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    June 22.  Midwinter Night.

A hard night:  clear, with a blue sky so deep that it looks black:  the stars are steel points:  the glaciers burnished silver.  The snow rings and thuds to your footfall.  The ice is cracking to the falling temperature and the tide crack groans as the water rises.  And over all, wave upon wave, fold upon fold, there hangs the curtain of the aurora.  As you watch, it fades away, and then quite suddenly a great beam flashes up and rushes to the zenith, an arch of palest green and orange, a tail of flaming gold.  Again it falls, fading away into great searchlight beams which rise behind the smoking crater of Mount Erebus.  And again the spiritual veil is drawn—­

    Here at the roaring loom of Time I ply
    And weave for God the garment thou seest him by.

Inside the hut are orgies.  We are very merry—­and indeed why not?  The sun turns to come back to us to-night, and such a day comes only once a year.

After dinner we had to make speeches, but instead of making a speech Bowers brought in a wonderful Christmas tree, made of split bamboos and a ski stick, with feathers tied to the end of each branch; candles, sweets, preserved fruits, and the most absurd toys of which Bill was the owner.  Titus got three things which pleased him immensely, a sponge, a whistle, and a pop-gun which went off when he pressed in the butt.  For the rest of the evening he went round asking whether you were sweating.  “No.”  “Yes, you are,” he said, and wiped your face with the sponge.  “If you want to please me very much you will fall down when I shoot you,” he said to me, and then he went round shooting everybody.  At intervals he blew the whistle.

He danced the Lancers with Anton, and Anton, whose dancing puts that of the Russian Ballet into the shade, continually apologized for not being able to do it well enough.  Ponting gave a great lecture with slides which he had made since we arrived, many of which Meares had coloured.  When one of these came up one of us would shout, “Who coloured that,” and another would cry, “Meares,”—­then uproar.  It was impossible for Ponting to speak.  We had a milk punch, when Scott proposed the Eastern Party, and Clissold, the cook, proposed Good Old True Milk.  Titus blew away the ball of his gun.  “I blew it into the cerulean—­how doth Homer have it?—­cerulean azure—­hence Erebus.”  As we turned in he said, “Cherry, are you responsible for your actions?” and when I said Yes, he blew loudly on his whistle, and the last thing I remembered was that he woke up Meares to ask him whether he was fancy free.

It was a magnificent bust.

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