armine, and it seemed to accumulate in mid-air until all the
landscape was bathed in its effulgence. And then it gradually died away.
The native boy was gone just half an hour. It began about five minutes
after he left and ended about five minutes before he returned, so that
its whole duration was twenty minutes. There had been no aurora at all
before; there was nothing after, for his quest had been fruitless, and,
since we would not venture that water in the dark, we made our camp on
the bank and were thus two hours or more yet in the open. The boy had
stopped to look at it himself, "long time," as he said, and declared it
was the only red aurora he had ever seen in his twenty odd years' life.
It was a very rare and beautiful sight, and it was hard to resist that
impression of a gigantic hand flinging liquid red fire from the mountain
top into the sky. Its source seemed no higher than the mountain
top--seemed to be the mountain top itself--and its extent seemed
confined within the river valley.

[Sidenote: A GRAND GENERAL DISPLAY]

There is only one other that shall be described, although there are many
mentioned with more or less particularity in the diaries of these
travels. And this last one is of the character of the first and not at
all of the second and third, for it was on the grand scale, filling all
the heavens, a phenomenon, one is convinced, of an order distinct and
different from the local, near-at-hand kind. There was exceptionally
good opportunity for observing this display, since it occurred during an
all-night journey, the night of the 6th of April, 1912, with brilliant
starlight but no moon while we were hastening to reach Eagle for Easter.

We had made a new traverse from the Tanana to the Yukon, through two
hundred miles of uninhabited country, and had missed the head of the
creek that would have taken us to the latter river in thirty miles,
dropping into one that meandered for upward of a hundred before it
discharged into the great river. It was one o'clock on Good Friday
morning when we reached a road-house on the Yukon eighty miles from
Eagle. The only chance to keep the appointment was to travel all the two
remaining nights. So we cached almost all our load at the road-house,
for we should retrace our steps when Eagle was visited, and thus were
able to travel fast.

Both nights were marked by fine auroral displays, so extensive and of
such apparent height as to give the impression that they mu