But the midnight sun! What a never-to-be-forgotten spectacle is presented by this polar sea in these radiant nights! As soon as the fog lifts its veil, leaving the eye at full liberty to roam over the horizon, one sees an endless succession of palaces of ice, strong castles, cathedrals, and fantastical structures, some majestically indifferent to the waves which caress their mighty bases, the others slowly rocking to and fro, notwithstanding their ponderous masses, and at each oscillation of their sparkling faces emitting from their alabaster sides rocket-like flashes of emeralds, rubies, and sapphires. [Illustration: THE _VIRGO_, AMSTERDAM ISLAND.] Numerous cascades pour down from the vast sides of these icebergs into basins formed in the very bases of these enormous ice-mountains, subsequently losing themselves in the waters of the sea; and all these waterfalls, large and small, are lit up by the hot, red rays of a brilliant sun. This polar nature, which one imagines to be so poor, so icy, so inert, in regions which we only know from dull and cold narratives of voyages,—this wonderful nature lavishly spreads out before my eyes the sight of an endless mass of sparkling and flashing diamonds, a veritable pyrotechnic display of another world, which the rays of the sun cause to burst forth, and change twenty times in a minute. And all this, like a sublime jewel casket, rests on velvet of an unheard-of variety, delicate green, pale pink, orange red, crimson, bright red, purple, golden yellow, violet, sky-blue, a marvellous velvet of deep soft and delicately shaded tints, which the calm and irradiated water seems to spread out for the greater delight of the eye and the soul. In the presence of all this grand and mighty nature, what becomes of man’s most ingenious artifices invented to charm by the excess of accumulated marvels? How paltry are the most superb decorations of his theatres compared with what one sees here—here where the water alone and the sun undertake the _mise en scène_! What are all the marvels hatched by his brain, by his sovereign industry, in the presence of miracles of colouring and brilliancy engendered by a ray of light penetrating a fragment of ice? _Tuesday, July 7th._—We had very bad weather on Saturday; on Sunday the atmosphere calmed down a little, and yesterday (Monday) we had a splendid day. We took advantage of this to make an interesting excursion in the steam launch to Magdaleina Bay. The peninsula contains an immense necropolis, dating back several centuries; it is here that the whalers of Smeerenburg came to bury their dead. We killed a very large seal, which nearly caused the boat to capsize when we got him on board. Strindberg killed a black fox at the foot of a glacier.