zone of fairly blend- 
ed light, stretching over an amplitude of some seventy 
degrees — the colors red, Indian red, Italian pink, with 
the yellows ; and then a light cobalt, gradually deep- 
ening into intense indigo as it reaches the northern 
horizon. 
''•April 27, Sunday. The cold increases, and our 
northwest wind continues. The day’s observation 
gives us 69° 35^ 50'''', so that we still go south encour- 
agingly, though slowly. This big floe is so solid, that 
some of us are beginning to fear it may resist the press- 
ure, and not break up in the bay; leaving us to the 
thaws of summer and the stormy winds of September 
before our imprisonment ceases. The apprehension 
has no mirth in it. 
“Walked to the, open water to the northward, near- 
ly ahead of us. The leads were so frozen over as to 
bear me. Looking across the level, letting my eyes 
wander from tussock to tussock of entangled floe-ice, 
as they had grouped themselves in freezing, I heard 
the blowing of a narwhal, followed by the peculiar 
swash of squeezing ice. A short walk showed me 
some six or eight conical elevations, forced upward 
upon the recently-formed ice, evidently by a force pro- 
truding from beneath. While looking at these, the 
sounds, though seemingly further off, increased to such 
a degree that I was convinced the ice was in action, 
and started off to double a cape of hummocks and see 
the commotion. Our steward, Morton, a shrewd, ob 
servant fellow, who was with me, suddenly called out, 
‘ Look here, sir — here !’ 
“Each of these little cones was steaming like the 
salices or mud- volcanoes of Mexico, the broken ice on 
