Words cannot tell the beauty of the scenes through which we were to pass during the next three weeks.  I suppose the pack in winter must be a terrible place enough:  a place of darkness and desolation hardly to be found elsewhere.  But forms which under different conditions can only betoken horror now conveyed to us impressions of the utmost peace and beauty, for the sun had kissed them all.

“We have had a marvellous day.  The morning watch was cloudy, but it gradually cleared until the sky was a brilliant blue, fading on the horizon into green and pink.  The floes were pink, floating in a deep blue sea, and all the shadows were mauve.  We passed right under a monster berg, and all day have been threading lake after lake and lead after lead.  ‘There is Regent Street,’ said somebody, and for some time we drove through great streets of perpendicular walls of ice.  Many a time they were so straight that one imagined they had been cut off with a ruler some hundreds of yards in length."[53]

[Illustration:  MIDNIGHT—­E.  A. Wilson, del.]

On another occasion: 

“Stayed on deck till midnight.  The sun just dipped below the southern horizon.  The scene was incomparable.  The northern sky was gloriously rosy and reflected in the calm sea between the ice, which varied from burnished copper to salmon pink; bergs and pack to the north had a pale greenish hue with deep purple shadows, the sky shaded to saffron and pale green.  We gazed long at these beautiful effects."[54]

But this was not always so.  There was one day with rain, there were days of snow and hail and cold wet slush, and fog.  “The position to-night is very cheerless.  All hope that this easterly wind will open the pack seems to have vanished.  We are surrounded with compacted floes of immense area.  Openings appear between these floes and we slide crab-like from one to another with long delays between.  It is difficult to keep hope alive.  There are streaks of water sky over open leads to the north, but everywhere to the south we have the uniform white sky.  The day has been overcast and the wind force 3 to 5 from the E.N.E.—­snow has fallen from time to time.  There could scarcely be a more dreary prospect for the eye to rest upon."[55]

With the open water we left behind the albatross and the Cape pigeon which had accompanied us lately for many months.  In their place we found the Antarctic petrel, “a richly piebald bird that appeared to be almost black and white against the ice floes,"[56] and the Snowy petrel, of which I have already spoken.

No one of us whose privilege it was to be there will forget our first sight of the penguins, our first meal of seal meat, or that first big berg along which we coasted close in order that London might see it on the film.  Hardly had we reached the thick pack, which prevailed after the suburbs had been passed, when we saw the little Adelie penguins hurrying to meet us.  Great Scott, they seemed to say, what’s