CHAP. X.] 
HALOS. 
517 
“ By three o'clock it begins to grow dark, and one after the 
other of our guests depart, to return, the most of them, in the 
morning. Now it is quiet and still. About six the crew have 
finished their labours and dispose of the rest of the day as they 
please. Most of them are occupied with reading during the 
evening hours. When supper has been served at half-past seven 
in the gunroom, he who has the watch in the ice-house from 
nine to two next morning prepares for the performance of his 
disagreeable duty; the rest of the gunroom personnel are 
assembled there, and pass the evening in conversation, play, 
light reading, &c. At ten every one retires, and the lamps are 
extinguished. In many cabins, however, lights burn till after 
midnight. 
“ Such was in general our life on the Vega. One day was very 
like another. When the storm howled, the snow drifted, and the 
cold became too severe, we kept more below deck; when the 
weather was finer we lived more in the open air, often paying 
visits to the observatory in the icehouse, and among the Chukches 
living in the neighbourhood, or wandering about to come upon, 
if possible, some game.” 
The snow which fell during winter consisted more generally 
of small simple snow-crystals or ice-needles, than of the 
beautiful snow-flakes whose grand kaleidoscopic forms the 
inhabitants of the north so often have an opportunity of 
admiring. Already with a gentle wind and with a pretty clear 
atmosphere the lower strata of the atmosphere were full of these 
regular ice-needles, which refracted the rays of the sun, so as to 
produce parhelia and halos. Unfortunately however these were 
never so completely developed as the halos which I saw in 1873 
during the sledge-journey round North-east Land on Spitzbergen ; 
but I believed that even now I could confirm the correctness of 
the observation I then made, that the representation which is 
generally given of this beautiful phenomenon, in which the halo 
is delineated as a collection of regular circles, is not correct, 
but that it forms a very involved system of lines, extended 
over the whole vault of heaven, for the most part coloured on 
the sun-side and uncoloured on the opposite side, of the sort 
