to blood,” formed themselves upon my lips, the crimson suddenly vanished, and a lightning flash of vivid orange startled us with its wide, all-pervading glare, which extended even to the southern horizon, as if the whole volume of the atmosphere had suddenly taken fire.  I even held my breath a moment, as I listened for the tremendous crash of thunder which it seemed to me must follow this sudden burst of vivid light; but in heaven or earth there was not a sound to break the stillness of midnight save the hastily muttered prayers of the frightened native at my side, as he crossed himself and kneeled down before the visible majesty of God.  I could not imagine any possible addition which even Almighty power could make to the grandeur of the aurora as it now appeared.  The rapid alternations of crimson, blue, green, and yellow in the sky were reflected so vividly from the white surface of the snow, that the whole world seemed now steeped in blood, and then quivering in an atmosphere of pale, ghastly green, through which shone the unspeakable glories of the two mighty crimson and yellow arches.  But the end was not yet.  As we watched with upturned faces the swift ebb and flow of these great celestial tides of coloured light, the last seal of the glorious revelation was suddenly broken, and both arches were simultaneously shivered into a thousand parallel perpendicular bars, every one of which displayed in regular order, from top to bottom, the primary colours of the solar spectrum.  From horizon to horizon there now stretched two vast curving bridges of coloured bars, across which we almost expected to see, passing and repassing, the bright inhabitants of another world.  Amid cries of astonishment and exclamations of “God have mercy!” from the startled natives, these innumerable bars began to move back and forth, with a swift dancing motion, along the whole extent of both arches, passing one another from side to side with such bewildering rapidity that the eye was lost in the attempt to follow them.  The whole concave of heaven seemed transformed into one great revolving kaleidoscope of shattered rainbows.  Never had I even dreamed of such an aurora as this, and I am not ashamed to confess that its magnificence for a moment overawed and almost frightened me.  The whole sky, from zenith to horizon, was “one molten mantling sea of colour and fire;—­crimson and purple, and scarlet and green, and colours for which there are no words in language and no ideas in the mind—­things which can only be conceived while they are visible.”  The “signs and portents” in the heavens were grand enough to herald the destruction of a world; flashes of rich quivering colour, covering half the sky for an instant and then vanishing like summer lightning; brilliant green streamers shooting swiftly but silently up across the zenith; thousands of variegated bars sweeping past one another in two magnificent arches, and great luminous waves rolling in from the inter-planetary spaces and breaking in long lines of radiant glory upon the shallow atmosphere of a darkened world.