I have left open is the stern, abaft the
bridge, so as to be able to see round over the ice from there.

"Personally, I must say that things are going well with me; much
better than I could have expected. Time is a good teacher; that
devouring longing does not gnaw so hard as it did. Is it apathy
beginning? Shall I feel nothing at all by the time ten years have
passed? Oh! sometimes it comes on with all its old strength, as
if it would tear me in pieces! But this is a splendid school of
patience. Much good it does to sit wondering whether they are alive
or dead at home; it only almost drives one mad.

"All the same, I never grow quite reconciled to this life. It is really
neither life nor death, but a state between the two. It means never
being at rest about anything or in any place--a constant waiting for
what is coming; a waiting in which, perhaps, the best years of one's
manhood will pass. It is like what a young boy sometimes feels when
he goes on his first voyage. The life on board is hateful to him;
he suffers cruelly from all the torments of sea-sickness; and being
shut in within the narrow walls of the ship is worse than prison;
but it is something that has to be gone through. Beyond it all lies
the south, the land of his youthful dreams, tempting with its sunny
smile. In time he arises, half dead. Does he find his south? How
often it is but a barren desert he is cast ashore on!

"Sunday, October 7th. It has cleared up this evening, and there is
a starry sky and aurora borealis. It is a little change from the
constant cloudy weather, with frequent snow-showers, which we have
had these last days.

"Thoughts come and thoughts go. I cannot forget, and I cannot
sleep. Everything is still; all are asleep. I only hear the quiet step
of the watch on deck; the wind rustling in the rigging and the canvas,
and the clock gently hacking the time in pieces there on the wall. If
I go on deck there is black night, stars sparkling high overhead,
and faint aurora flickering across the gloomy vault, and out in the
darkness I can see the glimmer of the great monotonous plain of the
ice: it is all so inexpressibly forlorn, so far, far removed from
the noise and unrest of men and all their striving. What is life
thus isolated? A strange, aimless process; and man a machine which
eats, sleeps, awakes; eats and sleeps again, dreams dreams, but never
lives. Or is life really nothing else? And is it just one more phase
of the etern