lplessly; and we, therefore, had to wait
until a change of wind had, by a cross drift, filled up the ridges thus
formed, before we took long walks; and on the road between the vessels
parties were usually employed mending the roads.

With one portion of the phenomena of the North Sea, we were
particularly disappointed--and this was the aurora. The colours, in all
cases, were vastly inferior to those seen by us in far southern
latitudes, a pale golden or straw colour being the prevailing hue; the
most striking part of it was its apparent proximity to the earth. Once
or twice the auroral coruscations accompanied a moon in its last
quarter, and generally previous to bad weather. On one occasion, in
Christmas-week, the light played about the edge of a low vapour which
hung at a very small altitude over us; it never, on this occasion, lit
up the whole under-surface of the said clouds, but formed a series of
concentric semicircles of light, with dark spaces between, which waved,
glistened, and vanished, like moonlight upon a heaving, but unbroken
sea.

At other times, a stream of the same coloured vapour would span the
heavens through the zenith, and from it would shoot sprays of pale
orange colour for many hours; and then the mysterious light would again
as suddenly vanish.

Clouds may have been said to have absented themselves from our sky for
at least two months of the winter; the heavens, the stars, and moon,
were often obscured, but it invariably appeared to be from snow-drift
rather than from a cloudy sky. Snow fell incessantly, even on the
clearest day, consisting of minute spiculae, hardly perceptible to the
eye, but which accumulated rapidly, and soon covered any thing left in
the open air for a few minutes. With returning daylight, and the
promise of the sun, clouds again dotted the southern heavens, and
mottled with beautiful mackerel skies the dome above us.

The immense quantity of snow which in a gale is kept suspended in the
air by the action of the wind, and is termed drift, quite astounded us;
and on two occasions, with north-westerly gales, we had a good
opportunity of noting its accumulation. The "Pioneer" and "Intrepid"
laying across the wind, the counter-current caused a larger deposition
around us than elsewhere. On the first occasion, after the wind
subsided, we found a snow-wreath along the weather-side of the vessel
for a length of one hundred and eighty feet, about eleven feet deep in
the deepes